Last week, a Hall of Shame cronyism memo turned 15 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano.

Global green planners such as Palmisano were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). His memo reflects the train-just-left-the-station mentality, as well as the specific 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 company of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.)

The Washington Post broke the memo soon after Enron’s demise, showing how Enron was hardly a free-market, capitalistic company. …

“Forgotten by many proponents is the justification for the PTC in the first place: to reduce CO₂ emissions…. [Yet] … many utilities with large amounts of wind generation steadfastly refuse to release operating data for analysis. I suspect to do so would mean the release of empirical data to build the opposition’s case for insignificant CO₂ reduction and poor operating economics. I was unable to find one study of existing wind energy installations that found the CO₂ reductions predicted by AWEA.”

Robert Peltier, editor-in-chief of POWER magazine, is an honest broker. He understands the technical side of electrical generation as a professional engineer. He knows power generation in practice from his years of industry experience on the regulated and the nonregulated sides. He has taught the subject as a tenured professor.…

While Invenergy waits for the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) to be extended by this ‘Lame Duck’ Congress, as expressed in the 12/4/12 Batavia Daily News article: “Orangeville windfarm waits on the tax credit,” there are thousands of local tax- and rate-paying citizens who are eagerly awaiting the expiration, permanent expiration, of this $0.022/kWh subsidy. The PTC is nothing more than a tax-shelter-generator for wealthy, multinational, rent-seeking corporations like Invenergy.

How does a business plan dependent on massive taxpayer-funded handouts for profitability make it past the drawing board in the first place?!? Any of us would have filed such a plan to its rightful place—in the garbage can.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA)– with the help of political cronies in high places–have attempted, and failed to push the PTC through various bills, not once, not twice, but FIVE (5) times in a little over a year.…

In business and in government, lesson after lesson has been learned against trusting the ‘smartest guys in the room.’

Remember Enron, where doubters were told by CEO Jeff Skilling that they just didn’t ‘get it’? … the alarmist climate scientists who have long stated that the science is settled…. the Obama Administration energy decision-makers who know which technologies are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and are ‘commercially promising’?

F. A. Hayek warned against the ‘pretense of knowledge” where an intellectual elite via government coercion plans for the rest of us. Economist/educator Russell Roberts (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) explained what Hayek meant in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?”

If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system.