Enron's Dirty Deals Through the U.N.
Although the media have dubbed Enron a company sympathetic to conservative or Republican causes, it worked in collaboration with the Clinton Administration toward adoption of the United Nations' global warming treaty, also known as the Kyoto Protocol. The conservative journalists who took Enron's money, such as Bill Kristol and Larry Kudlow, should be asked about this.
The U.S. taxpayer-funded United Nations Development Program provided $10 million in the area of "climate change" to assist Enron in a scheme to develop Communist China's coal resources. China, which produces the most coal in the world, got the money for coal-bed methane projects conducted in association with Enron and Amoco back in 1997. The money was funneled through the U.N.'s Global Environment Facility.
The Enron Web site still features a press release stating that the company supports a "binding, multilateral agreement" to address climate change. Enron in 1997 gave an award to former Soviet Communist Mikhail Gorbachev, who has become a leading proponent of the global warming treaty. Gorbachev received the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
The Washington Post described some of Enron's lobbying on behalf of the treaty. Reporter Dan Morgan said Enron chairman Ken Lay, a member of President Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development, had a meeting with Clinton and Vice President Gore where he advocated an approach that an Enron memo said was "good for Enron stock." Morgan said, "Enron officials envisioned the company at the center of a new trading system, in which industries worldwide could buy and sell credits to emit carbon dioxide as part of a strategy to reduce greenhouse gases." Morgan added that Enron officials were elated with the Kyoto Protocol because it would benefit their main business - natural gas. However, the U.S. Senate and President Bush rejected that approach.
While it tried to gain an advantage for natural gas against oil and coal here in the U.S., Enron was involved in a United Nations conference to develop China's coal resources. China is exempt from the restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions in the Kyoto pact. That conference led to the $10 million deal through the U.N. Development Program.
In a column entitled, "Enron's Secret Energy Plan," Robert Novak noted that Lay's efforts on behalf of the treaty "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 middleman between them was former Senator 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."
It turns out that the U.N. Foundation and Enron jointly funded a project through a U.N. agency called the "United Nations Economic Commission for Europe." This so-called "Energy Efficiency Investment Project" was designed to facilitate economic development in the former Soviet Union.
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