Al Gore's Inconvenient Enron - Chris Horner - Planet Gore on National Review Online

...The intervening event? An August 4, 1997 Oval Office meeting with Kenny Boy, Sir John Browne (then of BP), and the president and vice president of the United States. Let that sink in. Al Gore says he didn’t know the guy. But anyone who can even spell “Beltway” can tell you that that kind of attention requires serious influence. Ask Gordon Brown.

As revealed by the August 1, 1997 Kenny Boy briefing memo that entered the public record after the Enron unpleasantness, in this meeting Kenny Boy was to demand that the Senate be ignored, that the administration agree to Kyoto, and — most important — that it contain a cap-and-trade scheme.

I know where “advice and consent” is in the Constitution. I’m not so sure where Ken Lay and Sir John Browne are, probably in the back with all of the scary stuff. Anyway, you know who won.

So, in tossing things back to Gore to finally answer the question, I leave you with key excerpts from the “what I did in Kyoto” memo by Lay’s Kyoto aide (yep, he had one), John Palmissano, hailing Enron’s success:

* “This treaty [Kyoto] is exactly what I have been lobbying for.”
* “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”
* “Enron now has excellent credentials with many 'green' interests including Greenpeace, [World Wildlife Fund], [Natural Resources Defense Council], German Watch, the U.S. Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI . . . ”
* “This position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monitized) [sic].”
* “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.”