A new biography reveals the Koch brothers' very early role in creating organized climate denial

The Koch brothers are quite an enigma: on the one hand, they owe their vast fortune to extremely long-range planning: Charles Koch is famously contemptuous of entrepreneurs who take their companies public, believing that the public markets insist on such short timescales that they undermine real growth; and he grew his father's hydrocarbon empire by investing heavily in automation systems with extremely long amortization schedules.

But cutting against this commitment to a hyper-rationalist, long-range thinking is the brothers' slavish devotion to neoliberal orthodoxy and a reflexive, irrational phobia of state intervention, despite that fact that states are often an important long-range counterforce to the short-termism of the markets.

Where these two forces collide, the results are bizarre: the application of the Kochs' long-term thinking to heading off any kind of long-term planning by states.

Nowhere is this more manifest than in the Kochs' overt and covert campaign against climate science, whose rationalist, empirical conclusion is that urgent, coordinated, non-market action is a hard requirement to avert a catastrophe that could result in the extinction of the human species (which would also result in significant falls in the Kochs' fortunes). There is no rational version of long-range thinking that says that climate denial will produce a good outcome; the majority of climate denial is centered around the kind of short-termism that Koch deplores, where the returns to capital over a couple quarters are more important than the long-term ruination of firms, enterprises (and civilizations).

In Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, veteran investigative business journalist Christopher Leonard delivers a deep (700+ page) look at the Kochs, revealing newly unearthed evidence of the Kochs' involvement in the very earliest stirrings of organized, corporate climate denial campaigns, providing the black money for the first climate denial events and publications. Read the rest