“Back to the greenwash misdirection…. Why not add U.S. DOE secretary Jennifer “Please get your rig count up” Granholm to the list? How about the wind and solar developers who really don’t care about the damage they cause around them? How about the whole biomass industry?”

Paul Watchman is an amiable chap I have gotten to know on social media. Patient and polite, seems open-minded and respectful of opposing views, including mine toward Net Zero.

Watchman has many titles and positions in the climate debate, including Special Legal Adviser at UNEP Principles of Sustainable Development Net Zero Insurance Underwriters Alliance. This Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow is deep in the intellectual climate vanguard. [1]

“Greenwashing Day”

In a post titled “Greenwashing Day,” Watchman cuts loose on what he sees as a lot of fake greenery in the Net Zero cause.

“We, the Republican Party voters of Harris County Texas, urge the Texas legislature to enact laws protecting Texans from the Green New Deal and further subsidization of wind farms in Texas…”

The massive overreach of the Green New Deal, brought to life by the radical left in charge of the Biden Administration, has provoked an opposite reaction by Republicans at all levels of government. Witness a recent counter-offensive by Harris County (Houston) Republicans, who have had enough of the government-enabled takeover of the Texas grid by industrial wind turbines, a story that goes back to Enron’s Ken Lay and a number of pragmatic Republican politicians, led by George W. Bush and Rick Perry.

Note that government favor is being replaced by government disfavor in the proposal given that local officials are powerless to repeal the federal Production Tax Credit (extended 13 times) and other privileges that empower wind.

“History rhymes. Natural gas as part of the environmental solution is a return to thirty-plus years ago.”

John Kerry stated the obvious last month to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: natural gas must be a ‘bridge fuel’ for the “energy reset” away from fossil fuels. “Gas is going to be important to the transition,” said Biden’s climate envoy, adding:

But if we move too fast and too far with too much, and build out an infrastructure for 30 and 40 years, with plans to be able to use it for 30 or 40 years without abatement — if it’s abated, terrific. If you can capture 100% and it makes it affordable, that’s wonderful. But we’re not doing that.

Forget the caveats. Wind and solar and batteries are falling short, and oil, natural gas, and coal are making up the shortfall around the world.

Ed note: With the 20th anniversary of Enron’s collapse in the news, the underside of the company’s climate/energy strategy deserves another look. (Bradley’s personal experience is recounted here.)

This week, a Hall of Shame business memo turned 24 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.

Global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But Kyoto predictably failed, expired, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP26 turning into a “let’s talk next year” at COP27.

Palmisano’s memo cites the 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.