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Energy Tribune - Wall Street Extorts Kyoto Protocol: Lehman, Enron and other Cap-and-Trade Coincidences

Verheugen has stumbled upon the world’s second-oldest profession, that which seeks to make a fortune off of governmental policy rather than through competition. Each of us arrives at this realization on our own schedule. My eyes were opened when, having left my law firm in the late 1990s to serve as director of federal government relations for that same little energy company called Enron, I was informed that my top priority was to ensure a treaty capping (and trading) greenhouse gas emissions.

Long story short, I expressed my wonderment to headquarters, which expressed its own shock in response, and I left after a few weeks. It turned out that Enron had purchased companies on the relative cheap, which, if Enron were successful with its Kyoto gambit, would prosper – possibly even as much as they were telling Wall Street that they already were. This proved to be very typically Enron.

Of course, in internal memos, Enron famously argued that the Kyoto Protocol was “precisely what [Enron has] been lobbying for” and that “this agreement will be good for Enron stock!” Not good enough, apparently.

When Enron’s drama unfolded in 2001, the pressure group for rent-seeking businesses called the Pew Center on Global Climate Change quickly airbrushed its Web site of praise for the company, specifically Pew’s erstwhile poster boy for climate “responsibility,” Ken Lay. Lay and Enron were founders of Pew’s Business Environmental Leadership Council, a green-tinted coalition that was pushing the Kyoto agenda.

Lay was also a favorite and longtime trustee at a similar outfit known as the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment (run by John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz). An embarrassing e-mail emerged in which Heinz staff pleaded with Lay, “Simply stated, your background, expertise and experience make you uniquely qualified [to run our] global-warming [initiative].”

This was a sufficiently serious endeavor that soon after I left Enron in 1997, Lay and BP boss John Browne met in the Oval Office with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Lay’s briefing memo reveals that they clarified what Enron needed from the treaty at the upcoming December Kyoto negotiations. Just the week before, a unanimous U.S. Senate had voted instructing Clinton not to agree to the pact.

The rest is history, if often misreported. The Clinton administration disregarded the Senate and agreed to Kyoto on December 11, 1997, and signed it – yes, signed it – on November 12, 1998. Score: Lay and Browne 1, Senate 0. However, then as now, and every year in the interim, the Senate has refused to bind the U.S. to such an agreement.