“Imagine if the media was reversed on the climate/energy issue, supporting and promoting a free-market, classical-liberal position. They could look at my boxes of files from the Enron days (1990s) and produce an exposé, Enron Knew.”

Back at Enron Corp., I had “email wars” with the company’s climate lobbyist, John Palmisano, the author of the infamous “This agreement will be good for Enron stock” Kyoto Protocol memo. Enron had at least a half-dozen profit centers that stood to benefit from CO2 restrictions, inspiring the activism that led Jeremy Leggett [The Carbon War (Penguin: 1999), p. 204] to identify Enron as “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.”

The Palmisano/Bradley exchanges concerned regulating and pricing carbon dioxide. I was against; Palmisano for.…

“One promising avenue for thinking about some of these issues is provided by Robert L. Bradley Jr., who, building on Sandy [Ikeda]’s work, offers his own typology of interventionist dynamics in a working paper, “Typology of Interventionist Dynamics” and the version in Humane Economics: Essays in Honor of Don Lavoie, edited by Jack High. I cannot do his framework justice in my short comment, and I urge the interested reader to review Bradley’s work on this topic in its entirety. That said, his typology offers some examples of key categories for considering different types of regulatory interventions….”

Decades ago I found myself swamped with examples of government intervention into the oil and gas market as I came to the concluding chapters of what would be later published as Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S.…

“In my period at Cato (1990–present), “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’“, is probably our most important Policy Analysis in the energy/environment area. Bradley’s thorough review and analysis (60 pages, 325 footnotes) was a real pushback against the viability of ‘green’ energy in theory and practice.”

– Jerry Taylor, Senior Fellow and Director, Natural Resource Studies, Cato Institute, 2012

On the fifteenth [25th] anniversary of “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’” (yesterday’s post), I recall, with pride, a lot of hard work that went into supplying the author with information about California’s wind and solar experience.

At the time I was working in the belly of the beast, the California Energy Commission (CEC) in Sacramento. The Commission was a major proponent of all things renewable, almost to the point of fanaticism.…

“By facilitating decentralized coordination instead of imposing specific outcomes, the institutions designed in Texas became the most market-oriented in the country, and the most likely to be resilient and adaptive in the face of unknown and charging economic, technological, and environmental conditions.”

– Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, eds. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story (AEI: 2009), p. 3.

The Texas electricity debacle of February 2021 stands as the greatest failure in the history of the power industry–if not any other industry in America. Hundreds dead and many tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary expense led one system architect, Robert Borlick, to lament:

I have to admit, the ERCOT blackouts have shaken me. The amount of physical damage and human suffering they caused is astounding. Obviously, the ‘market’ failed to provide the service reliability that customers expected and deserved.