“The people who build wind farms are not environmentalists. . . .  Business is a delicate balancing act, and chief executives are always walking a tightrope between the needs of the community, their employees, and the marketplace.” [Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (1995), p. 454.]

“Planet of the Humans‘ expose is long overdue.” [below]

Big Green, Inc. has been challenged by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs’s “Planet of the Humans.” Importantly, the multi-million-view documentary brought together the inconvenient truths of (politically correct) renewable energies, as well as batteries for electric vehicles.

In a recent post for the Institute for Energy Research (IER), “Long-standing Eco-warnings Against Renewables Reinforce ‘Planet of the Humans’,” I documented how many mainstream eco-authors forthrightly talked about these problems. I noted:

Moore/Gibbs memorialized what had long been recognized by the environmental intelligentsia.

This post reproduces a short q&a with The Atlas Society on how the worldview of Ayn Rand and Objectivism influenced me personally and as a scholar interested in energy, history, political economy, and public policy. [For more information, see “The Fall of Ken Lay: An Interview with Former Enron Insider Robert Bradley Jr.” (April 1, 2006) and “Political Capitalism: Warnings and Reality” (February 4, 2013)

Tell us who you are? What’s the couple of sentence summary of what you do and what you’ve done?

I am a classical-liberal intellectual, or at least a student of classical liberalism.

I specialize in energy history and public policy. That has led me to business/government cronyism. And that had led to trying to understand contra-capitalism as it applies to organizational failure.

Note: On this day in 2001, the politically correct, all-things-to-all-people Enron entered the workweek in bankruptcy. Monday December 2nd was my last day at the company after a 16-year career there, as it was for several thousand other employees.

Enron, a unique story of corporate strategy and governance gone wrong, has been misinterpreted by the Progressive mainstream. The company represented the failure of political capitalism, not market capitalism. Its lessons extend to image environmentalism and renewable energy hyperbole, as I document in my book series on the company, as well as in shorter articles.

Reprinted below for the historical record is an email from John Jennrich, founding editor of Natural Gas Week, to Enron author John Emshwiller and myself. Jennrich discusses Enron’s role in the development of the modern natural gas market.

“Renewables will never catch up to modern, efficient sources of energy. But this hasn’t stopped federal, state and local governments from continuing to force consumers and taxpayers to subsidize renewable energy companies, making energy in America less affordable and reliable in the process.” (- Bill Peacock, below)

Four years ago, after the election of Donald Trump, I contacted the head of the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle requesting a visit with the editorial board to introduce myself, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), and the classical-liberal worldview applied to energy. I got no response.

I then resent the request and got a curt no caps rely from the gentleman as in don’t-have-time-for you. I then responded with the fact that IER was a go-to Trump think tank, and my being the founder and from/in Houston would add interest.