Category — Enron & Climate Change
“THIS AGREEMENT WILL BE GOOD FOR ENRON STOCK!!” (Enron’s Kyoto memo turns 15)
Last week, a Hall of Shame cronyism memo turned 15 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano.
Global green planners such as Palmisano were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). His memo reflects the train-just-left-the-station mentality, as well as the specific benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2), and seven if CO2 were capped and traded.) The story of Enron as the darling company of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.)
The Washington Post broke the memo soon after Enron’s demise, showing how Enron was hardly a free-market, capitalistic company. “[Enron] chairman Pushed Firm’s Agenda With Clinton White House.” Indeed, Enron was “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business” [Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War (Penguin, 1999), 204.]
The Kyoto Protocol, also 15 years old this month, and now at the expiration of its 2008–2012 (non)compliance period, is predictably on life support, a topic which will be examined next week.
Here is Palmisano infamous memo, 15 years old last week. [Read more →]
December 24, 2012 No Comments
