Mel Brooks, in his classic comedy The Producers, schemed to make money by over-subscribing shares in a sure-to-fail play. Unfortunately for his character, the play became a smash hit, and all the investors wanted their payouts. Since he had sold well over 100% of the interest in the play, he was in a bit of a pickle.

And so it is with natural gas. Clean, easy to use, abundant—natural gas is everyone’s choice for our energy transition away from oil and coal for power generation, industry, homes, and now transportation. Enter oilman-turned-wind-promoter T. Boone Pickens, with a proposal to move U.S. heavy trucks strongly toward natural gas fuel (as compressed natural gas, or CNG). And to enable the offset, the electricity that is currently generated by such gas (about a 21% market share of power generation, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Annuel Energy Outlook 2009, Table 8) would be supplied by new wind farms, built mostly in the Plains States.…

“An unlikely coalition of renewables groups, manufacturers and oil & gas companies opposed the bills. ‘It might as well have been the ~Lobby Employment Act of 2025~ based on the number of lobbyists hired to fight it,’ wrote state representative Jared Patterson.” (Sheridan, below)

Doug Sheridan is a noted analyst of the climate/energy realism school. With more than 40,000 social media followers, he corrects the bias of the mainstream media in real time. Little surprise that his influence dwarfs that of many prominent ‘magical thinking’ energy pundits, part of a very promising global rethink.

Sheridan’s latest analysis concerns the failure of the Texas legislature to cool the jets of uneconomic, destructive wind, solar, and batteries in the Lone Star State. But how did Texas, of all states, end up where it is today?…

“The consolation prize for a lot of us is that Joe Romm is so extreme and unprofessional that his cause of “Hell and High Water” suffers. Climate change is exaggerated and nefarious, just like Joe Romm himself.

MasterResource has followed the mercurial climate alarmist/activist Joe Romm since its beginning (2007). Back in the late 1990s, I sparred with Romm while I was at Enron, (“a company I greatly respect,” said he) regarding what turned out to be its most deceitful business, one promising free-lunch energy efficiency. Enron Energy Services (EES) and Romm’s Center for Energy and Climate Solutions (CECS) both bit the dust. For-profit or non-profit, the “energy service company” (ESCO) was a mirage.

Romm has referred to me as a “sociopath” in a private email.…

“Our Founder and CEO John Berger reminds us why this event is so pivotal: Sunnova and our dealer partners are uniting to tackle the U.S. power demand shortage with American-made solar solutions.🤝”

Previous posts (here, here, and here) have detailed how a second-hander company, trying to be all things to all people, and living off of special government subsidies, was a liability parading as an asset. Sunnova was never profitable, and the only winners among the countless thousands involved with the company were founder and CEO John Berger (inflated salary and cashouts) and some other executives paid for misallocating resources.

Having been at Enron from the beginning to the end, and seeing the similarities of Enron and Sunnova (both went down with the lights on), and knowing Berger was a Ken Lay-alike, I gathered (below) some pictures of the company’s hyperbole in action.…