Check out today’s New York Magazine article on the second richest man in New York, and richest climate denier on the planet, David Koch:
The best pull quote is this:
Global warming could be good for the planet, Koch says. “A far greater land area will be available to produce food.”
…from this paragraph, which shows Greenpeace got his billionaire attention this spring:
David Koch is deeply antagonistic to the Obama administration. He fought the health-care bill, and the financial-regulation measure that was passed last week (“Everyone I know in the financial world is terrified by the powers it gives the federal government”). He also opposes the president’s climate-change proposals. In his office, Koch showed me a photocopied flyer Greenpeace had produced with sketches of him and Charles below the words wanted for climate crimes and shook it in the air. Koch Industries’ emissions, Koch told me, are far less than legally required. “And yet they’re attacking us as environmental criminals,” he said. “Wanting to put me and Charles in jail.” Koch says he’s not sure if global warming is caused by human activities, and at any rate, he sees the heating up of the planet as good news. Lengthened growing seasons in the northern hemisphere, he says, will make up for any trauma caused by the slow migration of people away from disappearing coastlines. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he says.
Wow. What a load of… And it goes uncontested by the NY Mag author, Andrew Goldman, who seems to write mostly “people” pieces for the magazine on Bette Midler, Martha Stewart’s daugher, Annie Leibovitz so he can’t be expected to know a big ol’ global warming lie when he hears it. But we know it’s a Dirty Lie and if you want to do something about it, please go to the article right now and call Mr. Koch out for his attempts to downplay the seriousness of global warming just so he can keep raking money in hand over fist.
Here’s a video about the Greenpeace campaign Mr. Koch was referring to:
Greenpeace issued a report on the Koch Brothers in March 2010 (Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine) and another report last week on Bill Koch, David’s twin brother who is waging a campaign to kill Cape Wind, which will be the first offshore wind farm in the nation, just because he doesn’t want to look at it from his mansion.
By the way, Greenpeace has relaunched our PolluterWatch website with profiles of all of the Kochs.
New York Magazine got trusted inside access to David Koch (who rarely gives interviews), and provides a detailed biography of the three twisted billionaire Koch brothers. Allowing the magazine such access may have been a PR attempt to do some damage control and fend off the increasing attention the Kochs are receiving for their association with Americans for Prosperity and the radical Tea Party movement. Rachel Maddow has driven this story hard for months. Koch fought back with preemptive press releases that they have nothing to do with the Tea Baggers, but it just got them more bad press on Maddow.
Its great. The Koch legacy of shrouded political action, global warming denial and free-market, anti-government, anti-regulatory radicalism is finally, slowly being dragged out into the sunlight… Accountability is a wonderful thing, especially when it involves the filthy rich.
This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.
