Mel Brooks, in his classic comedy The Producers, schemed to make money by over-subscribing shares in a sure-to-fail play. Unfortunately for his character, the play became a smash hit, and all the investors wanted their payouts. Since he had sold well over 100% of the interest in the play, he was in a bit of a pickle.

And so it is with natural gas. Clean, easy to use, abundant—natural gas is everyone’s choice for our energy transition away from oil and coal for power generation, industry, homes, and now transportation. Enter oilman-turned-wind-promoter T. Boone Pickens, with a proposal to move U.S. heavy trucks strongly toward natural gas fuel (as compressed natural gas, or CNG). And to enable the offset, the electricity that is currently generated by such gas (about a 21% market share of power generation, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Annuel Energy Outlook 2009, Table 8) would be supplied by new wind farms, built mostly in the Plains States.…

Ed. Note: How did a major energy trade association/ lobbying group come to support climate alarm and forced energy transformation, reversing its prior position? The story gets back to an ex-Enron executive who imported Enron’s political capitalism model to the electricity industry, to flip the script.

“Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, [James “Jim” Rogers in 1988] supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. ‘Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,’ he said later. ‘But I said, “Let’s shape this, let’s make some money”.’” (Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2018)

“I made money on sulfur [dioxide], and I’ll make money on carbon [dioxide].” (Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2010)

“The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing the electric power industry,” a recent New York Times article stated, “said that if without a federal role in regulating greenhouse gases, states and cities could ‘attempt to fill that perceived void through increased regulatory requirements that could vary significantly from one jurisdiction to the next.’”…

“I’ve yet to meet a blue-collar worker at a cleantech conference, nor have I met one at cleantech dinner tables. The industry needs to ditch its self-righteous virtue signaling and stop relying on handouts.” (- a Cleantech veteran, below)

“Is this really the climate movement’s next chapter?” asked Stephen Lacey, cofounder and executive editor of Latitude Media, a publication “covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.”

If so, it will end in nothing more than further alienating voters. The progressive approach to climate mobilization has largely failed to build durable coalitions and policies. The election of Trump clearly showed that kitchen table issues matter most. We are in an extraordinary moment where people are struggling to pay their energy bills — and this is the answer? I agree with Michael Liebreich that we need a deep, pragmatic climate reset.

“IER/AEA have thousands of individual donors, reflecting the intellectual case for a free market and the goodness of civil society. This is a proud fact.”

A Mother Jones article from 15 years read: “Meet the 12 loudest members of the chorus claiming that global warming is a joke and that CO2 emissions are actually good for you.” And number 12 of the “dirty dozen” was the educational nonprofit Institute of Energy Research and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance.

IER/AEA would surely make the list today–and be ranked higher. This is a badge of honor. The message of classical liberalism applied to energy remains strong and consistent. Consumers matter. Taxpayers matter. Energy resource efficiency matters. Respect for the energy decisions of voluntarily consenting adults matter.

Here is the piece by Josh Harkinson from December 5, 2009, verbatim, with my critical comments.…