Category — Conservationism

“Today the conservation movement is led by sober business men and is based on the cold calculations of the engineers. Conservation, no longer viewed as a political issue, has become a business proposition…. The old school looked on conservation as a governmental function; the new school believes in entrusting it to the hands of business men and engineers.”

- Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933), pp. 784–85.

Profit-seeking conservation is nothing new, as economists have noted. So why must we assume that self-interested conservation is a ‘market failure’ requiring government subsidies and mandates? Why is market decision-making with energy necessarily sub-optimal?

And if “market failure” is posited, what must be said about “government failure”? Political processes are human too, and worse, bureaucrats do not have their own hard-earned cash on the line. The case for government (non-market) conservation is not self-evident.

Technological improvements and greater capital investment have often reduced resource requirements. History is replete with statistics showing how resource efficiencies have been a natural byproduct of profit-driven activity in a free and prosperous commonwealth as shown, for example, by economist Pierre Desrochers (here and here).

Coal Pounds/kWh Efficiencies: 1900 and Today

Consider the use of energy inputs to generate electricity. At Samuel Insull’s Commonwealth Edison Company in Chicago, for example, between 1900 and 1913 the amount of coal per kWh fell from approximately seven pounds to three pounds. (1) Insull spoke to such invisible-hand conservation–versus political shouts–in a 1916 speech: [Read more →]

[Editor note: For an in-depth look at Enron's political capitalism model applied to the climate-change debate, see Bradley's Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (M & M Scrivener Press, 2009)] 

On four occasions,  Joseph Romm at Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) has deployed an argument ad hominem against me, using my prior employment at Enron and my direct association with Ken Lay (see here, here,  here, and here). My response to Romm earlier this week has received thousands of views and several blog links, including here.

The irony here is two-fold. First, Romm ignores the fact that I was an employee who personally challenged the company’s rent-seeking via climate alarmism. Secondly, and more ironic still, Enron was his darling company. Specifically, he was an unpaid consultant and collaborator with Enron Energy Services (EES), whose contracts were money losers, reflecting of paucity of economic energy savings. The hidden losses and fake profits of this division were showcased at trial. EES was not a “cool company,” and the companies that outsourced to EES found out they were not that cool also.

A future post [now published] will explore the failure of EES, PG&E Energy Services, and Duke Energy Solutions–the big energy service companies, or ESCOs, that were touted by Romm and Amory Lovins as the next big thing and as leading the way to Kyoto compliance.

I add the following exhibits to the Romm/Enron connection (Enron is bolded below for ease of identification). [Read more →]

[Editor note: Also see "Joseph Romm and Enron: More for the Record" (May 8, 2009) and "Enron and Waxman-Markey: Response to Joe Romm" (July 2, 2009)]

The headline at Climate Progress, the blog site of Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, read:

MYSTERIOUS INDUSTRY FRONT-GROUP AFFILIATED WITH KEN LAY’S FORMER SPEECHWRITER LAUNCHES ANTI-WAXMAN-MARKEY ADS WITH PHONY MIT COST FIGURE

And here is what Romm specifically says about me:

Who is the [American Energy Alliance]?  Good question.  The AEA says on its website:

“AEA is an independent affiliate of the Institute for Energy Research (IER)….”Aside from the cryptic nature of the oxymoronic phrase “independent affiliate,” it is worth noting that the Institute for Energy Research “has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.” The President of IER is one Robert Bradley “who previously served as Director of Public Policy Analysis at Enron, where he was a speechwriter for CEO Kenneth Lay,” who was “convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges on May 25, 2006.”

And here is what Romm said about me in March at Climate Progress:

So it is only fair to note that the myth articles were “produced with support from the Institute for Energy Research …. The President of IER is Robert Bradley ‘who previously served as Director of Public Policy Analysis at Enron, where he was a speechwriter for CEO Kenneth Lay,’ who was “convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges on May 25, 2006.”

’Nuff said on that.

His implication is that I am somewhere between a dunce and a fraud because of my association with Enron and Ken Lay. But Romm should know better. He and I had email wars when I was at Enron, and Joe was Enron’s cheerleader, even complaining to his “friends” there about me.

Here is the background, as told in my book Capitalism at Work (p. 311): [Read more →]

Several reports (see here and here) and certain websites (here) allege that renewable technologies can meet our growing electricity needs and also meet stringent reduction targets for carbon dioxide. For example, Climate Progress, a website populated by Joseph Romm, an assistant secretary of energy during the Clinton administration, indicates that the answer to our growing electricity needs will come from energy efficiency (including cogeneration), wind power, concentrated solar power (CSP), and biomass co-firing, which taken together will meet a projected 1 percent annual growth rate in demand while also reducing carbon emissions.

These reports are in sharp contrast to forecasts produced by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent agency of the U.S. Department of Energy. [Read more →]

Investment in energy-efficient light bulbs would, in 5 years, save more than 5 times as much energy as an equal investment in a wind turbine would produce in 20 years.

This fact is clearly demonstrated with simple arithmetic! [Read more →]