Money may not be able to buy happiness, but Charles and David Koch, billionaire brothers who made their fortune in fossil fuels, think a million will buy the overturn of California’s 2006 law, AB 32.
This law, also called the Global Warming Solutions Act, is essentially a renewable portfolio standard, or RPS, calling for 33 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2020. It also calls for mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, or GHGs, an addendum adopted in December of 2007 and likely the one most troubling to the Koch brothers and their henchmen (for lack of a better word).
The Koch brothers are legendary in some parts of the nation. In Minnesota, for example, they are remembered by old-timers for their Rosemount refinery. Today, expansion has delivered Koch Industries (chain, twine and fasteners), a larger refinery (crude oil to diesel and gasoline), Koch Pipeline, a fertilizer division, a coal supply division in Duluth, and a former Georgia Pacific wood products supplier (also in Duluth).
Koch bought Georgia Pacific in 2005, thus making it the largest private company in the U.S., with a reported $98 billion in yearly revenues. This would place it at number 16 on the Fortune 500 if it were publicly held, and makes the Koch brothers the third richest individuals in America, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
That money runs politics, at least in the U.S., is evident every time we have an election, and it belabors the point and confuses the issue to get into fringe-group politics, like the Tea Party movement, which Joe Romm has already covered so thoroughly.
Suffice to say that Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank which applauds itself for supposedly aligning mainstream America with free-market philosophy. In fact, Cato’s support of such “egalitarian” policies as cutting Social Security, extending corporate tax cuts, and letting Nature fend for itself, have put more and more Americans under the dual onus of rising poverty and increasing illness from pollution.
David Koch’s grassroots pressure group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), pretends to align itself with populist causes like health care reform, but in fact its aim is to block passage of any form of carbon emissions regulation (particularly cap-and-trade, or Waxman-Markey), and prevent any reform in union pension reporting.
But before we get completely off-topic, let’s return to California and the Koch push to undermine AB 32 with Prop 23, a bill proponents are calling, “The California Jobs Initiative”.
The title, which is a prime example of Republican doublespeak, suggests that a vote for Prop 23 is a vote for jobs, the one thing California needs almost as badly as financing.
An independent audit by UC Berkeley (Center for Law, Energy & Environment) suggests exactly the opposite; that Prop 23 would reduce California revenue, forestall clean energy jobs (one of the fastest-growing sectors in U.S. employment during this recession), slow California’ push to reduce climate change and GHGs, and create legal uncertainty by blurring formerly precise deadlines establishing climate cleanup mandates.
In March, Greenpeace called Koch Industries a “kingpin” among (climate science) deniers, reportedly giving more to anti-climate change organizations than even ExxonMobil. At almost the same time, the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) called them one of the top ten among 100 global air polluters (the top five are Bayer Group, ExxonMobil, Sunoco, DuPont, and Arcelor Mittal).
Other Koch-funded groups include the Heritage Foundation – founded by infamous right-winger Joseph Coors and called by SourceWatch a “New Right” think tank. Heritage also has ties to the Mellon banking and industrial conglomerate.
In all, the Koch brothers – under the guise of their industries – fund almost 20 groups who stand to the right (or diametrically opposed) to American ideals of social and environmental justice, tolerance, and prosperity for all. These include the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Goldwater Institute.
Sometimes a name does say it all.
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