Global Warming Activities at Enron: At the Center (Part I)

By Bruce Stram -- January 27, 2020 1 Comment

Editor Note: The important role of defunct Enron Corp on climate issues has been well documented at MasterResource. This post by Bruce Stram, who served as Enron’s chief economist for most of his 20 years at the corporation, adds to the historical record. [Part II tomorrow will describe Enron’s revisionist view of the natural gas resource base that was related to promoting gas as a “bridge fuel” to “sustainability.”]

Several papers I had written made me Enron’s environmental policy lead by 1992. I was blessed with a CEO/Chairman Ken Lay who understood that a carbon tax or cap and trade was good for natural gas relative to other fossil fuels, and we were of course a natural gas company.

We had developed a theme about the environmental goodness of natural gas.…

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Why is California Blaming Wildfires on a Small Percentage of Downed Power Lines? (Part I)

By -- November 13, 2019 5 Comments

“California’s reliance on hydropower and proliferation of remote, centralized renewable energy plants; the mandated environmental mothballing of 19 coastal natural gas power plants located close to customers; redundant transmission lines for green power; and seasonal wind blasts, results in lethal blast-furnace-like wildfires that leave trees alone but incinerate houses.”

“California leaders and opinion-makers must first abandon their blame game and diagnose the problem more clearly than using clichés like ‘global warming,’ ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘greed’ or even ‘not enough clear cutting,’ if they are going to responsibly deal with the dangerous unintended consequences of de-modernizing its electric grid.”

A question arising out of California’s recent wave of wind-fanned wildfires, is why are public officials mainly attributing the cause to downed electric transmission lines that comprise less than ten percent of all the causes of such fires?

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Capitalism as Seen by the Left: “The Age of Enron”

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 16, 2019 5 Comments

“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”.…

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“Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years” (Book Review)

By John Olson -- June 2, 2019 4 Comments

Bradley has tackled a vast and dynamic energy landscape through the big prism of Enron. He was wise to include necessary contexts for 15 chapters of markets and personalities. Navigating FERC deregulation orders over a decade was a fearsome writing task, done well. Pipeline and power plant deals at home and abroad; solar, wind, and other alternative energies, the list goes on. Politics in Austin, Washington, DC, and foreign capitals. Enron was everywhere.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. has written a very important book about Houston’s most controversial company. This is the first of a two-volume corporate biography chronicling the rise, fall, and aftermath of Enron; his tetralogy has already produced a book on worldview (Capitalism at Work: 2009) and prehistory (Edison to Enron: 2011).

Few observers have been as ideally located to chronicle this modern-day version of a Greek tragedy.

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Trump on Wind Power’s Problems (cancer too)

By Sherri Lange -- April 11, 2019 35 Comments Continue Reading

TPPF: Fighting Back in Texas on Wind Power Subsidies

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 21, 2019 4 Comments Continue Reading

Corporate Cover for the Environmental Left in the 1990s (“Enron Ascending”)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 6, 2018 5 Comments Continue Reading

Attack on Tom Stacy: “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” (anti-wind effort smeared by crony environmentalist)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 11, 2018 3 Comments Continue Reading

Energy Statism: R Street Hits New Low (carbon tax dead, so wind & solar lovefest today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 8, 2018 4 Comments Continue Reading

ExxonMobil’s Tillerson on Wind and Solar Subsidies (an argument to remember)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 21, 2017 6 Comments Continue Reading