Duke Energy

The top engineer of Walmart’s strategy to pursue left-wing priorities such as “sustainability” and backing Obamacare, as though those are what genuinely reflect “corporate responsibility,” is leaving.

Leslie Dach joined the Bentonville, Ark. retail behemoth seven years ago as vice president of corporate affairs. He previously worked for environmentally extreme groups and was “active as a senior strategist in Democrat politics,” according to his World Resources Institute bio. He worked in the Clinton administration, served as a senior adviser for Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, and has been a top strategist for at least two Democratic conventions. He helped design the 2004 Boston convention and managed the Democrat response to the Republican convention that year, and is credited with managing the program at the convention in Los Angeles four years earlier.

Now that he’s been forced out as chairman and CEO of Duke Energy, James Rogers is apparently looking for something else to do, and may now be more receptive to the idea of becoming President Obama’s next Secretary of Energy.

The new speculation, primarily from the Charlotte Business Journal, which is based in Duke’s home city, arose following an interview that Rogers did with Bloomberg News while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Whereas Rogers used to routinely dismiss suggestions that he might be up for a cabinet post, when asked this time by Bloomberg reporter Tom Keene what he would bring to the job if the president asked him to serve, he was unhesitant.

A data center in western North Carolina built by Apple, Inc. has now doubled the size of its associated power-generating fuel cell facility, one which in April NLPC reported was a conflict of interest for Apple director and former Vice President Al Gore.

Major technology companies such as Google, Facebook and eBay build these massive server farms to support services such as cloud computing, but in an effort to pacify environmentalists about their enormous energy use, many go to great lengths to make these facilities appear “green.” They’re not.

As the North Carolina Utilities Commission tries to make sense of the farcical events that surround its approval of the merger of Duke Energy and Progress Energy into the largest public electricity company in the nation, the deeper they dig, the dumber Duke looks.

Yesterday the 6-member panel (one seat is unfilled due to political wrangling) heard from former Progress CEO Bill Johnson (pictured). Throughout the 18-month merger process the two companies proclaimed to anyone who cared – including federal regulators, utilities commissions in at least six states, and Wall Street – that Johnson would carry that role over to the combined company, while former Duke CEO James Rogers would elevate to chairman.