Posted on 04/25/2002 1:41:15 PM PDT by xsysmgr
Christopher C. Horner is a Senior Fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute.The Washington Post first reported internal memos revealing that the vocal "global warming" movement and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol were fruit of a stealthy and extensive corporate lobbying campaign. The ringleader? Enron (surprise!). The memos disclosed that "green" groups were courted, funded and even created to spread the gospel that man is killing the planet by burning fossil fuels, a malady Enron offered to mitigate through its natural gas, windmill and solar ventures.
Now similar schemes, cloaking issues in green to garner political influence and economic advantage, are arising in the market for fueling America's automobility.
In California, which excluded coal from its electricity mix thus leading to its embarrassing, expensive, and dangerous summer of 2001, corporate interests are seeking to exploit green values to set a heightened, specific requirement for a particular gasoline additive, notwithstanding its well-documented environmental (and economic) downsides.
Incredibly, California's legislature again is lending a helping hand.
The Post's initial revelation of the corporate-funded Kyoto campaign involved a torrent of internal memos, including Enron's dictation of the need and content for an international treaty restricting energy use emissions. Among them was the 1996 internal Enron memo which included the sub-heading: "Making sure there is a treaty," detailing high-level meetings with Clinton administration officials. Oval Office meetings followed soon thereafter.
Enron's chief "warming" salesman, John Palmisano, provided a damning post-Kyoto assessment in another internal memo, in which he wrote: "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 memo went on that the Kyoto deal was "exactly what I have been lobbying for," "it seems like we won," "again, we won," and "another victory for us". It closed: "This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!"
Well, Enron, for obvious reasons doesn't have the clout it used to. But riding in the "global warming" wake it helped create, the ethanol lobby is riding on, led by the all-time political influence and corporate pork king, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).
Sniffing the potential of what wooed legislators and regulators can award them but actual competition never would provide, this special interest appears to have scored big in California. And it smacks of Enron's exposed campaign of fronting "green" groups to fuel its greedy agenda.
In the waning hours of the recently concluded legislative session, the Assembly passed AB 1058. That bill required California's Air Resources Board to adopt regulations yielding the "maximum feasible" reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from passenger cars and trucks. CO2 is a naturally occurring gas. A small percentage (approximately .03) of the world's total is produced by releasing fossil-based energy through combustion.
The principal component of human breath, CO2 is also consumed by plants to produce oxygen. As such it obviously has no ill human health effects as long as, like with any ambient gas, you don't try breathing it exclusively. It does, however, pose tremendous business opportunities for new, high cost boutique fuels. But because of their higher energy costs, which hit seniors and the poor particularly hard, related fuel interests appreciate environmental claims such as "catastrophic global warming" being accepted. Hence industry's stealth green campaigns. There is a lot of money to be made by making the world a poorer place through energy suppression policies.
And that's where ethanol, the highly toxic gasoline additive derived from corn, comes into play.
Ethanol has serious fuel performance, production, logistical, and price problems dwarfing even those of the demonized MTBE. According to a 1994 affidavit sworn and filed in federal litigation, then-California Secretary of Environment Don Strock said that by "[a]dding ethanol to gasoline … the State would suffer increases in ozone, particulate matter, oxides of nitrogen (NOx), and a loss of carbon monoxide (CO) emission reduction benefits."
No objective environmental assessment of ethanol supports its use.
Yet, the California Senate is poised to consider the "climate" legislation desired by the ethanol lobby, currently rushing it through committees. Until cars requiring no hydrocarbons become "feasible" (quite possibly never), AB 1058 would seemingly require that gasoline contain a hefty dose of the "oxygenate" produced from corn.
Why? Well, according to energy trade reporters in California, those wacky ethanol boys are up to their "ears" in this.
As bad as the corporate scheming is the environmental groups that stand behind the effort. According to the Associated Press, a group calling itself Bluewater Network is this bill's green face. Who are they? Well, Bluewater is a self-described "project of the Earth Island Institute" (EII). And as some readers may recall, EII on its website dismissed overly mourning the 9/11 tragedies in this fashion: "The majority of the victims were, unfortunately, working for the Pentagon and various elements of multinational financial empires." Bet you never knew those people deserved it.
It is time that legislators and regulators stop adopting fashionable eco-scare campaigns, until they at least learn what interests are actually behind each one. There is a good reason elected citizens, not corporate CEOs, make policy.
