On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Europe’s potential political merger, the ten year anniversary of Enron’s collapse, and evidence the American private sector has been dying since the 1960’s.

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These two headlines from today’s Global Warming Policy Foundation update ought to finally shake some sense into any of the many US companies pushing for our involvement in the Kyoto debacle. That’s a demand invented by Enron (greenies, I was in the room, don’t bother), and I particularly recall DuPont’s rep whining like a child to the US representative about their being denied the right to cash in, at a State Department briefing at one global confab I attended in 2002.

This is particularly true on the heels of the experience of Coca Cola and Unocal with the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act, under which they were sued to pay for the actions of a government in whose country they operated.

Specifically, news reports indicate that:

“Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against ‘global warming,’ a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism.

The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the ‘carbon credits’ on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers…

Villagers told of how armed ‘security forces’ stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.

‘We were in church,’ recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. ‘I heard bullets being shot into the air.’

‘Cars were coming with police,’ Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. ‘They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.’

‘But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming,’ reports the New York Times.”

To beat some too-typical greens to their punch, no, this is not what happens when one introduces “market mechanisms” into environmental schemes.

The only armed goons I’ve read about under our Clean Air Act, with its cap-and-trade scheme (designed quite differently, to keep the price of coal-fired energy affordable, not make it “necessarily skyrocket”) came from EPA.

This is what happens with the UN running things.

And of course, as the UN’s own lead economist on these issues, Ottmar Edenhofer has acknowledged, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore”; no, instead, “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

For a detailed treatment of how one line in the Judiciary Act of 1789 would be abused to imperil our industries while chilling international investment — when the real problem is the UN and its scheming little UN schemes — see my paper expanding on a discussion originally written for the Federalist Society, both of which are available here.

Keep these things in mind as you hear the usual green hysteria and demands in the run-up to November’s annual Kyoto negotiating session, this year’s “last chance to save humanity (or at least schemers’ schemes) in Durban, South Africa.

Then at Rio’s World Environment Summit in June, during our presidential campaign, which State Department officials privately insist Barack Obama will not attend, even as other heads of government do.

Mmm. This is “Rio-plus 20”, celebrating the 1992 confab where the ‘global governance’ gang ultimately behind the present massacre first roped us into the Kyoto process. As I recall, the president at the time also said he wouldn’t go. And that fella didn’t even promise to reverse the oceans’ rise (which the oceans have decided to do for themselves, incidentally, unless a mere inauguration and some crushing rules in the pipeline were enough to do the trick).

Don’t just say no to statist, global governance-types and rent-seeking companies trying to tie us down into these regimes promising to transfer them power and wealth, and secure markets for phony commodities and uneconomic goods where none would exist, and otherwise pick your pocket at the further cost of eroding our liberties. Say no, and let everyone know why.

But here we go again. Today, T. Boone Pickens went on the air with Bloomberg and proved way too much about his latest great idea — on the heels of also pushing the global warming agenda, specifically a national windmill mandate — to mandate a market for his huge natural gas investments (windmills generally don’t work so require a gas plant to be built for ‘backup’. Windmill mandates failed, politically, but he had a backup ready there, too).

This is, naturally, a backdoor for the climate agenda. As Christine Todd Whitman recently and precisely admitted about the whole ‘clean energy’ Plan B, incidentally, in defending President Obama from Al Gore’s barbs.

His next Pickens Plan is at root a cash or clunkers scheme gone stark raving mad.  And remember, this was considered less appealing than a windmill mandate. It seeks to force the transport sector onto natural gas where that is not in fact economic. Hence the big ol’, new government scheme a la ethanol and wind and solar subsidies and preferences, and the mélange of ethanol subsidies and mandates which it more closely resembles.  Requiring, e.g., auto dealers to float not five grand or so but up to $64,000 per vehicle, to ultimately be paid back by you and I, it is little wonder Pickens thought a windmill mandate was the less-bad bet.

T. Boone is of course not alone among gas interests to have bet big and come up short on the global warming agenda, seeking to scare people into allowing the state to for all intents and purposes regulate coal, our most abundant energy supply, out of existence.

