HST Friday...Requiem For A Koch Bro.

NonDenialDenialsFlowingThrough
TheWarmedUpBigMuddyVille


From the latest in a long line of posts on the subject of climate at the very fine Fraser Institute website by Patrick Murphy dated August 16, 2019:

...(A)s Canada’s political parties rollout their climate plans for the federal election in October, I’m here to report to Canadians that many of the extreme policy ideas you’re hearing will do more harm than the climate change they are meant to prevent.

For example, consider the popular idea of limiting cumulative global warming to (at most) two degrees Celsius or (if possible) 1.5 degrees Celsius. These targets have become so mainstream that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report last fall advising governments on various policies that could give humanity a shot at hitting the 1.5 degree target.

But according to the most reputable work on the topic, achieving that target would cause far more harm than benefit...


Anyway.

One of the world's most wealthy and vocal climate change deniers, Mr. David Koch, died today.

Ryan Cooper explains how hard Mr. Koch worked to get the great unwashed to ignore the climate thing in The Week:

David Koch, one of the two infamous billionaire Koch brothers, died Friday at the age of 79. The Wall Street Journal is quick to point out that, in addition funding a vast conservative political network, Koch gave about $1.3 billion of his nearly-$60 billion fortune to various philanthropies. But what Koch may ultimately be most remembered for is helping to seed the climate-change denial movement in the 1990s. Indeed, David Koch was one of the most powerful people in the world over the last three or so decades, and he did his level best to stymie any effort to stop the biggest threat to human society.

The Kochs' place in funding climate denial is covered well in the recent book Kochland by Christopher Leonard. They were big funders of a key 1991 Cato Institute conference, which mobilized furiously after President George H.W. Bush announced he would support a climate change treaty. They went on to spend gargantuan sums boosting up the handful of credentialed scientists who deny climate change, funding climate-denying "think tanks" and publications, donating to climate-denying politicians (and refusing money to those who don't), and so on...


And it turns out that Mr. Koch and his brother did not just give money to American think tanks of a certain bent.

Beth Hong had that story in the (then) Vancouver Observer way back in 2012:

"The Fraser Institute, Canada's leading right-wing think tank, received over $4.3 million in the last decade from eight major American foundations including the most powerful players in oil and pharmaceuticals, The Vancouver Observer has learned.

In May, it was found that the US oil billionaire Koch brothers gave the Fraser Institute half a million dollars since 2007..."


And, as of this year, DeSmog Blog and Greenpeace estimate that the new number is approaching $1.5 million.

So.

Why, exactly, do the super wealthy go out of their way to fund super fine institutes that, in my opinion, often do their level best to get the serfs to ignore reality such that said serfs can then be convinced to act in their own worst interests?

Well...

I think the good Docktor may have figured out the mind state of such folks and their relationship to the serfs who live 'beneath them' while travelling through South America a long, long time ago, in 1963.

Back then Hunter Thompson toiled not for Jann Wenner but instead for a very different National Observer than the one we know today:

"...One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club - a five-iron, if memory serves - driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Columbia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call 'a stylish pot' instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.

He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor anyone else on the terrrace that day had the vaguest idea.....Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling down on the roofs - golf balls, 'old practice duds,' so the Britisher told me, that were 'hardly worth driving away'...


OK?



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Weirdly, the version of the 'National Observer' that the young Mr. Thompson worked for did/does not employ Sandy Garossino....Ironically, HST's NatO was owned by the then parent company of the now Koch friendly Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones & Company...Imagine that!
Back when I was a young trouble(ish) maker, my friends and I invented a slightly gonzoish pursuit called 'punk golf'. The goal was not to get the ball in the hole with the fewest number of strokes. Instead, the idea was to get it the thing down in the least amount of time... There was no waiting around for the guy who was away to hit first...It was all running, swinging and ducking for cover all of which made for a whole lot of divot making...For the record, we never played it on the declasse public course where we were junior members for 50 bucks a year if you get my drift...And, ya, you read that $50 number right...
Photo at the top of the post is from a most entertaining piece by Terry McDonnell in Esquire about playing golf with Thompson and George Plimpton, on acid, in Aspen in the year that Orwell broke...


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