Texas and Europe don’t have a lot in common. But when it comes to government support for renewable energy, the Lone Star state has followed the same course as many European nations.

In the late 1990s, while the European Union was urging member nations to adopt targets for the percentage of their energy produced from renewable sources, Texas enacted a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) mandating that the state’s competitive electric providers buy a minimum 2,000 MW of qualifying renewable energy by 2009. The purchase mandate was part of a broad electricity restructuring bill sponsored by Enron Corp., parent of Enron Wind Corporation, a story detailed elsewhere at MasterResource.

The Texas Legislature, with the support of Governor Rick Perry, later increased the RPS to 10,000-MW by 2025. Texas met this target for installed wind capacity in 2010, a full fifteen years ahead of schedule.…

Last December, Texas governor Rick Perry, speaking at a Houston fundraiser, sadly noted how President George W. Bush had lost his way in Washington, D.C. His good friend had compromised his principles and left the nation in a lurch, however unintentionally.

But then the governor launched into his Texas-is-great stump speech that included kudos to windpower, a new large industry (no) thanks to a legislative mandate requiring that Texas electricity retailers purchase qualifying renewable energy. (Wind is the most economical of the qualifiers.) The 1999 mandate, enacted with the crucial help of Enron lobbyists, was increased in 2002 with a powerful wind lobby at work. And so at  the point of a gun, Texas became the leading windpower state in the country, passing California along the way.

So it was not surprising that last Saturday night Gov.…

Ed note: The following repost of “BP’s Fall From Grace“(December 2010) by Kevin Mooney is testament to the energy realism of Exxon’s Lee Raymond over the image-over-substance approach of John Browne of BP and Ken Lay of Enron. The lesson is clear: false causes and political correctness result in wasted resources and ecological loss. Part III tomorrow (Part I was yesterday) concludes this week’s tribute to the top integrated oil major leader of his generation.

Once simply called British Petroleum, BP transformed its corporate identity into an international ‘green energy’ company with a sunburst logo and the tag line “Beyond Petroleum.” Environmental groups applauded when BP’s CEO gave credence to alarmist global warming assertions. Little did they know that the company’s rhetorical overtures to green causes deflected attention away from its reckless and irresponsible practices that jeopardized worker health and safety and ultimately resulted in death and devastation in the Gulf of Mexico.…

Ed. Note: A Hall of Shame business memo turns 28 years old today. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.

“This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!” (-John Palmisano, Enron lobbyist)

Global green planners back in the 1990s were euphoric that somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But the Kyoto Protocol predictably failed, and with the Paris climate accord of 2015 teetering (COP30), the momentum has shifted toward climate and energy realism.

Palmisano’s on-the-ground 1997 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.…