Editor Note: This commentary is reproduced, with slight revision, from the December 2009 issue of POWER magazine.

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I personally believed was good social policy.

While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade and a federal renewables mandate–and a lot of mandated energy efficiency with its profit centers in mind.…

Two years ago, in Scenes from the Climate Inquisition, my colleague Steve Hayward and I observed that climate alarmists were growing ever more incendiary in their criticism of people who disagree with them. And these disagreements were not simply about the science, but about the favored policy choices of leftist environmentalists, many of whom had no training in public policy or economics.  As we wrote:

Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a “climate change denier.” Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials–or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission–for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet’s salvation.

[Editor note: This interview with Rob Bradley from the April 2006 issue of The New Individualist, published by The Atlas Society, is reproduced for two reasons: 1) the role of Lay and Enron in launching the global warming debate within the energy industry in the late 1980s and 1990s; 2) the role of Bradley during his 16 years at the company brought up by critics of the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance.]

TNI: Why should Objectivists, libertarians, and individualists take an interest in the collapse of Enron and particularly in the fall of Ken Lay?

Bradley: Enron will prove to be one of the most important episodes in the history of American business, and its story, from beginning to end, is inseparable from Ken Lay, its founder and long-time chairman.…

[Editor note: Mr. Lynch’s op-ed in the New York Times last week stirred a good deal of  comment and disagreement from “peak oil” proponents. His response is here]

The publication of my op-ed on peak oil in the New York Times brought forth the usual tidal wave of criticism. The Oil Drum went so far as to put up a separate page for comments, and Joseph Romm issued a ‘challenge’ to me to wager on oil prices. (For an executed bet coming due next year, see the appendix below.)

Responding to each and every comment, or even the main ones, would be a Herculean (and Sisyphean) task, so I will (here) make some hopefully useful observations.

First, I apologize to Fatih Birol for lumping him in with the peak oil advocates.…