Another is Chesapeake Energy, which rushed into the embrace of Chinese financiers recently to keep the lights on, so big was its bet on getting the ‘climate’ agenda adopted by now. Having bought a television network, started an ‘environmentalist’ group, and otherwise replicated Enron’s failed lobbying agenda to impose this regime, today we read how they just doubled down.

So Chesapeake’s CEO, Aubrey McClendon, and Pickens are increasingly desperate. Which brings us to today’s interview. Pickens, proving yet again that crony capitalists among all people need media flacks to keep them from what we call a ‘gaffe’ in Washington — uttering the truth about your agenda. As transcribed by E&E News PM (subscription required) :

“They do much better if you have cheap natural gas,” Pickens said of Charles and David Koch, the two brothers who steer the privately held company. Charging that Charles Koch declined to discuss the natural gas bill with him, Pickens added: “He does not want natural gas prices to move up. Charles Koch is working for Koch and Boone Pickens is working for America.”

Oh, those awful men, preferring an abundant commodity reflect a market-based price without artificial, state-created price spikes! But still, what a moment: Pickens (oh, yes, and his colleague: George Soros) is arguing for higher gas prices. Which is good for America. Or at least for Pickens and Soros. And maybe you are too dumb to think otherwise; after all, a bunch of politicians fell for it.

Now, the only reason others ‘do much better if you have cheap natural gas’ — like the chemical, fertilizer, agriculture, plastics and other industries which use natural gas as a feedstock…and the odd American consumer or business that purchases the output of such industries…which collectively do sound quite a bit like ‘America’ — is because it makes them economically healthier. Pish posh.

Like so many on Wall Street and elsewhere confused the end of their world with the end of the world, Pickens is convinced (maybe) that what would benefit him would be a boon for us. Even if it means a) massive debt to fund a scheme, b) designed to cause energy prices to increase. But he ought to learn to keep quiet about it. I mean, the things that I am told he says are pretty disturbing.

Hubris, thy name is Boone. I’m no fan of media handlers. But, boy, do some people need them.

This campaign takes the form of a bill embraced by ostensible fiscal hawks, causing an uproar and enabling the media to describe the Republicans ‘circular firing squad’, of a base taking umbrage at Members abandoning their pledges of fiscal sobriety at the drop of a billionaire’s phone call. Well played, gentlemen.

The vehicle was not Pickens’ first choice. His first choice was a windmill mandate, transparently pushed by a handful of gas interests, including Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, to put a green hat on their efforts to use the state to displace coal’s market (one of McClendon’s group’s first television ads stated up front, “more wind means more gas”: windmills don’t work that often, so they need ‘backup’ to run wastefully all the time, cycling up and down, and for various reasons inevitably this means gas-fired electricity).

Coal was difficult to budge, what with centuries of it domestically, so some gas folks have been helping the greens’ war against coal for about two decades. This is their latest foray.

And, astroturfers, please hold the mail. I happened to be in the room in 1997 with the American Gas Association, BP, and Enron as they worked with green pressure groups, as radical as the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as more mainstream, anti-coal activists like NRDC, to get a global warming treaty and a domestic cap-and-trade scheme. I couldn’t believe my ears and said so, which in a matter of weeks led to us parting ways.

When Pickens was pitching his Plan A in a particular off-the-record meting a few years ago, I congratulated him on discovering my old boss Ken Lay’s business plan: he had some gas interests, bought a bunch of windmills on the cheap because they aren’t economic investments, then set about to use his lobbying muscle to make them — not economic, but as President Obama says over and over — “the profitable kind of energy”.

The windmill mandate belly flopped. So Pickens unloaded his windmills and reached up another sleeve. It entails keeping his conservative friends close, and the left-wing pressure groups even closer. All of which is fine, except the nominal conservatives going along with it.

Now, the argument goes, we have lots of natural gas domestically so, with oil at a high price we should move transportation onto natural gas; although this cannot happen without robbing taxpayer Peter to pay gassy Paul, according to anyone cited in the WSJ article.

