Enron’s Ken Lay saw Kyoto treaty ‘green’ only as the color of money

ENRON HAS BEEN widely depicted as a free market swashbuckler leveraging its political power for deregulation. In truth, the Texas energy giant and its well-connected chief, Dr. Kenneth Lay, also constituted the most active corporate advocate of the Kyoto global warming treaty. Lay’s efforts last year reached into the Bush Cabinet to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

There is no evidence of direct communication on this issue between Lay and O’Neill. The middle man between them was former Sen. Timothy Wirth, an environmentalist who is now president of Ted Turner’s billion-dollar United Nations Foundation. Lay tried hard to harness O’Neill’s indiscreet enthusiasm for the global warming cause to a commercial bonanza for Enron. An O’Neill spokesman told me that he had no knowledge of Lay’s support for the Kyoto treaty and reaffirmed his own opposition to it.

Lay has been painted as a heartless advocate of free market economics when he actually was working behind the scenes for control of energy emissions, establishing alliances with the most radical environmentalist pressure groups. Just as Enron pushed electrical deregulation to make billions in energy trades, Lay wanted restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto agreement to artificially create a market for CO2 “credits” to be purchased to burn coal. Enron was not about ideology and certainly not partisanship, but was using governmental contacts to maximize profits.

Lay had secretly cultivated Clinton administration officials — including Tim Wirth, undersecretary of state for Global Affairs. Lay was trying to use Wirth as a conduit to Alcoa CEO (and environmentalist) Paul O’Neill. On Oct. 26, 2000, Wirth suggested to O’Neill that it was necessary to divest global warming of its political coloration. In essence, Wirth wanted to strip the dead weight of potential Presidential loser Al Gore from the issue. On Nov. 7, election day, O’Neill let Wirth know that he essentially agreed with his analysis.

By Jan. 17, the election was decided, and O’Neill was the unexpected nominee for the Treasury portfolio. Wirth, now at the U.N. Foundation, told Lay that “Paul” was willing to help in fighting global emissions. Mary Hope Katsouros, senior vice president of the environmentalist Heinz Center, on Feb. 16 issued a private report about O’Neill’s help, which was directed to Lay at Enron. She reported that the new Treasury Secretary had passed to colleagues at a Cabinet meeting his own article about global warming. At a private dinner, she reported, O’Neill promised to help fight greenhouse emissions.

Adverse Republican reaction to O’Neill’s position curtailed his advocacy, and Lay’s attention was directed elsewhere as Enron’s house of cards began to disintegrate. Nevertheless, the attempt was audacious: to enlist the conservative administration in a scheme to enrich the rapacious corporation at the expense of ordinary American energy users, thanks to the Kyoto treaty’s restrictions.

Ratifying and implementing Kyoto would greatly increase the cost of generating electricity from coal. To burn coal, it would be necessary to purchase credits for the emission of CO2. That would create a market for Enron, buying and selling emission credits. Internal memos show that Enron envisioned a profit here as early as 1996.

While Lay was becoming one of George W. Bush’s major contributors, he was building the company’s alliances in the green movement. On Dec. 12, 1997, an internal Enron memo claimed that the company had “excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests” — including the extremist Greenpeace. These groups, in turn, were described as referring to Enron “in glowing terms.”

The Dec. 12 document asserted that the Kyoto treaty “will do more to promote Enron’s business” than any other regulatory initiative. It called the treaty’s authority to trade in CO2 credits “another victory for us,” adding: “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!” Enron’s advocacy began years earlier. On Dec. 5, 1995, Lay wrote Environmental Protection Administrator Carol Browner pressing for the trading of emission standards.

Paul O’Neill can be accused of being a misguided idealist about global warming, but Ken Lay saw Kyoto’s green as the color of money. While it flourished, Enron knew no loyalty to party, to ideology or to American consumers. It had contempt for more than its employees.

While Lay was becoming one of George W. Bush’s major contributors, he was building the company’s alliances in the green movement. On Dec. 12, 1997, an internal Enron memo claimed that the company had “excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests” — including the extremist Greenpeace. These groups, in turn, were described as referring to Enron “in glowing terms.”

Shades of Calpine.

Most enteresting.

So Enron wanted Bush to sign the Kyoto agreement and Bush chose not to and that surely cost Enron some good money!

How do the democrats turn that around seems like a good question!

And we have this also:

There was a Natural Gas plant built in the Klamath Basin where money was extract via carbon credits ( as I recall --I think) and a solar energy plant was built in India !

Company owning the Klamath plant is a Scottish company investing the US.

It seems that an American corporation has little difficulty playing a fantasy market in carbon credits and using our electricity bills to finance foreign investments. Gosh, one wonders what it means if the President and the Congress look the other way while these guys do this with the complicity of the Department of the Treasury?

Are carbon credits equivalent to minting a form of money? If the game is played with the approval of the IMF and the Whirled Bunk are they transacting in said currency within the US? Are they claiming ownership of the atmosphere?

Enron envisioned a market in trading carbon emissions just like trading electricity futures and derivatives. If Kyoto were adopted here in the US, it would have been a huge market as companies would have been able to sell emission credits, and companies needing them for expanison would be buying them.

Enron wasn't the only company interested in that. But they certainly would have handled the majority of those transactions and they saw it as a gold mine.

Dubya shot them out of the saddle on that one, although there is still a chance that Kyoto could be implemented by much of the rest of the world.

It won't help Enron, though. They have sold their trading arm to UBS, and if it is successful, a portion of the profits will be sent to Enron's creditors. Enron itself is now out of the business.

Dubya shot them out of the saddle on that one, although there is still a chance that Kyoto could be implemented by much of the rest of the world.

Not entirely. It was a crooked scam from the get go designed as a wealth transfer scheme with the return on investment going only to the agents.

Before I read this article about how Ken Lay was plotting to sell out his country for 30 pieces of silver, I had almost allowed Rush to convince me that Ken Lay was an honest man. If this story by Bob Novak is true, then Ken Lay is nothing short of a traitor.

He has put his own personal greed ahead of loyalty to his country. Kyoto is nothing but a scam to deprive Americans workers of their hard-earned income and transfer it to corrupt 3rd world dictatorships, with a big cut going to opportunist middleman companies like Enron and Shell Oil who have endorsed the Kyoto Protocol.

The middle man between them was former Sen. Timothy Wirth, an environmentalist who is now president of Ted Turner's billion-dollar United Nations Foundation.

Try out this quote from former Senator Tim Wirth:

"What we've got to do in energy conservation is to try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
--Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO), 1988

Wirth presently heads Ted Turners $1,000,000,000 UN fund to reduce human population growth.

These people are liars and they are corrupt. They want to steal our money and our way of life.

BARF.

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