With the bankruptcy of Enron and the developing scandal, people are beginning to take a closer look at the company’s political contributions and activities. One interesting development that seems to be surprising many people is that Enron has had very close ties to the environmental movement.

In particular, it turns out that Enron has been one of the biggest corporate supporters of the Kyoto Protocol. This is the U.N. treaty on global warming that would lead to laws forcing a dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and therefore energy consumption.

Over the last several years, Enron has devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbying for the U.N. treaty, supported by the Democrats and the Clinton administration but emphatically opposed by Republicans and George W. Bush. (This is in spite of Enron’s alleged cozy relationship with certain members of the Bush administration.) In 1998 Enron received the Climate Protection Award from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change for its “exemplary efforts and achievements in protecting the global climate.”

Over the years Enron has entered into joint relationships with several environmental groups, including The Natural Resource Defense Council, which is responsible for the bogus alar cancer-causing apple scare a decade ago. As recently noted by energy industry analyst Jerry Taylor writing in the Wall Street Journal, “Enron was more than willing to link hands with nearly every environmental activist that crossed its path to undertake war against America’s carbon based energy economy.”

So why would Enron be so proactively in favor of the Kyoto Protocol, becoming the Ben and Jerry’s of the energy industry? Wasn’t Enron part of the Texas-based “big energy” lobby that Bush was supposedly trying to protect by withdrawing from the treaty?

A small part of the explanation can be found in the fact that Enron has been the owner of several large wind farms, and of course alternative energy sources such as wind and solar would benefit from the restrictions and subsidies that passage of Kyoto would likely bring. But certainly wind power is not what Enron is known for, nor has it been a significant part of its business operations. The real answer can be found in one statistic. In a 1998 study by the Department of Energy, which concluded that the Kyoto treaty would cost the economy more than 4 percent of GDP and 1.4 million jobs, it was also estimated that the price of natural gas, Enron’s bread and butter, would go up by a whopping 147 percent.

Of course, the price of oil and coal would also rise, so why aren’t these industries also supporting the treaty? The burning of natural gas releases comparatively little carbon dioxide. The price of oil and coal will increase because of new taxes and regulations on their usage, the price of gas will go up because of a massive increase in demand. Electric utilities would be forced out of oil and coal and into natural gas. With passage of the Kyoto Protocol, gas usage would have increased worldwide, effecting a wealth transfer from energy customers and the oil and coal industries to natural-gas giants like Enron.

So while Enron was receiving accolades from environmental groups, many of which were benefiting from Enron’s corporate contributions, the fact is that the company’s vociferous support for the Kyoto Protocol was not about corporate responsibility but about corporate welfare. The Kyoto treaty is based on the weakest of scientific foundations. Satellite data over the last 20 years show that global warming is not occurring. Even if the science was sound, the most credible study of the treaty’s effects suggests that in 100 years the earth would be only about 14/100ths of a degree cooler.

It is likely that the leadership at Enron knew the science. It is even more likely that they knew the treaty would require the central planning of every aspect of the U.S. energy industry along with the disastrous results for the U.S. economy predicted by the Department of Energy. But that didn’t matter. The global warming treaty presented Enron with a golden opportunity to enlist the environmental movement in an attempt to use the power of regulation to squeeze its competition out of the market — proving once again that capitalists can be capitalism’s worst enemy.

Dr. Roy Cordato is vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh.