[Editor note: From time to time, MasterResource will publish excerpts from Bradley’s forthcoming book, Political Enron: A Business History, (John Wiley & Sons and Scrivener Publishing, 2016). The first two volumes of his trilogy on political capitalism, inspired by the rise and fall of Enron, are on worldview (2009) and industry background (2011).]

Enron’s two-front civil war within the fossil-fuel industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s had natural gas warring against coal on the one side and petroleum on the other. But Ken Lay’s well researched, ably orchestrated effort inspired another split, this one within the hitherto anti-fossil-fuel, anti-industrial environmental community.

“Natural gas has, until recently, tended to be lumped in with the ‘bad guys,'” wrote natural gas scribe Daniel Macey. “Now the question is whether to let natural gas into the environmental camp.”…

[Editor note: Political capitalism, aka crony capitalism, is a major theme at MasterResource because special government favor enables three major energies: ethanol, wind power, and on-grid solar power. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist-leaning historian, popularized the term political capitalism — and concluded, with few exceptions, that business led government, rather than government (reformers) led industry, into interventionism. Kolko overstated his case, however, as this post contends, misleading free-market proponents of Kolko and political capitalism.]

“Bradley and Donway closely analyze Gabriel Kolko’s contention that nineteenth-century railroad officials sought regulation, identifying mistaken notions about private property and capitalism, as well as Kolko’s uncritical reliance on railroad statements that were coerced by the threat of legislation, weak citations, and misquotes.”

We can thank New Left historian Gabriel Kolko for the modern concept of “political capitalism” and its offspring, “regulatory capture.”…

[Editor’s note: This post from 2011 is relevant today as the Losing Left tries to impugn the motives of the free-market climate/energy realists, one target being climatologist David Legates, recently profiled at MasterResource.

David Appell, part of the controversy back in 2011, in fact, reared his head again in the comments section recently at MasterResource. An active climate alarmist with very strong opinions, he hardly rebuted his rebutters. Science is supposed to be his thing; if he would like to answer for Gina McCarthy and US EPA here, he will be given the floor.]

The public editor at the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, recently wrote in his weekly Public Editor column about the trustworthiness of Robert Bryce, the nation’s leading energy journalist who has graduated to being a top energy public policy scholar, period.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science.

 It’s all spelled out atWiseEnergy.org, which is a wealth of energy and environmental resources.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Greed Energy Economics

“$1.7 Trillion Spent… Zero CO2 Abated”

NERA Report on EPA Power Plant Rules

Are Renewables Less Effective Than Energy Efficiency at Reducing CO2

Abandoned Homes Help Us Understand Wind Turbine Annoyance…