“I have made it clear in this campaign that I am not calling for any tax increase on gasoline, on oil, on natural gas, or anything else. I am calling for tax cuts to stimulate the production of new sources of domestic energy and new technologies to improve efficiency.”

– Al Gore (2000)

“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”

– Barack Obama (2012)

For a very brief moment early in his first term, President Obama played the pro-oil card for some political mileage. Gasoline prices were on the rise, and Obama wanted to be all-things-to-all-people. …

“With the climate activists out of political power, they must regroup and turn to open debate and persuasion. Alex Epstein is ready when you are, Misters Brune, Gore, Hansen, Holdren, Musk, Nye, and Romm.”

John Holdren, James Hansen, Joe Romm: Since you are sure that planetary warming necessitates government rationing of fossil fuels, why not debate and expose the fallacies of the climate optimists, or the ‘deniers’ as you like to call them?

Alex Epstein stands ready (and he tried with Holdren, who surely has more time now as a private citizen.)

I was reminded of this when Alex sent out this email last week about a twitter challenge to Bill ‘The Science Guy” Nye:

Why Bill Nye “The Science Guy”?

Because he is the most prominent opponent of fossil fuels that has shown any inclination to debate.

“Good news indeed! Energy cuts are easy cuts compared to the hard budget choices that lie ahead in the transition from statism and stagnation to a vibrant, coordinated, expanding entrepreneurial economy.”

Rome is not burning, but Joe Romm at Climate Progress is.

“Will Trump go down in history as the man who pulled the plug on a livable climate?” he writes, with the subtitle, “The fate of humanity is in the hands of a denier who pledged to kill domestic and global climate action and all clean energy research.

Really, Joe?

But Romm goes on to (usefully) report:

The Australian journalist Graham Readfearn notes that while you can’t find Trump’s original “100 day action plan” for energy and climate on the campaign website anymore, “it was archived by Wayback Machine”.

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), are in the news.

As reported last month in the Los Angeles Times, and more recently in Bloomberg Politics, IER/AEA are involved in the free-market directions that the president-elect and his team have followed to date.

One account described the founding of IER as follows:

The Institute for Energy Research was founded to be a clearinghouse for energy information in 1989 in Houston by Robert L. Bradley Jr., a speechwriter for Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay, who was later convicted of securities fraud.

Given that this association is part of the political conversation (Joe Romm started it in 2009: see below), and the continuing attention that is ahead for IER/AEA, I wish to revisit the historical record about my time at Enron that overlapped with IER.…