“The United States fully intends to be the world’s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. [E]nvironmental protection makes growth sustainable…. [This] recognition … by leaders from around the world is the central accomplishment of this important [United Nations] Rio Conference.”

 – George H. W. Bush, “News Conference in Rio de Janeiro, June 13, 1992.

“Bush restored federal subsidies to the Carter-era renewable-energy and energy-efficiency programs that had been cut under Reagan. All-Things-to-All-People Bush also signed the Clean Air Act of 1990, which took the acid-rain scare at face value, a signal about his openness toward the global-warming issue to come.”

– Robert Bradley, Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years (2018), p. 332.

In “This is when the GOP turned away from Climate Policy, E&E News recalled the good ol’ days when George H.…

“A federal investment tax credit was enacted just as the project was being completed, adding 10 percent to the rate of return. Accelerated depreciation in the same law further sheltered profits from income taxes. Thank you, political capitalism.”

“Cogen Technologies would go on to become one of the very top independent power developers in the nation. The sale of CTI’s major asset to Enron in 1999 (McNair took cash, not stock) would make McNair one of Houston’s wealthiest men and provided the means to buy an NFL football team for his hometown, a deal that was also made possible by a new taxpayer-supported stadium, in no small part the result of an intense lobbying effort by Ken Lay and Enron several years before.”

Last Friday, the owner of the Houston Texans, Robert C.…

“Under [Ken] Lay’s direction, Enron would restart the solar industry [in 1995], rescue the US wind industry [in 1997], and help legitimize the climate issue.”

“Enron saw green in green energy. Wind and solar as primary energies had new public policy rationales and powerful political constituencies. Specifically, global warming from fossil-fuel usage (via the enhanced greenhouse effect) was the new neo-Malthusian scare, and post–Gulf War concerns over energy security put petroleum on the defensive. Even more than this, renewables had public cachet for an energy company, particularly one that prized publicity and promoted a momentum stock.”

– Bradley, Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, pp. 530, 528, respectively.

Rent-seeking … strategic uses of government intervention…. corporativism. Many terms have described business lobbying within political capitalism where the political means replaces the economic means to financial success The result is bad profit, defined by classical-liberal entrepreneur Charles Koch as corporate income not created but politically obtained and thereby lost to the creators in the economic system.…

“We still have much to learn about and learn from Enron’s remarkable history to understand its meaning for twenty-first-century American capitalism.”

 —Malcolm S. Salter, emeritus professor, Harvard Business School; author of Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse (2008)

This week, Scrivener Publishing and John Wiley & Sons begin shipments of a book that I have been working on for many years, along with my research assistant/editor Roger Donway. We searched and searched for this or that. We debated paragraphs, sentences, even words. And we never cut a corner for what is easily, between the two of us and copy-editor Evelyn Pyle, a 10,000-hour book. [1]

Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, 1984–1996 is Book 3 in my tetralogy on Political Capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron.…