"Kochland" Examines the Koch Brothers' Early, Crucial Role in Climate-Change
Denial
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
15 August 19
If there is any lingering uncertainty that the Koch brothers are the primary
sponsors of climate-change doubt in the United States, it ought to be put to
rest by the publication of Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries
and Corporate Power in America, by the business reporter Christopher
Leonard. This seven-hundred-and-four-page tome doesnt break much new
political ground, but it shows the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence
that Charles and David Koch have exerted to cripple government action on
climate change.
Leonard, who has written for Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street
Journal, devotes most of the book to an even-handed telling of how the two
brothers from Wichita, Kansas, built up Koch Industries, a privately owned
business so profitable that together they have amassed some hundred and
twenty billion dollars, a fortune larger than that of Amazons C.E.O., Jeff
Bezos, or the Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The project took Leonard more
than six years to finish and it draws on hundreds of hours of interviews,
including with Charles Koch, the C.E.O. and force without equal atop the
sprawling corporate enterprise. (David Koch retired from the firm last
year.)
While Kochland is more focussed on business than on politics, in line with
Leonards The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of Americas Food Business,
from 2014, it nonetheless adds new details about the ways in which the
brothers have leveraged their fortune to capture American politics. Leonard
shows that the Kochs political motives are both ideological, as hardcore
free-market libertarians, and self-interested, serving their
fossil-fuel-enriched bottom line. The Kochs secret sauce, as Leonard
describes it, has been a penchant for long-term planning, patience, and
flexibility; a relentless pursuit of profit; and the control that comes from
owning some eighty per cent of their business empire themselves, without
interference from stockholders or virtually anyone else.
Saying anything new about the Kochs isnt easy. The two brothers have been
extensively covered: they are the subject of Daniel Schulmans excellent
biography Sons of Wichita, from 2014, and the focus of much in-depth
investigative reporting, including a piece I wrote for The New Yorker, from
2010, and my book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind
the Rise of the Radical Right, from 2016.
Leonard, nonetheless, manages to dig up valuable new material, including
evidence of the Kochs role in perhaps the earliest known organized
conference of climate-change deniers, which gathered just as the scientific
consensus on the issue was beginning to gel. The meeting, in 1991, was
sponsored by the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank,
which the Kochs founded and heavily funded for years. As Leonard describes
it, Charles Koch and other fossil-fuel magnates sprang into action that
year, after President George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a
treaty limiting carbon emissions, a move that posed a potentially
devastating threat to the profits of Koch Industries. At the time, Bush was
not an outlier in the Republican Party. Like the Democrats, the Republicans
largely accepted the scientific consensus on climate change, reflected in
the findings of expert groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which had formed in 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Kochs key role in stopping congressional action on climate change is
well-known, but longtime environmental activists, such as Kert Davies, the
director of the Climate Investigation Center, credit Leonard with
discovering that the Kochs played an earlier and even more central role in
climate-change denial than was previously understood. In 2010, Davies
authored a report, for Greenpeace, that labelled the Kochs The Kingpins of
Denial, but he told me that he hadnt realized that their role went as far
back as 1991. (A copy of a flyer for the Cato conference can be seen at Koch
Docs, a new digital collaborative-research project, directed by the liberal
corporate watchdog Lisa Graves, which tracks the Kochs influence.)
According to Kochland, the 1991 conference was called Global
Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics? It featured many of the same
characters who have spread doubt about the reality of climate change and
continue to challenge the advisability of acting against it. Among the
speakers was Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T., who
is quoted in the brochure as saying there was very little evidence at all
that climate change would be catastrophic.
Kochland is important, Davies said, because it makes it clear that youd
have a carbon tax, or something better, today, if not for the Kochs. They
stopped anything from happening back when there was still time. The book
also documents how, in 2010, the companys lobbyists spent gobs of cash and
swarmed Congress as part of a multi-pronged effort to kill the first, and so
far the last, serious effort to place a price on carbon pollutionthe
proposed cap and trade bill. Magnifying the Kochs power was their network
of allied donors, anonymously funded shell groups, think tanks, academic
centers, and nonprofit advocacy groups, which Koch insiders referred to as
their echo chamber. Leonard also reports that the centrist think tank
Third Way quietly worked with the Kochs to push back against efforts to
renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which could have
affected their business importing oil from Canada. Frequently, and by
design, the Koch brothers involvement was all but invisible.
Others have chronicled the cap-and-trade fight well, but Leonard penetrates
the inner sanctum of the Kochs lobbying machine, showing that, from the
start, even when other parts of the company could have benefitted from an
embrace of alternative energy, Koch Industries regarded any compromise that
might reduce fossil-fuel consumption as unacceptable. Protecting its
fossil-fuel profits was, and remains, the companys top political priority.
Leonard shows that the Kochs, to achieve this end, worked to hijack the Tea
Party movement and, eventually, the Republican Party itself.
Scientists who worked for Koch Industries adopted the company line; Leonard
quotes a former company scientist, who embraced the conspiracy theory that
élites invented a global-warming hoax as a way to unite Americans against
a common enemy after the Cold War. Leonard also quotes Philip Ellender, Koch
Industries top lobbyist, as claiming, in 2014, that the Earth had gotten
cooler in the previous eighteen years. In fact, according to NASA, eighteen
of the nineteen hottest years on record have occurred in the past two
decades. Yet the Koch machine bought its way into Congress and turned
climate-change denial into an unchallengeable Republican talking point.
Meanwhile, after the cap-and-trade bill died, the planet continued heating,
and the Kochs net worth doubled.
Because the Kochs opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in 2016, many have
assumed that they are antagonistic to the Trump Administration. To the
contrary, Leonard writes, with the help of allies such as Vice-President
Mike Pence, the politics that the Kochs stoked in 2010 became the policies
that Trump enacted in 2017. Whether announcing his intention to withdraw
from the Paris climate accord, placing shills from the oil and coal
industries at the head of federal energy and environmental departments, or
slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, Trump has delivered
for the Kochs. Kochland quotes Charles Koch telling his allied political
donors, in 2018, Weve made more progress in the last five years than I had
in the previous fifty.
Leonards grasp of political details isnt always completely firm. He
describes the late Senator Arlen Specter, a moderate from Pennsylvania, as
being a conservative Republican prior to his switch to the Democratic
Party. And Leonard misconstrues the origin of the term Kochtopus, which
was coined not recently by political critics but decades ago by rival
libertarians who derided the Kochs for putting self-interest above
principle. But Kochland is deeply and authoritatively reported, and, while
it can be overly cautious in the conclusions that it draws, it marshals a
huge amount of information and uses it to help solve two enduring mysteries:
how the Kochs got so rich, and how they used that fortune to buy off
American action on climate change.
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