doodledee

Today, Timothy Belden, a former top dog energy trader at Enron, pled guilty in federal court to charges of wire fraud. I'm no lawyer, so I don't understand all the legal mumbo-jumbo, but I'm pretty sure it all boils down to him admitting that Enron screwed the state of California. The screwing included such sneaky things as:

• Telling California state authorities that Enron would be sending more energy than Enron knew the state's transmission lines could handle. As a result, the state had to turn down energy that Enron was charging them for. In many cases, Enron never actually had the energy, but they sold it anyway, knowing California wouldn't be able to buy it even if they wanted to. Sneaky and risky, eh?
• Circumventing California's energy price controls by shipping local energy out of the state before selling it back to them. Out-of-state energy wasn't subjected to the same price controls. Get it out of state, raise the price, sell it back. Sneaky.

There's tons more stuff like this, but right away you can tell this dude is a straight-up jackhole. He and many of his colleagues cheated the system and the people of California out of billions and billions of dollars. That's probably why California is suing a group of energy producers for $9B.

But I'm still confused.

Back when the energy crisis was ragin', people were convinced that energy deregulation in California was the driver for the huge price increases and the rolling blackouts. Naturally, un-deregulating quickly became the popular side of the fence to be on. Now, 2 years later, it's more than obvious that jerks working at Enron, Dynergy, etc. acted amorally and [most likely] illegally and in effect created the energy crisis. Yet strangely, un-deregulation remains as popular an idea as ever.

Why not just fix the problems with the rules of deregulation? Why not close the loopholes and throw the cheaters in jail? What's wrong with consumer choice again? What's wrong with smallish alternative energy producers getting in on the action? Why are we so attached to oil and natural gas?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?