“He has been a stalwart in defense of wind energy in this state — no question about it.”

– Paul Sadler, executive director of the Wind Coalition, quoted in Kate Galbraith, “As Governor, Perry Backed Wind, Gas and Coal,” New York Times, August 21, 2011, p. 21A.

Texas curtailed electricity customers this Wednesday in the face of abnormally high temperatures and insufficient capacity. And as is to be expected this time of year, windpower is producing at its yearly lows–on Wednesday, about 9 percent of capacity (880 MW out of nearly 10,000 MW capacity), down from 18 percent earlier in the week.

As Texas revs up mothballed plants, one can only imagine how much state-of-the-art, high-utilization capacity the state could have ‘bought’ instead of wind power, which produces most of its juice when it is not needed.…

Until the end of 2010, the American Wind Energy Association’s annual reports were in the public domain. The details of their business now go to members only.

What has changed? What information has the lobby organization decided to share only with insiders? And why?

A look at some of AWEA’s slanted and aggressive one liners, such as August 4th’s Continued Growth Depends on Consistent Tax Policy, is revealing. Make no mistake–the fate of the industry is not in the hands of consumers as it is with virtually all other goods and services in our economy. It is wholly government dependent. And in terms of the paramount budget debate, wind power is not viable without exemption from its American duty to help reduce our national debt.

AWEA’s predicament has lead them to simultaneously threaten and beg Congress.…

“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.…