At 41, [James Rogers] was named CEO of PSI Energy Inc., a small, financially troubled Indiana utility. Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, he supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. “Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,” he said later. “But I said, ‘Let’s shape this, let’s make some money.’”

– James Hagerty, “Jim Rogers, Head of a Coal-Burning Utility, Crusaded Against Global Warming.” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2018.

“I made money on sulfur [dioxide], and I’ll make money on carbon [dioxide].”

– James Rogers. Quoted in Eric Pooley, “The Smooth-Talking King of Coal–and Climate Change.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2010.

James Eugene “Jim” Rogers Jr. (1947–2018) was a notable political capitalist (rent seeker) of the late 20th/early 21st century electricity market.…

“Add [to rent-seeking] the company’s rank imprudence and strategic deceit (what I labeled philosophic fraud), and a new term had to be invented to describe that which true capitalist luminaries from Adam Smith forward warned against: the contra-capitalist corporation.”

For many years now, as a poor man’s Robert Caro, I have labored to demonstrate that the worldview-testing event called Enron was Exhibit A of crony capitalism and Progressivism, not free-market capitalism and the classical liberalism.

The Progressive mainstream argued emphatically for their conclusion. Two examples are among my favorites. Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Robert Kuttner in BusinessWeek: “Defenders of deregulation are mounting a heroic effort to insist that the [Enron] debacle was merely a business model gone bad, not an impeachment of freer markets”.…

Bradley has tackled a vast and dynamic energy landscape through the big prism of Enron. He was wise to include necessary contexts for 15 chapters of markets and personalities. Navigating FERC deregulation orders over a decade was a fearsome writing task, done well. Pipeline and power plant deals at home and abroad; solar, wind, and other alternative energies, the list goes on. Politics in Austin, Washington, DC, and foreign capitals. Enron was everywhere.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. has written a very important book about Houston’s most controversial company. This is the first of a two-volume corporate biography chronicling the rise, fall, and aftermath of Enron; his tetralogy has already produced a book on worldview (Capitalism at Work: 2009) and prehistory (Edison to Enron: 2011).

Few observers have been as ideally located to chronicle this modern-day version of a Greek tragedy.…

“The United States fully intends to be the world’s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. [E]nvironmental protection makes growth sustainable…. [This] recognition … by leaders from around the world is the central accomplishment of this important [United Nations] Rio Conference.”

 – George H. W. Bush, “News Conference in Rio de Janeiro, June 13, 1992.

“Bush restored federal subsidies to the Carter-era renewable-energy and energy-efficiency programs that had been cut under Reagan. All-Things-to-All-People Bush also signed the Clean Air Act of 1990, which took the acid-rain scare at face value, a signal about his openness toward the global-warming issue to come.”

– Robert Bradley, Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years (2018), p. 332.

In “This is when the GOP turned away from Climate Policy, E&E News recalled the good ol’ days when George H.…