Windspeak: Language used by those who profit financially, politically, or ideologically from wind technology that disguises, distorts, or reverses the meanings of words in order to promote the technology. Oxymorons, which combine incongruous or contradictory terms, abound in windspeak—viz, windpower, wind capacity, responsible windpower (double oxymoron), windfarms, windparks, wind jobs, wind reliability workshops, and wind as alternate energy. Generally any claim made for the technology in windspeak produces the virtually opposite effect in reality.

With the right story and no accountability, Madison Avenue can sell fantasy wholesale. Rock Hudson’s ad executive did just this 50 years ago in the charming send-up to our commercial culture, Lover Come Back, when he successfully marketed a non-existent product, VIP.

Nothing illustrates this idea better than the au courant fantasia about wind technology, where public relations legerdemain has deployed the power of windspeak to give wind a complete makeover, transforming a klutzy pretender into a seemingly benevolent superhero unbound by the laws of physics and even its own history.…

[This is Part II of an interview of Robert L. Bradley Jr. by Stephen Hicks (website here). Part I was published last week.]

Kaizen: You began as a specialist in oil and gas regulation. How did you evolve from there to where you are now?

Bradley: There are four or so stanzas in my intellectual career to date. The first was certainly oil and gas regulation, taxation, and subsidization, the subject of my Cato book, Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience. The research for that was essentially complete by 1985 when went to the corporate world by joining HNG-InterNorth, soon to become Enron.

In my first years at Enron, I became conversant with the electricity market and its regulation, which was really a new area for me, a second stanza in my development.…

[Note: Last summer, philosophy professor Stephen Hicks (website here) interviewed MasterResource founder Rob Bradley. “The Robert L. Bradley Jr. Interview, ‘Enron and Political Entrepreneurship'” covers Bradley’s intellectual career and worldview regarding the market order and energy.

This series (in four parts: Part II, Part III, Part IV) is the full interview (with some elaboration), from which an abbreviated version was published in KAIZEN magazine (Issue 13: August 2010)  and a longer version was posted online.]

Introduction

Rob Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years. As director of public policy analysis for his last seven years there, he wrote speeches for the late Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in 2005 of fraud and conspiracy.

Bradley is also founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C.…

At a time when energy realists need to take the high ground, corporations are bringing us low. Some of this is old fashioned rent-seeking; some greenwashing; and some just political correctness (as if California was the world).

For weeks, Siemens has been running full-page ads for wind technology. Last week Chevron and Weyerhauser, in full-page ads, agree “IT’S TIME OIL COMPANIES GET BEHIND THE DEVELOPMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY.”

The same slush is coming from GE, AES, BP, Shell, NRG, and a legion of corporations whose fundamental commodity is fossil fuel.

Do these multinationals really believe that wind and solar will put a dent in their fossil fuel market share? Or is something else afoot? One should note that nowhere does this renewable ballyhoo from today’s energy goliaths mention a word about saving the world from the devastation of climate change wrought by the consequences of fossil fuel use, although this was the tack Ken Lay took to steer Enron’s aggressive renewables course.…