January 7, 1997, some 13 years ago, was one of the worst days in my 16-year career at Enron. Enron had already entered into the solar business (1994) in partnership with Amoco (Solarex), and the U.S. wind industry was on its back. Zond Corporation was struggling, and rival Kenetech had recently suspended its dividend and was on the way to  bankruptcy. Enron bought Zond on this day and renamed it Enron Wind Company.

Enron Wind would never turn a profit, and it would be sold in May 2002 by the bankrupt parent to GE. (GE and Enron would have other ominous parallels.)

Enron came in at just the right time for a troubled, undeserving industry by

1. Putting a big-name corporation in the U.S. wind industry for the first time;
2. Issuing countless press releases on ‘wonderful’ green wind for the next several years; and
3. Successfully lobbying Texas politicians to enact the most strict renewable mandate in the country in 1999.

My recent post at MasterResource, Climategate: Here Comes Courage!, has been picked up in the blogosphere (such as at WattsUpWithThat) and has received several thousand views at MasterResource.

In my post, I profiled three individuals in the Houston area who in the post-Climategate environment have spoken up more forcefully against climate alarmism:

1. Dr. Neil Frank (a former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami and a weather forecaster at KHOU-Channel 11 in Houston);
2. Michelle Michot Foss, an internationally respected energy economist with the University of Texas at Austin and the past president of both the U.S. Association for Energy Economics (2001) and the International Association for Energy Economics (2003); and
3. Peter Hartley, the George and Cynthia Mitchell Chair in Sustainable Development and Environmental Economics, and Professor of Economics, at Rice University.

The times are changing in the wake of Climategate. And more is to come as the polluted science embedded in the email exchanges gets reviewed by talented amateurs and pros alike on the blogosphere (see Climate Audit,  Roger Pielke Jr., and WattsUpWithThat, in particular).

Given time, the rethink will go mainstream. Scientists are truth seekers at heart, but an entrenched mainstream of climate scientists–so many of them friends and political allies–will need to be nudged out of their denialism.

Old voices are challenging their ‘mainstream’ colleagues, and new voices are coming forth. I have seen this clearly here in Houston (examples below), and I expect it is happening elsewhere.

Consider what Andy Revkin, the recently retired climate-change science writer at the New York Times, told the public editor at the Times regarding Climategate: “Our coverage, looked at in toto, has never bought the catastrophe conclusion and always aimed to examine the potential for both overstatement and understatement.”…

I have lamented how the editorial board of my hometown Houston Chronicle long ago took a hard left position on the “problem” and “solution” of anthropogenic global climate change. Not even the U.S. House of Representatives’s Waxman-Markey climate bill–labeled a “monstrosity” and “less than worthless” by NASA scientist and Al Gore mentor James Hansen, and “out of control” by UN Foundation head Tim Wirth–has loosened the grip of climate alarmism and policy activism at the Chronicle despite an opposite view by the paper’s popular business editorialist Loren Steffy.

Last week, an estimated 3,500 Houstonians, the large majority working for oil and gas companies, gathered at the Verizon Theater downtown to protest Waxman-Markey’s carbon-dioxide cap (cap-and-trade, correctly identified by Tim Wirth as a carbon tax).…