President Obama did not include Houston on his visit to Texas last week rallying his base and raising funds for Democrats for the November elections. The President was originally expected to be here but ended up in Austin and Dallas. Was this bypass a duck-out? After all, Congressman Kevin Brady (R. Tx.) pointedly invited the president to meet face-to-face with Houston energy workers on the other Gulf Crisis—the federal offshore drilling moratorium that threatens tens of thousands of jobs here and in much of the Gulf Coast region.

Sure, Obama’s Texas visit was not about helping Republican candidates or hosting a Tea Party event. But why couldn’t the president reserve an hour to talk to workers whose livelihoods depend on Houston’s largest industry – an industry that is being victimized by the President’s everyone-is-guilty drilling policy?…

“The BP incident highlights big differences in how socially responsible funds prioritize various causes. Some of these managers considered BP’s stance on climate change a strong positive. ‘BP was the first to break the logjam on climate change policy’ and had been a leader on alternative energy, says Mark Regier, director of stewardship investing for MMA Praxis.”

– Quoted in Eleanor Laise, “Oops: ‘Socially Responsible’ Funds Hold Big Stakes of BP,” Wall Street Journal, July 17–18, 2010.

The greenwashing strategy of BP and Enron has been the subject of three recent posts at MasterResource:

They Loved BP and Enron: Climate Alarmism as the Great Environmental Distraction (Part I: Worldwatch Institute quotations)

BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’: Climate Alarmism as the Great Environmental Distraction (Part II: Why the ‘greenwashing’?)

Harvard Business Review Article: BP as Environmental Role Model (Part III on global warming as the great environmental distraction)

Don’t believe that “Beyond Petroleum” BP fooled the politically correct after Enron and even all the way up to the Deepwater  Horizon explosion/Gulf spill of April 2010?…

MasterResource, a free-market energy blog, continues to attract new talent and a growing audience. We have had approximately 45 authors to date, and our cumulative views have exceeded one-half million.

We are not a mega-blog, but we are an important addition to the energy literature that will, like a good book, be accessed and referenced for years to come.

At Technorati, MasterResource has consistently been in the top 25 (out of 1,550) “green” blogs and has reached as high as #7. But more importantly, serious students of energy policy are regulars at our site, reading our once-a-day, in-depth post or tracking down material on what Enron/Ken Lay really did, what Jim Hansen or John Holdren really said, or what BP was doing under John Browne. We preserve the excesses of the smartest-guys-in-the-energy-room for posterity.…

[Editor note: Part I in this series reviewed the praise for BP and Enron from the Worldwatch Institute. Part II delved into the reasons that BP tried to rebrand itself as “beyond petroleum.”]

“Such [progressive] leadership [on climate change] may give BP Amoco better access to government-controlled oil deposits and more operating flexibility.”

– Kimberly O’Neill Packard and Forest Reinhardt, “What Every Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2000.

The Worldwatch Institute sang the praises of BP’s it’s-a-problem, we-can-solve-it approach to climate change. Far Left environmentalist Joe Romm featured John Browne/BP in his book Cool Companies as a leading example of corporations going green for profits and virtue.

Both Worldwatch and Romm were wrong–dead wrong–about BP, just as they were also wrong about climate-alarmist Enron and Ken Lay.…