This week, a Hall of Shame business memo turns 27 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, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP27’s recent failure making COP28’s prospects look grim.

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 of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.…

“The Biden Administration’s offshore wind ambition, not only Vineyard Wind, is going the way of the EV debacle. It is time to end the charade, even before the Presidential election.”

All the current political news is keeping this week’s implosion of the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry off the front pages. “Vineyard Wind shut down after turbine failure sends ‘sharp fiberglass shards’ onto Nantucket beaches,” reported CBS News out of Boston. The worst case event could spell the end of another Biden anti-economic, anti-ecology “climate” program, with only the 132 MW South Fork Wind project off the coast of Long Island under construction.

Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, was at the 10-turbine, 136 MW mark of a planned 62 turbines totaling 806 MW. GE Wind (formerly Enron Wind), the blade-maker, is in trouble too.…

“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up.” (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979, p. 49)

The idea of a transition to a “new energy future” is historically incorrect with wind power, grid solar, and battery-driven cars and trucks. All have a history of non-competitiveness with or displacement by fossil fuels. Energy density explains much of why the renewable energy era gave way to a far better world of coal, oil, and natural gas in recent centuries.

This is taken from a 2014 article by Zachary Shahan for Renewable Energy World, History of Wind Turbines.

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1887: The first known wind turbine used to produce electricity is built in Scotland. The wind turbine is created by Prof James Blyth of Anderson’s College, Glasgow (now known as Strathclyde University).…

“Looking back with hindsight, the business opportunities were on the generation side, and the utility was going out for bid with all these big renewable-energy projects. But in retrospect, it seems clear, we weren’t as focused on these fire risks as we should have been.”

– Doug McLeod, former Maui county energy commissioner (quoted in WSJ, below)

Opportunity cost is a central concept in economics. Economics is about the unseen versus the seen. Resources spent in one direction are not spent in another. The same goes for corporations as politically correct, economically incorrect priorities crowd out good. Climate change policy is a premier example.

Government-forced substitution of dilute, intermittent energies for reliable incumbents has not only cost taxpayers and ratepayers. It has also cost the environment–dearly. The recent saga of Hawaiian Electric’s preoccupation with “the energy transition” at the expense of grid safety and reliability is the latest example of this.…