At 41, [James Rogers] was named CEO of PSI Energy Inc., a small, financially troubled Indiana utility. Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, he 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.’”
– James Hagerty, “Jim Rogers, Head of a Coal-Burning Utility, Crusaded Against Global Warming.” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2018.
“I made money on sulfur [dioxide], and I’ll make money on carbon [dioxide].”
– James Rogers. Quoted in Eric Pooley, “The Smooth-Talking King of Coal–and Climate Change.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2010.
James Eugene “Jim” Rogers Jr. (1947–2018) was a notable political capitalist (rent seeker) of the late 20th/early 21st century electricity market.
…The good news: Joe Romm has gone quiet (last post: June 26th) at ClimateProgress after a 14-year run as founder/chief blogger. The bad news: he has launched a new venture in the hopes of raising his profile and reach.
He has his work cut out for him. This irritable, emotional physicist-turned-journalist has long turned off conservatives, libertarians, and open-minded independents with his exaggerations (Wiki: ” Romm’s 2006 book Hell and High Water projects that humans have a window of opportunity of only about a decade to head off the most catastrophic effects of global warming”).
He has remained vitriolic and stubborn in the face of contrary evidence regarding dilute, intermittent energies, not to mention his notion of an unlivable climate. He will not engage in open debate with his critics–but likes to work behind the scenes to bully and discredit them.
…“Add [to rent-seeking] the company’s rank imprudence and strategic deceit (what I labeled philosophic fraud), and a new term had to be invented to describe that which true capitalist luminaries from Adam Smith forward warned against: the contra-capitalist corporation.”
For many years now, as a poor man’s Robert Caro, I have labored to demonstrate that the worldview-testing event called Enron was Exhibit A of crony capitalism and Progressivism, not free-market capitalism and the classical liberalism.
The Progressive mainstream argued emphatically for their conclusion. Two examples are among my favorites. Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Robert Kuttner in BusinessWeek: “Defenders of deregulation are mounting a heroic effort to insist that the [Enron] debacle was merely a business model gone bad, not an impeachment of freer markets”.
…