Enron never “dumped” its ‘climate alarmism.’ What it was doing, however, was making money off oil-fired power plants internationally and, in its last year, a coal tradng unit that was buying a good deal of coal properties (which helped trading). The oil and coal stuff was hush, hush.

So Enron was trying to have its cake and eating it too.

Also, Enron was touting how electricity prices would fall under “open access” competition, yet it was secretly working for carbon pricing that would increase electricity prices.

This contradiction came to a head with a WRI/Enron collaborative within the President’s Council on Sustainable Development that I will post about at Master Resource later.

Jerry Taylor at Cato has written a lot about oil security and military policy. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave oil alone and stick to climate and electricity in our discussion.

One question for you Nick. Having read Joe Romm and my rebuttal about me being a ‘shill’ for Enron, do you feel he mislead his readers?

P.S. I invite you to peruse my book Capitalism at Work which gets into corporativism and energy policy in some depth. The introduction to the book is here: http://www.scrivenerpublishing.com/cart/images/Bradley_Intro.pdf

Thanks for taking the time to respond and make your history with Enron more clear. The more I read about Enron the more complicated and nefarious that organization seems to me. Am I correct in interpreting your suggestion that Enron actually trumped up their position on climate change in order to game the political system to their advantage before dumping that opinion?

I respect the idea of a free market for energy and understand the point of view that renewables and other alternatives may currently be uncompetitive with oil and gas without some subsidies. But before I try to justify current political movements, would you agree that the current fossil fuel economy, especially the oil industry is not exactly free market either? For example, a huge, if not primary reason for our current military spending is to secure a cheap supply of oil. Is that not an epic example of government meddling in a free market?

We welcome your response here and appreciate the challenge of differing points of view.

My Enron experience regarding energy and climate change is quite different from what you might think. To me Enron is “Exhcibit A” against Waxman-Markey.

Please read my take at http://masterresource.org/?p=4274 and visit my website regarding my book series on the rise and fall of Enron, and its wider implications, at http://www.politicalcapitalism.org.

You might not agree with my views on energy and climate, but I was no shill for Enron and put my job on the line for my beliefs.

- Rob Bradley