“This scholarly work fills in much missing history about two of America’s most important industries, electricity and natural gas.”

   – Joseph A. Pratt, NEH-Cullen Professor of History and Business, University of Houston

“An engaging look back at the market and political development of the U.S. energy industry. Industry and policymakers will benefit from reading this book.”

   – Dr. Robert Peltier, PE, Editor-in-Chief, POWER magazine

Edison to Enron is the second book in my trilogy on political capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron (order information: Amazon, Scrivener Publishing, John Wiley & Sons).

Book 1, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, provided a worldview of market-based versus political business, as well as an interpretation of energy sustainability. The present volume (Book 2) examines the individuals and companies that are related to Enron’s prehistory.…

When I was director of public policy analysis at Enron in the late 1990s, I hired climatologist Gerald North of Texas A&M as a consultant to help me get to the bottom of the raging debate between climate ‘skeptics’ and ‘alarmists.’ I was Ken Lay’s speechwriter, and I was concerned that Enron’s embrace of climate alarmism (we had seven profit centers banking on priced CO2 from government intervention) was intellectually off base and thus violated the honesty plank of corporate responsibility.

It was money well spent. Dr. North was personable and honest, although he had a propensity to default toward alarmism if you did not challenge him. (Such is the neo-Malthusian propensity of most natural scientists who see nature as optimal and the human influence as only downside.) This is why I have called Dr.…

“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.…