Of course, we also have vast quantities of oil, likely all of it recoverable at a per-barrel price around half of where it stands today. So that’s not really much of an argument for such wrenching, expensive, uneconomic intervention, now is it?

But this is the sort of advocacy that bad ideas are forced to employ. As my CEI colleague Myron Ebell wrote:

Why are billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies needed?  According to T. Boone Pickens’s web site, it’s because natural gas vehicles are cheaper to operate than gasoline or diesel vehicles:  “Even with higher initial costs (which will disappear as manufacturing ramps up) the life-cycle costs of NGVs [natural gas vehicles] are significantly lower.  Fuel costs are at least 15 percent less using natural gas rather than gasoline or diesel.”

So people need to be paid in order to make them want to buy vehicles that will save them money.  Yes, that makes sense: I always prefer the more expensive product unless there is a government rebate for the cheaper one.

Given all of this, we have three takeaways from today’s Journal piece.

First, here is the chart of countries this idea seeks to have us be more like.

Message: be more like Third-World countries. But for Italy, which has long directed nearby North African gas into its economy, no other OECD country is big into this old idea. I know that history of saying “look at Spain” didn’t work out to well about the windmills, but countries without oil, like, say, über-green Germany, aren’t on the list. Why?

Second, the article acknowledges these countries have been doing this for a long time. And they all still operate as a government program because it is not economic.

Yet the pull-quote gives us the $5-$9 Billion Quote of the Day: “T. Boone Pickens on subsidies for natural-gas truckers: The government should provide five years of subsidies, ‘and then get the hell out of it.  It flies by then, or it’s a bad idea.’”

Yeah. Once you build a subsidy, and the constituencies dependent upon it, even if it doesn’t work Washington is pretty good about letting it expire. It hasn’t worked anywhere with decades of support. A clever man, Mr. Pickens.

Finally, the story admits that this very scheme was one of the ’stimulus’ schemes. Mr. Pickens is calling for the ’stimulus’ to continue, for his investments in the uneconomic, for 5 more years.

Stimulus. Subsidy. Can’t say it too many times. That’s what this is. Republicans, wise up.

Give it a minute. Then hold that thought.

Last week, to optically set the stage for Tuesday night’s rhetorical pitch for more big government to prop up certain favored losers called the ‘clean energy economy’, President Obama teamed with his BFF — and big-time lobbyist for/vendor to massively increased government mandates — CEO Jeff Immelt of GE for a photo-op at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY.

GE makes a gas turbine there, several of which it has signed a contract for sale to India. So that made a very good backdrop, if for a very confused message.

The logic goes something like this: GE makes renewable energy gizmos, manufacturing jobs for which Obama wants to create here by mandating markets for and otherwise propping them up with taxpayer dollars. Therefore, GE’s economic, non-mandated, efficiency-enhancing fossil fuel turbine is evidence that energy technology innovations are possible and therefore the federal government ought to mandate all sorts of uneconomic ‘renewable’ efficiency killers.

Which reminds us of Enron-style arrogance.

Apparently our president is convinced that all he need do is offer poll-tested, trendy buzzwords ‘clean energy’ and the American public will flock to his policies, no matter how flea-bitten, like Wall Street to a ’90s IPO using the word ‘internet’. But the economic folly of mandating people use more expensive, vastly less efficient energy sources is probably a tougher sell today, even if draped in lots of ‘jobs’ talk as is this pitch.

Obama’s choice of dance partner for his photo-op made more sense. There are reasons Immelt has said things like “We’re all Democrats now”, and “The government has moved in next door, and it ain’t leaving. You could fight it if you want, but society wants change. And government is not going away”. These reasons are GE’s ‘renewables’ gadgets produced in anticipation of certain policies it also lobbies aggressively for because, well, without government coercion there is no market for them.

GE’s wish-list nicely parallels Obama’s proposals to mandate, coerce and underwrite them into use through taxpayer-funded wealth transfers.

