Enron was jubilant when the Kyoto agreement was put forward
Here’s a legacy exhibit from the historical annals of How the Global Warming Scam Grew. You can see the cogs of the industrial machine picking up the “green theme”, becoming patrons of eco-legislation, and pouring money and influence into any big-government scheme that also promises them big profits. This is exactly the unholy alliance of Big-Finance with Big-Government that I described in the Climate Scare Machine Map. The email below documents one part of that self-fulfilling cycle where the taxpayers and citizens get screwed, corporates and politicians win, and the environment is irrelevant. The Greens ought be ashamed their naivety and ambition was so easily gamed by the real powers-behind-the-scenes.
Robert Bradley Jr. was working for Enron in 1998, and saw Enron lobbying for profits in the green sector. Bradley’s name was on the “to” list of this email below (perhaps with the wrong address because it did not arrive). He only saw the email when another man asked Bradley what he thought of it, and Bradley asked him to forward the message.
See Master Resource for the full email. Here are some key snippets.
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From: John Palmisano
Date: December 12, 1997
Subject: Implications of the Climate Change Agreement in Kyoto & What Transpired
Implications
If implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States. The potential to add incremental gas sales, and additional demand for renewable technology is enormous. In addition, a carbon emissions trading system will be developed. While the trading system will be implemented by 2008, I am sure that reductions will begin to trade with 1-2 years. Finally, Enron has immediate business opportunities which derive directly from this agreement.
The endorsement of joint implementation within Annex-1 is exactly what I have been lobbying for and it seems like we won.
On the business front: During the next year there will be intense positioning of organizations to capture an early lead in a variety of carbon trading businesses.
The clean development will be a mechanism for funding renewable projects. Again, we won. (We need to push for natural gas firing to be included among the technologies that get preferential treatment from the fund.)
The endorsement of emissions trading was another victory for us.
Enron was busy cultivating influence with the Green patsies it wanted to use to make money:
Through our involvement with the climate change initiatives, Enron now has excellent credentials with many “green” interests including Greenpeace, WWF, NRDC, GermanWatch, the US Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI, and Worldwatch. This position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monetized).
We can see how the Greens kid themselves that they are being influential. They think a corrupt entity is being a good corporate citizen:
(Parenthetically, I heard many times people refer to Enron in glowing terms. Such praise went like this: “Other companies should be like Enron, seeking out 21st century business opportunities” or “Progressive companies like Enron are….” Or “Proof of the viability of market-based energy and environmental programs is Enron’s success in power and SO2 trading.”)
The deal may not have happened if it weren’t for “Brussels” dragging in individual countries
The EU negotiated as a group. Until two years ago, they negotiated as individual countries. While there are still individual country interests, the EU retains substantial power when working together. It was this cohesiveness that lead to a more stringent agreement.
The US knows what a real free market is, everyone else was hijacking it:
EU delegates asked for my input into the agreement to oppose some of the positions espoused by some US delegates. In particular, the US was advocating no rules governing the trading of carbon emissions because rules would “inhibit trading.” My position is that rules defining who owns what reductions, how reductions are traded, how they are tracked, and liability rules will help promote trading since rules give both buyers and sellers more confidence in the commodity.
Someone somewhere with play the “rascist” weapon to silence dissent against their profit making plan:
An increasingly ugly trend has become evident to the environmental NGO community and the delegates from developing countries. They see the argument about developing country participation as a thinly disguised recycling of the early twentieth century fear-mongering characterized by the so-called “yellow-peril” or invasion of the US by Asian peoples.
This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!
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UPDATE:
Bradley’s book on political capitalism sounds a lot more appealing than its title suggests
Capitalism at Work: Business, Government and Energy (Political Capitalism)
Book description: “Capitalism took the blame for Enron. Yet Enron was anything but a free-market enterprise, and company-architect Ken Lay was hardly a principled capitalist. On the contrary, Enron was a politically dependent company and, in the end, a grotesque outcome of America s modern mixed economy.
That is the central finding of Robert L. Bradley s Capitalism at Work: The blame for Enron rests squarely with political capitalism – a system in which business interests routinely obtain, and employ government intervention for their own interests at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, and competitors. Although Ken Lay professed allegiance to free markets, he was in fact a consummate politician. Only by manipulating the levers of government was Enron transformed from a $3 billion natural gas company to a $100 billion chimera, one that went from seventh place on the Fortune 500 list to bankruptcy.
But Capitalism at Work goes beyond unmasking Enron s sophisticated foray into political capitalism. Employing the timeless insights of Adam Smith, Samuel Smiles, and Ayn Rand, among others, Bradley shows how fashionable anti-capitalist doctrines set the stage for the ultimate business debacle. Those errant theories, like Enron itself, elevated form over substance, ignored legitimate criticism, and bypassed midcourse correction. Political capitalism was thus more than the handiwork of profit-hungry businessmen and power-hungry politicians. It was a legacy of failed scholarship. “