The demise of the “Climate Bank” SVB makes a look back at ‘Woke Enron’ timely. This post is an excerpt from Robert Bradley, Jr. Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), pp. 309–310.

In the fall of 2001, Ken Lay set the tone for what would be Enron’s last Environmental, Health, and Safety Management Conference:

We believe that incorporating environmental and social considerations into the way we manage risk, govern our projects, and develop products and services will help us maintain our competitive advantage. As we move forward, we will leverage our intellectual capital and innovative capabilities to promote sustainable business practices around the world.

At this meeting, Enron’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) task force listed its “Accomplishments to Date,” which were:

• Secured board oversight of social/environmental performance
• Expressed support for Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Completed corporate responsibility task force
• Developed and pilot-tested human rights audit
• Developed security and human rights guidelines
• Established formal partnerships with WBCSD [World Business Council on Sustainable Development], IBLF [International Business Leaders Forum], and CI [Conservation International]
• Identified language to strengthen code of ethics
• Providing project support—Calypso, Transredes, Dabhol and Cuiabá
• Responding to stakeholder concerns on an ongoing basis

The goals for 2002 included:

• Formally adopt CERES Principles
• Complete indigenous peoples’ policy
• Specify social/environmental expectations in formal relationships with vendors and contractors
• Review results of stakeholder survey and develop strategy to address outcome
• Create awareness of social/environmental trends among [Enron’s] origination and investment groups
• Add corporate responsibility performance attribute to PRC [Performance Review Committee] process
• Present task force recommendations to Dr.

“Why should a thermal plant spend money in a government-rigged market that threatens a reasonable profit? Why should the plant even remain in the market under these conditions?”

“For IVREs it’s a no-risk deal, with markets guaranteed and taxpayers country-wide adding profits. But what about the need for reliable power?”

This two-part post (Part II here) is a follow-up to Robert Bradley’s recent IER article, “Wind, Solar, and the Great Texas Blackout: Guilty as Charged.” His article discussed how regulatory shifts and subsidies favoring Intermittently Variable Renewable Energy (IVRE) producers resulted in prematurely lost capacity, a lack of new capacity, and upgrade issues with remaining (surviving) traditional capacity. These three factors–“the why behind the why”–explain the perfect storm that began with (or was revealed by) Storm Uri.

Part I below describes how the market was originally meant to work–but has not worked given the governmentally redesigned power market, beginning with generation.…

“What we have is one-way bureaucratic command-and-control making poor decisions with funding derived from captive consumers and one-sided radical agendas. Accordingly, the environmental zealots demonize fossil fuels, while maintaining that only wind and solar are ‘green’ enough to ‘save the planet.’ This itself is greenwashing.”

Like Rob Bradley’s “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’” (see Part I), my colleague Tom Tanton wrote a major piece about the over-regulation of the rare-earth extraction industry in the U.S.: “Dig it!  If you want more information on the importance of rare earths within the U.S economy, this would be a good place to start.

The long-term feasibility of this transition to renewables simply assumes sufficient raw materials exist for it at all. Professor Michaux of the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) has studied these issues, probably more extensively than anyone else and thinks not. Professor…

“The superior case for dense mineral energies economically and environmentally should inspire a rethink. And climate policy is in shambles heading into COP 27.”

“What is really fishy is that those that admit to ‘climate anxiety’ do not have any appetite to seriously entertain the case for CO2/climate optimism, aka energy freedom for the masses. And they see no evil in the eco-sins of wind, solar, and batteries….”

I actively engage in (and occasionally share) debates on LinkedIn against climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists. I sometimes feel like a teacher presenting a suite of arguments that have been cursorily dismissed. The good news is that there are a lot of readers in the middle who see what is going on. A number now join me in what is a two-sided debate at LinkedIn.…