“When The Washington Post reported earlier this month that President Trump appointed Daniel Simmons to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the paper called him a ‘conservative scholar.’ Conservative scholar? ‘Fossil fuel industry propagandist’ would have been more accurate.”

– Elliott Negin (Senior Writer, Union of Concerned Scientists). “Can Trump’s Koch-Funded Appointees STall Clean Energy Momentum?” May 19, 2017.

Editor note: This responds to Professor Dolan’s post yesterday, “Hayek and a Carbon Tax: Response to Bradley, which answered Bradley’s post two days ago, “Hayek was not a Malthusian or Global Tariff Advocate (link to a carbon tax peculiar, errant).” The debate began with Dolan’s original piece, “Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes.”

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“… let’s add the ‘fat tail’ of the global CO2 blanket protecting against a little ice age or an ice age in the next several hundred years. Why not think of global lukewarming as a short-term positive, and the CO2 blanket as a long-term positive?”

“Classical liberals should be focused on adaptation to climate change, natural or anthropogenic, which is wealth-as-health and free movements of goods and services and people.

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), are in the news.

As reported last month in the Los Angeles Times, and more recently in Bloomberg Politics, IER/AEA are involved in the free-market directions that the president-elect and his team have followed to date.

One account described the founding of IER as follows:

The Institute for Energy Research was founded to be a clearinghouse for energy information in 1989 in Houston by Robert L. Bradley Jr., a speechwriter for Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay, who was later convicted of securities fraud.

Given that this association is part of the political conversation (Joe Romm started it in 2009: see below), and the continuing attention that is ahead for IER/AEA, I wish to revisit the historical record about my time at Enron that overlapped with IER.…

Editor Note: The post below, published at MasterResource in June 2009, has profound challenges for the notion that self-interested business underinvests in energy efficiency, giving a “market failure” rationale for government investments in and mandates for energy efficiency. This post introduced the term conservationism to differentiate government conservation from market conservation. It also documents the market failure of Joe Romm’s shuttered nonprofit, the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions.

“Enter the energy outsourcing model of energy service companies (ESCOs) in the 1990s, widely heralded as a ‘new economy’ breakthrough and a new feature of ‘natural capitalism’. Enron Energy Services (EES), in particular, the energy outsourcing division of the late Enron, was the next great thing…. ‘ESCOs are DEFINITELY the future,’ exclaimed Joe Romm. ‘I intend to work with the big ones to transform the market, which I think will take about two or three years.’