Climate Criminals: Charles and David Koch
The Kochs are a 20th century petrochemical family that has grown into a conglomerate, owning over 20 businesses, and operating hundreds of facilities in over 50 countries globally, including four oil refineries and 4,000 miles of pipelines across the United States. But it isn’t just their legacy of exploiting loopholes in the Clean Air and Water Acts or the hundreds of millions of metric tonnes of CO2 that they pump into the atmosphere that earned them a place on this list. It is the extensive political and lobbying machine that the Koch brothers hid behind for decades that qualifies them as climate criminals; through their bloated political influence, the Koch brothers disrupted—and continue to disrupt—countless climate change policies in order to protect the fossil fuel industry (and their individual interests).
As early as 1991, the Kochs were actively trying to sow skepticism about the science of climate change; in 1991, the Kochs Cato Institute held a seminar in Washington titled “Global Environmental Crises: Science or Politics?” The seminar was heavily attended by heavyweights in President Bush’s administration including John H. Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff, and fellow climate criminal.
Between 1997-2018, the Koch conglomerate spent over $145 million financing 90 different groups that attack climate change science and lobby against policy solutions. But most of these donations could not be connected to the Kochs because they make donations through their always-growing list of organizations and foundations. For example, the Koch brothers didn’t create the Tea Party, but they founded and funded Americans for Prosperity—the conservative political advocacy group most responsible for giving the Tea Party its shape. Through the Americans for Prosperity organization, the Kochs would organize Tea Party rallies in Republican districts, provide buses and boxed lunches to rallies, and encourage protestors to bring up specific issues at town halls or campaign events. Climate change denial was one of the first galvanizing issues that the Koch brothers used to incite Tea Party activism.
In an effort to target the 2009-2010 Waxman-Markey bill—legislation aimed at creating clean energy jobs, reducing GHG emissions, and transitioning to a clean energy economy—Charles Koch convinced Republicans and Libertarians that this clean energy bill was one of the biggest threats to ever face America’s democracy. In reality, what was actually threatened was the Koch brothers’ profit margins. The Kochs viewed the Waxman-Markey bill as the first domino in the fossil fuel apocalypse that would end their decades-long reign, and they were especially concerned about the “cap and trade” portion of the legislation.
Cap and trade would limit—or cap—the amount of greenhouse gasses corporations could emit but would allow them to buy and sell—or trade—permits to generate more emissions through a newly created market. It was a bill that passed the House of Representatives in 2009 without issue, but it died on the Senate floor with explosive pushback from Republican constituents and legislators. And the majority of that pushback was generated by the Koch brothers, acting behind the mask of their Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
To create the political reality that would kill the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, the Kochs utilized something called an echo chamber. It started with the Kochs’ lobbying office hiring a conservative economic think tank to write a report about how damaging the Waxman-Markey bill would be for the American economy, and then it paid another lobbying group to “sponsor” that report even though Koch was paying for it. This performative sponsorship allowed Koch to hide their financial involvement of the report. In August 2009, The American Council for Capital Formation released their Waxman-Markey report that estimated the bill “would destroy 2.4 million jobs between 2012 and 2030…[and] that electricity prices would jump 50 percent by 2030, while $3.1 trillion in economic activity would be lost” (Leonard, 447-448).
After the study was published, it was then promoted by the Institute for Energy Research, a conservative think tank with financial connections to Koch Industries. After that promotion, the study was then “recycled by another Koch Industries-affiliated think tank…the American Energy Alliance…headed by a former Koch Industries lobbyist…who remained in close contact with his former colleagues at Koch’s lobbying shop” (Leonard 449). The American Energy Alliance created radio and TV ads that communicated the highlights of the Koch-sponsored report about the bill’s failures and targeted specific Republican Senators who had expressed support for the cap and trade program.
These ads and protests that Koch was secretly sponsoring caught Republican legislators’ attention while simultaneously amplifying constituent frustration with the cap and trade bill. Thanks to the echo chamber generated by Koch’s expansive political machine, public outcry over the Waxman-Markey bill seemed louder and more widespread than it actually was. That’s not to say that Koch’s efforts in making the public question the science of climate change was ineffective. According to a Pew Research Center poll, in 2006, 77% of Americans believed that there was strong evidence that global warming was real; by late 2009, at the height of Koch’s disinformation campaign within the nascent Tea Party, that number dropped to 57%.
In November of 2009, the Koch-sponsored report about the Waxman-Markey bill made it to the Senate floor in an official capacity. The Senate Finance Committee invited Margo Thorning, senior vice president of the American Council for Capital Formation—the Koch-hired think tank that authored the original report—to testify about the economic effects of climate change and clean energy. Her unsurprising and Koch-sponsored suggestion to the Senate: to kill the anti-job Waxman-Markey bill and instead “expand access to onshore and offshore [oil] reserves…and…accelerate our research on carbon capture and storage so that we can burn our vast supplies of coal without negatively impacting job growth.” Thanks to the Kochs’ lobbying efforts, the Waxman-Markey bill, a bill that could have provided meaningful policy to cap emissions, was never voted on in the Senate; it died an uneventful death in 2010.
Koch’s political reach didn’t end with the Waxman-Markey bill, however. In 2009 and 2010, Koch began positioning Republican candidates to challenge legislators who hadn’t or wouldn’t protect Koch’s free market goals; “Koch’s chosen candidates attacked the incumbents from the right, claiming that the Republican Party was insufficiently conservative and too accommodating of the Obama agenda. The overwhelming message was that compromise with Democrats must end” (Leonard, 452). As Koch positioned and supported Tea Party candidates in Congressional primaries all over the country, Republican lawmakers in Washington were starting to understand that “one wrong step could expose them to fierce competition” with a heavily resourced Koch-backed candidate. They were getting the message that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they would keep Koch Industries happy.
While David Koch died in 2019, effectively avoiding the climate chaos that is his legacy, Charles Koch and Koch industries are still one of the biggest donors to conservative interests and the fossil fuel industry. However, the need for dark money donations hidden in enormous political networks is no longer necessary. In a post Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission world, corporations and individuals are allowed to donate as much money as they want to political campaigns and lobbyists. But the Citizens United vs. FEC case was another political reality that started in Charles Koch’s imagination and continues to change the landscape of American politics and continues to make climate change policy more difficult to pass. Koch’s influence on today’s partisan and corporatist political landscape—a landscape that is actively designing an unlivable future—cannot be overstated.
Sources:
Christopher Leonard’s Kochland: The Secret History of Koch’s Industry and Corporate Power in America.
“Climate Change Legislation: Considerations for Future Jobs” Hearing Before the Committee on Finance, 111th Congress, November 10, 2009. https://www.congress.gov/111/chrg/CHRG-111shrg65632/CHRG-111shrg65632.pdf