Obama’s stagecraft actually proved far too much. No ‘renewable’ mandate makes us use, makes GE manufacture, or makes the Indians buy the fossil turbine whose innovation, construction and export Obama will recite again as proof of the fact that energy technology innovations are possible and that therefore the federal government ought to mandate all sorts of things.

But he cannot escape how the chosen prop was not some uneconomic political icon singled out for taxpayer largesse. Remember, Obama praised it as something for export to India, a nation notoriously exempt from and disinterested in Kyoto-style energy rationing policies.

Innovations and improvements in efficiency like this turbine are what businesses pursue (unless distracted by federal programs encouraging them to instead divert their capital to guaranteed returns no matter how old the technology, like windmills and solar panels). Obama’s policies call for forcing less efficient boondoggles into the economy. One has nothing to do with the other. The only tie binding the turbine and renewables is Obama’s openly admitted war on coal.

Further exposing Obama’s logic, this turbine, his prop, was not something invented because it was mandated here in the U.S.A.; that is important because Obama’s argument is also that if we are to become a leader in developing something for export then, well, we had better federally mandate its use here. This is nonsensical. The Chinese aren’t making less expensive windmills and solar panels — the real target of Obama’s wealth transfers — because they’ve mandated them; they haven’t. China makes them cheaper because they don’t mandate them, so it is not an uneconomic location for manufacturing things. That China makes them at all is because other countries mandate them.

If the developed world abandoned its ‘renewables’ foolishness, you would see China’s wind and solar industries vaporize. They are playing us. Don’t begrudge them that. But don’t enable it any further, either.

And it is equally absurd to argue (as Senate point-man John Kerry expressly does) that if we don’t want to import all of our supply of windmills and solar panels then we had better mandate and otherwise prop-up their use. Wha? The answer to that fear is to not mandate them. Poof! There goes the worry about importing our windmills and solar panels from China. And, again, with it those parasitic industries preying on our folly which are then ironically and cynically cited as evidence that we must dig deeper on the mandates and subsidies! Sigh.

Obama could have chosen to stand in front of a windmill or solar panel. Instead, he chose a non-mandated, economic, efficiency enhancing and actually innovative product — none of which describe windmills and solar panels. He thereby undermined his inevitable State of the Union call for more wealth transfers to prop up windmills and solar panels.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama’s SOTU themes will be ‘competitiveness’ and ‘investment’, “daring Republicans to resist his push for new spending in areas that he will call vital to the nation’s future [like his preferred...] infrastructure, science and energy”. He demands we be competitive in the uneconomic, calls for innovation in the old and for the taxpayer to ‘invest’ in things that can’t find investors enough to stay afloat. In a country where the Snuggie and Vince the Sham-Wow guy find investors and markets.

What a humiliation that windmills and solar panels can’t. Here’s to hoping that even in Washington, neither can this absurd call to dive further down the rabbit hole of ‘renewable’ energy.

In fact, this case was not entirely uncommon in that the entire enterprise was Paul’s idea to begin with. Which left me as the guy on the street corner muttering about this evil company cooking up money-making charades, to nothing but rolled eyes until the, ah, unpleasantness and the opportunity it afforded to take a few gratuitous swings at George W. Bush. Buy me a beer and I will regale you with tales of reporters from Newsweek and the Washington Post desperately seeking assistance to spin, respectively, Enron as having urged Bush away from the Kyoto agenda as opposed to having crafted it, and Enron’s global warming activism as its one redeeming feature.

The basic truth is that Enron, joined by other ‘rent-seeking’ industries — making one’s fortune from policy favors from buddies in government, the cultivation of whom was a key business strategy — cobbled their business plan around ‘global warming’. Enron bought, on the cheap of course, the world’s largest windmill company (now GE Wind), the world’s second-largest solar panel interest (now BP), to join their world’s second-largest natural gas pipeline network. The former two will only make money under a system of massive mandates and subsidies (and taxes to pay for them); the latter would prosper spectacularly if this war on coal succeeded.