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It was elected citizen officials, and the bureaucrats they appointed, who got us into each of these messes to begin with. So while I agree with many of the points of this article, its central premise is bogus.
What an entire pantload of pure unadulterated bogus crapola/payola... Judas H. Priest!!!
Can this country be saved? Please Lord, put these people out of misery.
Their only joy... is to annoy!!!
Allow me to rearrange this in the correct order:
Businesses do not always win. In fact, they usually lose. That's why many are leaving the country to set up shop elsewhere.
They know but simply sell out for the campaign money in California.
I don't buy it. In fact, the big guys often lobby FOR the regulation to put their competition out of business (see nuclear). The CARB is loaded with industry lobbyists, which is why we still have MTBE. So it is with the Board of Forestry (Simpson). So is with the Water Quality Control Board (big Ag and real estate).
The reason industry didn't leave in the past was the threat of political instability or nationalization. Now they go for the cheap labor and non-existent regulation abroad without a care and cash in on their residual domestic holdings, by manipulating currencies, real estate, raw material prices... They don't seem to be hurting for it and appear to be fond of clothing themselves as internationalists and thumbing their noses at America, that is until it is time to shed blood to save thier sorry asses. Have you ever considered that the public guarantee of their safe conduct through military power is a subsidy and that they are therefore winning, not losing?
That's what it looks like to me.
Bluewater Network is a subsidiary of Earth Island Institute, IIRC a David Brower spinoff of Friends of the Earth, a spinoff of the Sierra Club. These lobbying groups and lawsuit shops have so many subsidiaries it's impossible to track them all.
You're saying that businesses are leaving because of the very regulations they paid politicians to pass.
I know you don't hold businesses in high regard, but they are not that stupid.
Not only was Enron big in the US in natural gas fired combustion turbines it was also big in developing them in India, Africa and other places (remember the Clinton Administration Trade missions?).
Yes this is a good and timely article, but probably will not make the evening TV news on the commercial channels.
Yes I am. They make money on it both ways and explained how. You either don't get it or are playing the readers here as dumb.
I know you don't hold businesses in high regard, but they are not that stupid.
That's crap, and you know it. What I don't hold in high regard is corporations using government to control resources for a profit. That's fascism. Government should not own land or control its use. Government should not be in the risk management business. Business shouldn't be paying politicians to limit their liability setting minimum standards of compliance. That's how we got airplanes flying into buildings.
Why would I propose a free market in regulatory enterprise if I didn't hold free enterprise in high regard? I have worked with and in nearly all levels of industry and you know that too. I especially appreciate entrepreneurs, product creators, and skilled technical labor. I am not a big fan of skilled players of an illegitimate game.
What I don't appreciate is lobbyists writing legislation, tax cheats funding green lawsuits, bureaucrats of any kind, asset manipulators and lawyers bankrupting multigenerational landowners, dealmakers pushing around foreign governments and then expecting soldiers to die to protect them, or bankers screwing the poor with currency manipulation and selling out this country and our freedom in the process. That's not free enterprise. It's using the power of government to steal wealth from the people.
If you don't understand how it works, read the book.
Source: Common Dreams.
Published on Saturday, December 22, 2001 by Counterpunch
Enron and the Green Seal
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
The fall of Enron sounds the death knell for one of the great rackets of the past decade: green seals of approval, whereby some outfit like the Natural Resources Defense Council or the Environmental Defense Fund would issue testimonials to the enviro-conscience and selfless devotion to the public weal of corporations like Enron. These green seals of approval were part of the neoliberal pitch, that fuddy-duddy regulation should yield to modern, "market-oriented solutions" to environmental problems, which essentially means bribing corporations in the hope they'll stop their polluting malpractices. Indeed, NRDC and EDF were always the prime salesfolk of neoliberal remedies for environmental problems. In fact, NRDC was socked into the Enron lobby machine so deep you couldn't see the soles of its feet.
Here's what happened.
In 1997 high-flying Enron found itself in a pitched battle in Oregon, where it planned to acquire Portland General Electric, Oregon's largest public utility. Warning that Enron's motives were of a highly predatory nature, the staff of the state's Public Utility Commission (PUC) opposed the merger.
They warned that an Enron takeover would mean less ability to protect the environment, increased insecurity for PGE's workers and, in all likelihood, soaring prices. Other critics argued that Enron's actual plan was to cannibalize PGE, in particular its hydropower, which Enron would sell into California's energy market.
