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.…

“A federal investment tax credit was enacted just as the project was being completed, adding 10 percent to the rate of return. Accelerated depreciation in the same law further sheltered profits from income taxes. Thank you, political capitalism.”

“Cogen Technologies would go on to become one of the very top independent power developers in the nation. The sale of CTI’s major asset to Enron in 1999 (McNair took cash, not stock) would make McNair one of Houston’s wealthiest men and provided the means to buy an NFL football team for his hometown, a deal that was also made possible by a new taxpayer-supported stadium, in no small part the result of an intense lobbying effort by Ken Lay and Enron several years before.”

Last Friday, the owner of the Houston Texans, Robert C.…

“Under [Ken] Lay’s direction, Enron would restart the solar industry [in 1995], rescue the US wind industry [in 1997], and help legitimize the climate issue.”

“Enron saw green in green energy. Wind and solar as primary energies had new public policy rationales and powerful political constituencies. Specifically, global warming from fossil-fuel usage (via the enhanced greenhouse effect) was the new neo-Malthusian scare, and post–Gulf War concerns over energy security put petroleum on the defensive. Even more than this, renewables had public cachet for an energy company, particularly one that prized publicity and promoted a momentum stock.”

– Bradley, Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, pp. 530, 528, respectively.

Rent-seeking … strategic uses of government intervention…. corporativism. Many terms have described business lobbying within political capitalism where the political means replaces the economic means to financial success The result is bad profit, defined by classical-liberal entrepreneur Charles Koch as corporate income not created but politically obtained and thereby lost to the creators in the economic system.…