It then engaged green groups to scare people toward accepting those policies. That is what is known as a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. I sat in on such meetings. Disgraceful.

Flashing forward in time, these companies’ flagship agenda item, cap-and-trade, has passed on to its final resting place. But the global warming industry presses on, joining President Obama in his call to find “other ways  to skin that cat” (an inventory of which is found here).

Addressing such taxpayer-funded boondoggles bestowed by pals in government, Holman Jenkins has an item in Wednesday’s WSJ bringing readers’ attention to the substantive issues providing context for a prurient email scandal unfolding in Indiana. This involves cozy relations between Duke Energy and a state regulator cum Duke Energy executive, himself also briefly tenured thanks to said email revelations.

The following excerpt should remind us not only of the juvenile ‘inevitability’ canard employed (by people like Duke’s Jim Rogers, a former Enron VP under Ken Lay who took the business plan to Cinergy and now Duke) to weaken what little principled opposition to cap-and-trade, etc., remained within the regulated community. But also it should remind us of the folly of rent-seeking businessmen thinking they can finally be the ones to ride the political tiger of climate politics and not end up inside with the rest:

Hovering over all is Duke’s Edwardsport coal-gasification plant, whose high-tech white elephanthood is a direct product of Mr. Rogers’s attempt to position his company to prosper in the age of climate politics.

The plant, which is nearly $1 billion over budget, was always destined to mean higher prices for consumers compared to the low-tech coal plants it would replace. But it was sold to the locals as supplying not just electricity but a “clean coal” future for Indiana’s “dirty” coal-mining industry. More to the point, the plant’s economics were supposed to be rescued when Congress passed cap and trade, dramatically hiking costs for traditional coal power plants.

Mr. Rogers here was betting on Mr. Rogers, the closest thing to a celebrity CEO in the utility business, profiled in the New York Times magazine two years ago as a “green coal baron.” No executive has lobbied as noisily or consistently for a national price on carbon output. His wish seemed certain to come true after both major parties nominated climate worrywarts in the 2008 presidential contest.

But something about a 9.8% national unemployment rate has now made politicians less keen on imposing higher utility bills. Nor did Mr. Rogers count on what we’ll boldly call the public’s growing sophistication about climate science. Where the public was once prepared to believe in a pending climate meltdown because “scientists” said so, now it entertains the possibility that “scientists” are human, capable of mistaking theory for fact, of confusing belief with knowledge.

Back in July 2007 I wrote:

Now, this post also prompts me to remember a telephone call I received from a White House aide the night in December 2006 that incoming chair of the Senate Environment Committee Barbara Boxer supposedly broke it to Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers that no, he shouldn’t now expect a cap-n-tax bill to reward his loyal support with billions in rents. It seemed that the issue was too important to have against Bush, and for ‘08 [NB: unless, implausibly, climate warrior John McCain somehow won the Republican nod], ….

She, apparently like the New York Times now, saw it as more important to have the issue than the law. The greens got wind of this, however – Rogers, so my caller said, was beside himself and ringing everyone in town he could in outrage, so it was hard not to get wind of it – and demanded what proved to be the Boxer-led disastrous vote last summer in which the bill had to be pulled from the floor in a matter of hours.

It does appear that Rogers and Duke have made a habit of picking the wrong horse to bet on, all arising from their decision to build a business plan around, and then lobby for, energy scarcity. Sticking with principle is usually a better bet. Finally, as we learn of more windmill and solar panel billions in Obama’s latest ’stimulus’, here’s to hoping the next Congress actually rolls this agenda back.

In fact — as I learned regarding Enron’s and BP’s pet projects, “carbon cap-and-trade” and related ‘green jobs’ schemes all designed to make uneconomic investments in windmills etc. pay off — sometimes the entire enterprise is Paul’s idea.

So it is that we see with deep pocketed gents now scrambling to protect their bets on uneconomic investments and rent-seeking schemes, by supporting the campaign to defeat Proposition 23 in California. Prop 23 would delay California’s climatically meaningless but economically suicidal state-level adoption of Kyoto agenda, called AB 32. Oddly, there is no condemnation of these bags of money being thrown at killing a ballot initiative, despite the opprobrium heaped upon those few who have dared venture in to help the “Yes” campaign.