But at the very moment when such protests threatened to balk Enron of its prize, into town rode NRDC's top energy commissar, Ralph Cavanagh, Heinz environmental genius award pinned to his armor and flaunting ties to the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco-based outfit providing financial wattage for many citizen and environmental groups that work on utility and enviro issues.
Cavanagh lost no time whipping the refractory Oregon greens into line. In concert with Enron, the NRDC man put together a memo of understanding, pledging that the company would lend financial support to some of these groups' pet projects.
But Cavanagh still had some arduous politicking ahead. An OK for the merger had to come from the PUC, whose staff was adamantly opposed. So, on Valentine's Day, 1997, Cavanagh showed up at a hearing in Salem, Oregon, to plead Enron's case.
Addressing the three PUC commissioners, Cavanagh averred that this was "the first time I've ever spoken in support of a utility merger." If so, it was the quickest transition from virginity to seasoned service in the history of intellectual prostitution. Cavanagh flaunted the delights of an Enron embrace: "What we've put before you with this company is, we believe, a robust assortment of public benefits for the citizens of Oregon which would not emerge, Mr. Chairman, without the merger."
With a warble in his throat, Cavanagh moved into rhetorical high gear: "The Oregonian asks the question, 'Can you trust Enron?' On stewardship issues and public benefit issues I've dealt with this company for a decade, often in the most contentious circumstances, and the answer is, yes."
Cavanagh won the day for the Houston-based energy giant. The PUC approved the merger, and it wasn't long before the darkest suspicions of Enron's plans were vindicated. The company raised rates, tried to soak the ratepayers with the cost of its failed Trojan nuclear reactor and moved to put some of PGE's most valuable assets on the block.
Enron's motive had indeed been to get access to the hydropower of the Northwest, the cheapest in the country, and sell it into the California market, the priciest and-in part because of Cavanagh's campaigning for deregulation-a ripe energy prize awaiting exploitation.
Then, after two years, the company Cavanagh had hailed as being "engaged and motivated" put PGE up on the auction block. Pending sale of PGE, Enron has been using it as collateral for loans approved by a federal bankruptcy judge.
Enron is best known as George W. Bush's prime financial backer in his presidential quest. But it was a bipartisan purveyor of patronage: to its right, conservative Texas Senator Phil Gramm; to its left, liberal Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson-Lee (who had Enron's CEO Ken Lay as her finance chairman in a Democratic primary fight preluding her first successful Congressional bid; her Democratic opponent was Craig Washington, an anti-NAFTA maverick Democrat the Houston establishment didn't care for).
Today some House Republicans want to treat the Enron collapse as a criminal matter, while Democrats have been talking in vaguer terms about cleaning up accounting rules and plugging holes in the regulatory system. The inability of Enron's employees to sell company stock from their 401(k)s while high-ups absconded with millions may doom Bush's promised onslaught on Social Security. There are many morals in Enron's collapse, and the role of that green seal of approval should not be forgotten.
This is the kind of crap that happens when government gets control of private property. How could an average voter know enough to hold any politician accountable for a maze like this? Where do voters go in a two-party system when both sides are dirty? Is politics supposed to be a question of which side is more guilty of crimes? Just because it has been going on for 175 years makes it legitimate? It certainly isn't constitutional. WOULD THE GAME EXIST IF SOMEONE WEREN'T PAYING FOR IT, DOG GONE? Why do they pay for it?
They pay for it because they are banking upon the speculation that it is more profitable and predictable than honest competition. That's not free enterprise, it's fascism; and please spare me the claim that the NRDC is an entity that is adverse to the fossil fuel business! If you don't know better than that, maybe you should ask Mr. Rokefeller's boy, Bryson for a job so that he can show you the ropes. Now, maybe he'll succeed and maybe he won't. But I'll bet you that Ken Lay never sees the inside of a jail cell, those Grand Cayman banks he and his sponsors laundered money through won't sell him out, and someone will pick up his game where he left off for pennies on the dollar, perhaps even with Mr. Lay as an expensive consultant.
And don't get me started on the meat packers, Soros, and Western grazing regulations under the BLM. Then there's that little gambit by Tyson in the aquaculture business. You did know that he has major investments in farming salmon, didn't you DG? He's working with Glen Spain funding salmon bycatch research. You remember Mr. Spain, don't you? Now why would he be doing that? You do know that he's moving his chicken operation to South America too?
To the streets, Carrie. Start shutting things down.
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