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.)…

Ed. note: This fortnightly Master Resource post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, published every other week by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete MBN for this post can be found here.

Of special interest in this issue is an article from Matt Ridley, here.

Greed Energy Economics:
Wind Energy companies accused of bid rigging and racketeering in US lawsuit
Public should know true costs of state’s push for carbon-free grid
Energy poverty in Europe is linked to expensive renewables

Renewable Energy: Health and Ecosystem Consequences:
Did Ohio board certify Icebreaker wind project with enough bird, bat research?
Stunned Still: Offshore Wind Turbine Power Cables Leave Crabs Mesmerized and Motionless
Mountain of discarded turbines prompts NY bond push
Iowa Turbine “graveyard” removal underway

Wind Energy:
Fine Video: Wind Turbines: Salvation or Ruin?…

Ed. note: This fortnightly Master Resource post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, published every other week by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete MBN for this post can be found here.

Of special interest in this issue is Henry Geraedts’s article “Inconvenient Realities about Net-Zero,” here.

Wind & Solar Energy:
A green paradox: Deforesting the Amazon for wind energy in the Global North
Quantifying the hurricane risk to offshore wind turbines
Green Technologies Have A Glaring Problem Of Scale
NY Utility Bills to Rise 10± Percent due to Green NYC
Lake Erie wind turbine project subject of upcoming Ohio Supreme Court hearing
Pennsylvania Bill Solar and Wind Decommissioning Introduced
Fire fears over huge battery storage plants for wind project
NC Commissioners rebuff request for 574-acre solar project

Nuclear Energy:
Key Facts about Spent Nuclear Fuel
Closing California’s last nuclear power plant would be a mistake
Nuclear Bans Tumble as Once-Skeptical States Seek Carbon Cuts

Fossil Fuel Energy:
Multistate carbon tax scheme on gasoline collapses
Germany urges US Congress not to sanction Putin’s pipeline
Biden lacks understanding of oil’s contributions to civilization
Inconvenient realities about net-zero
Fifteen States Respond to ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Threaten to Cut Off Banks That Refuse to Service Coal, Oil Industries
China is mining much more coal again and that’s boosting its factories
Elizabeth Warren Goes to War Over Natural Gas Prices She Helped Create!…

“There’s only one problem with this rash, hyperbolic onslaught on fossil fuels: everything about it is wrong. Far from destroying life on Earth, our discovery and exploitation of these fuels improved it enormously.”

“The hostility to fossil fuels seems increasingly to be driven by misanthropy rather than reason; by an elitist feeling of revulsion for the gains of modernity rather than by a rational assessment of the undoubted problems humankind still faces.” (Brendan O’Neill, SPIKED, November 12, 2021)

Alex Epstein, president and founder of Center for Industrial Progress, has not been alone in his quest to reframe the climate/energy debate in humanist terms. Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer of SPIKED, whose recent “Keep Burning Those Fossil Fuels” came to my attention, has been beating the fossil fuel/human betterment drum for some time.…