By now, it’s no big secret that fossil fuel corporations funded the billion dollar disinformation campaigns of the last 40 years, sowing the seeds of climate denial. But these sprawling disinformation campaigns had the support of so many organizations and companies, it becomes hard to pinpoint the person in the driver’s seat. But in many respects, public relations professional and author E. Bruce Harrison designed and steered the climate change denial campaigns that shaped the political and ecological landscape where we currently live. E. Bruce Harrison is considered the father of greenwashing. In fact, he wrote the book on it—2 books actually: Going Green: How to Communicate Your Company’s Environmental Commitment (1993) and Corporate Greening 2.0 (2008).

Since Descartes had no concept of greenhouse gas emissions or global warming while he was writing his famous Meditations, it is unlikely that he could predict our current ecological crisis. He was writing one hundred years before the invention of the steam engine and two hundred years before the combustion engine. But if you conceptualize the issue of climate change as a single entity, you would find René Descartes’ philosophy in the deepest roots of today’s ecological crisis. 

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.