“Gaygate 2023 and Climategate 2009 reinforce each other. So when will basic honesty and academic standards return to academia? To climate science?”

It’s a whitewash–again. The plagiarism (and data falsification?) of Harvard president Claudine Gay brings to mind the similar exposé of the Climategate emails, whose words, sentences, and paragraphs had to be swept under the rug back in 2009/2010 by an embarrassed establishment protecting its own. [1]

Wiki’s whitewash, for example, brought attention to the source (“denialists”) and then misrepresented the importance of the exposé.

The story was first broken by climate-change denialists, who argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. The CRU [Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia] rejected this, saying that the emails had been taken out of context.

“‘I think ultimately we’re headed for an era in which my grandchildren will be driving electric cars, powered primarily by renewable energy,’ [George W.] Bush said. Oil, he said, brings economic, environmental and national-security problems.

– Kate Galbraith, “W. is for Wind,” Texas Tribune, May 25, 2010.

Let history note that Enron and Texas governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry created an industry that consumers in a free market did not. With the help of the federal Production Tax Credit of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, since renewed 13 times, as well as the $6.9 billion CREZ transmission line, Texas became the wind power state on the backs of national taxpayers and in-state ratepayers.

Bush’s “America is Addicted to Oil” reference in his 2006 State of the Union address did not come out of nowhere.…

Note: On this day in 2001, the politically correct, all-things-to-all-people Enron entered the workweek in bankruptcy. Monday December 2nd was my last day at the company after a 16-year career there, as it was for several thousand other employees.

Enron, a unique story of corporate strategy and governance gone wrong, has been misinterpreted by the Progressive mainstream. The company represented the failure of political capitalism, not market capitalism. Its lessons extend to image environmentalism and renewable energy hyperbole, as I document in my book series on the company, as well as in shorter articles.

Reprinted below for the historical record is an email from John Jennrich, founding editor of Natural Gas Week, to Enron author John Emshwiller and myself. Jennrich discusses Enron’s role in the development of the modern natural gas market.…

“Please note: Desert Report editors have retracted ‘The Silent Menace’ articles from both the June and September issues; our forthcoming December issue will cover the reasons why.” When the retraction took place during the second week of September, they hadn’t found an official excuse yet that they were comfortable publishing as an explanation….

… the formerly controversial topic of potential infrasound hazards associated with industrial wind turbines had been demonstrated by enough prestigious studies to be harmful beyond any level of doubt. As an environmental tribunal in Ontario, Canada officially explained, the issue was no longer one that questioned the harm but had evolved into a question of the degree of harm that industrial wind turbine–generated infrasound causes.

One of Murphy’s Laws states, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Along those lines, after working without any compensation for months to uncover the most revealing, current scholarly studies, and thought-provoking news reports on the known health hazards associated with infrasound from industrial wind turbines, a two-part series of articles that was written at the Sierra Club’s request was suddenly retracted from one of their club’s magazines.…