The Oregonian’s one successful area of this sort of endeavor has been on matters of the environment; so far it has forestalled the only possible salvation of Columbia River salmon, Snake River dam removal, promoted the destructive and useless deepening of the Columbia River Channel, and it has gone a long way toward re-legitimizing nuclear power in the eyes of a forgetful public.  Win, win, you know?  So why not go whole hog for that absurd,  Enron-bred chimera, Liquified Natural Gas?  Why wouldn’t you transport flammable gas, expensively liquified, across the ocean where it could expensively be re-converted to gas, and piped under the property of thousands of unwilling property owners through eminent domain to people who may or may not need/want it?  As a business model, it’s hard to beat, particularly in the regulatory climate in which we find ourselves, where failures are all socialized and profits taken before they ever materialize, but c’mon, Oregonianistas….  LNG is like soooo 1999.  There’s better scams out there, now.  I guess  at the Oregonian, though, Kenny Boy Lay still lives, and the stupid idea of carrying refrigerated Sterno across the Pacific through the treacherous shoals at the mouth of the Columbia pencils out somehow.

This week, the front company designed for nothing but fleecing investors rolled up its tent, after its road show, the Bradwood Landing LNG Terminal, finally retreated from its makeshift stage under a hail of rotten vegetables.  While most people, particularly those who don’t want exploding gas pipes under their land, looked askance at such a cockamamie idea, the Oregonian thought this baby was pure gold, and my only wish is that they owned shares, so they could put their money where there mouths have been.  You see, ever since Enron’s ridiculous and immediately mothballed India plants made a mockery of the entire notion of LNG, and the two other heavily subsidized West Coast ports have failed to see any business, anyone deeply involved in LNG has been tossed under Ayn Rand’s bus, but the Oregonian maintains, to this day, that that’s because hippies must have been driving it that day.

Although the company’s withdrawal of the proposal (for indolence on the part of Bradwood’s hucksters, among other things) occurred just a day before the inevitable bankruptcy of the sham firm touting it, the Oregonian somhow decided that it wasn’t the Free Market, but rather that Oregon is run by a bunch of radical environmentalists too busy doing bong rips and making sand candles to faithfully expedite the March of Progress.

Bizarre, far-fetched crony capitalist deals that trash the planet and make no sense economically can never fail, they can only be failed.  I read it in the Oregonian.