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.…

Ed. Note: This repost from April 17, 2017, is timely given Executive Order 14199 this week to withdraw the U.S. from 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities assuming/promoting climate alarmism. The UN climate program dates to 1988 and became a political force at the ‘Earth Summit’ with the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (Rio Treaty).

“I am writing to urge you to attend the upcoming United Nations Conference on Environment and Development [‘Earth Summit’] scheduled for early June in Brazil and to support the concept of establishing a reasonable, non-binding, stabilization level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.” – Ken Lay (Enron Corp.), to George H. W. Bush, Letter of April 3, 1992.

“The United States fully intends to be the world’s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment.

Ed. Note: A Hall of Shame business memo turns 28 years old today. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.

“This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!” (-John Palmisano, Enron lobbyist)

Global green planners back in the 1990s were euphoric that somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But the Kyoto Protocol predictably failed, and with the Paris climate accord of 2015 teetering (COP30), the momentum has shifted toward climate and energy realism.

Palmisano’s on-the-ground 1997 memo cites the benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2)–and seven if CO2 were capped and traded.…

Ed. Note: How did a major energy trade association/ lobbying group come to support climate alarm and forced energy transformation, reversing its prior position? The story gets back to an ex-Enron executive who imported Enron’s political capitalism model to the electricity industry, to flip the script.

“Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, [James “Jim” Rogers in 1988] supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. ‘Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,’ he said later. ‘But I said, “Let’s shape this, let’s make some money”.’” (Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2018)

“I made money on sulfur [dioxide], and I’ll make money on carbon [dioxide].” (Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2010)

“The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing the electric power industry,” a recent New York Times article stated, “said that if without a federal role in regulating greenhouse gases, states and cities could ‘attempt to fill that perceived void through increased regulatory requirements that could vary significantly from one jurisdiction to the next.’”…