This is a shame, for the question Cui bono? is so readily answered simply by scanning the growing list of those digging deep to make sure the ‘green’ gravy train of wealth transfers isn’t derailed (regardless of the fairly obvious economic consequences if they are successful, which in a rational world would be of great interest to a watchdog press).

Things are heating up in Cali, as we see with a Forbes blog post about some lefty billionaires — that would be the ‘good’ kind of billionaires to the uninitiated — picking up on this more detailed Grist item from last week. Both offer some insight about who stands to gain if the political class defeats the electorate’s uprising in the form of Prop 23.

That is to say, we see whose beaks just might have been wetted by AB 32, bizarrely hailed as a ‘world’s first’ greenhouse gas and ‘green economy’ law notwithstanding the train wrecks of similar plans piling up around us where the scheme has already belly-flopped. It should come as no surprise that these examples hail from throughout Europe’s more profligate basket cases like Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

From the Grist piece:

“Over the past few days, the No forces have collected $5 million from venture capitalists, New York financiers, renewable energy companies, and other deep-pocketed backers, according to California Secretary of State records….

Of course, Texas oil companies Tesoro and Valero and the billionaire Koch brothers, who earlier contributed $1 million to the Yes effort, could drop $10 million on the campaign tomorrow. But there appears to be a fundraising enthusiasm gap between the campaigns during the home stretch sprint to Election Day.

Take a look at the growing roster of No partisans willing to put their money where their mouths are — not to mention their self-interest.

Ann Doerr, the wife of leading Silicon Valley capitalist John Doerr, gave $1 million to the No campaign on Thursday while her husband contributed $500,000 (in addition to the half million dollars he previously donated). Thomas Steyer, founder of the Farallon Capital Management hedge fund and co-chair of the No on 23 effort, put another $2.5 million into the campaign. San Francisco venture capitalist Paul Klingenstein contributed $100,000.

On the other coast, New York hedge fund manager Julian Robertson of Tiger Management kicked in half a million dollars on Thursday.

Renewable energy companies stepped to the plate as well. The U.S. division of Spanish wind giant Iberdrola Renewables gave $25,000; Santa Monica-based Solar Reserve, a developer of solar power plants, pitched in $50,000; and Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg contributed $10,000.

The Consumers Union, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, and Working Assets also gave a collective $100,000 over the past week.”

The fear-mongering about what could happen is de rigueur in such contexts, but also note these latter parties cited, who remind us that this fashionable spin on central planning is coincidentally catnip to statists and ideologues. Also see, for example, the venture-cap guy Steyer whose website touts his “Core Investment Strategies“, one of which is “Value Investments“, which according to him means “securities …which are expected to appreciate in value due to a catalyzing event or a change in circumstances, including regulatory or legislative change, changing business models, …”.

All of which screams out that he’s probably, like the other deep pockets rushing to the rescue, putting his money where his money already is (yes, I’ve screenshot it). Someone might ask him if he’s ever had $5 million pay off like he’s hoping this $5 million will.

And now greenie trade press outlet Climate Wire reports that those seeking to keep the voters from taking this mismanaged issue from the political class have a 2-to-1 funding advantage. Oddly, this is precisely the opposite of the long-running story line employed to demonize citizen activism.

Regardless, these late-hour outbursts of panic that California’s newest stab at central planning might get scuttled does put a little more perspective on the cries that monied interests oppose it.

What they don’t want to discuss is that the “Yes on 23 campaign” has every appearance of having originated as a grassroots effort to delay a scheme that is proving a disaster everywhere it is tried. Which, of course, is why no one opposing Prop 23 is telling you to look at the successes elsewhere; but instead sputtering ‘world’s first’-type fibs.

So, as the opponents of Prop 23 have been shrilly claiming in lieu of substantive argument, people who might have money at stake support it, so you know it must be sinister. Peter, meet Paul, and goose, meet gander.