“The fraudulence of … ‘goals’ for emission reductions, ‘offsets’ that render even iron-clad goals almost meaningless, an ineffectual ‘cap-and-trade’ mechanism must be exposed. We must rebel against such politics-as-usual.”

– James Hansen, “Never-Give-Up Fighting Spirit,” November 30, 2009

“The truth is, the climate course set by [the] Waxman-Markey [cap-and-trade bill] is a disaster course. It is an exceedingly inefficient way to get a small reduction of emissions. It is less than worthless….”

-James Hansen, “Strategies to Address Global Warming,” July 13, 2009.

The case for government intervention in the name of addressing man-made climate change concerns alleged market failure. But there is a second key factor in the debate over public policy activism: government failure.

The letter below, signed by 41 Left environmental groups , is a welcome example of policy activists assessing the ‘cure’ in terms of the ‘disease’.…

“Greedy capitalism got the blame for Enron, but Enron was anything but a free-market corporation…. They were gaming the system, using politics for their own interests. That’s not free-market capitalism. That’s political capitalism.”

– Robert L. Bradley, Jr. Quoted in Leigh Brown Perkins, “Energy Surge: Robert Bradley ’77 Profile, Rollins College Magazine, Fall 2009.

The end of Enron was an unlikely new beginning for Robert Bradley ’77.

After 16 years at the energy giant, the last seven as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for CEO Ken Lay, Bradley found himself stranded when the company imploded in a firestorm of shady dealings. Like most people at Enron, he never saw it coming. “As with most Enron employees, my equity was in company stocks,” he said. “So I not only lost my job, I lost my financial cushion.…

[Editor note: Part I on energy conservationism examined Richard Nixon’s price control order of August 1971 as the birth of peacetime conservationism , with shortages leading to mandatory allocation law.]

A tract for the energy-shortage times was a 1976 essay in Foreign Affairs by Amory Lovins, the 29-year-old energy representative of the U.K. environmental group, Friends of the Earth. In “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins coined the term soft energy paths to differentiate energy conservation and decentralized renewable technology from the “hard” path of central-station power plants fueled by oil, gas, coal, or uranium.

Neo-Malthusians such as Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren sang his praises, and the article became the most reprinted piece in the history of Foreign Affairs. Lovins was soon testifying before the U.S.…

“In [Atlas Shrugged], I glorify the real kind of productive, free-enterprise businessman in a way he has never been glorified before…. But I make mincemeat out of the kind of businessman who calls himself a ‘middle-of-the-roader’ and talks about a ‘mixed economy’—the kind that runs to government for assistance, subsidies, legislation and regulation.”

– Ayn Rand (1949) (1)

As the public face of capitalism, business leaders are well positioned to explain the logic of free markets from a moral and economic viewpoint—and to demonstrate by example the non-coercive nature of trade by eschewing the political exploitation of consumers, taxpayers, and rivals.

The words and deeds of corporate executives are quite different, however. Rand was very disappointed in what she saw–and she would be more disappointed today, particularly in the energy industry.…