The Koch Family’s Climate Change Disinformation Campaigns 

credit: P. WOLMUTH/REPORT DIGITAL-REA/Redux

Apparently, the US House Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long climate change disinformation campaign.  Thus far, top executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell have testified concerning their roles.

Assuming the committee has the power to get to the bottom of all this, one wonders what’s the most we can hope for.

Suppose, for example, that it’s able to force Charles Koch, the 20th wealthiest American (net worth $58 billion) to testify about what we already know, that Koch family-controlled foundations donated more than $145 million to a network of 90 think tanks and advocacy groups from 1997 through 2018 to disparage climate science and block efforts to address climate change.

I’m not a criminal lawyer, but even if all this can be proven, I can’t imagine that Koch actually broke a law.

Big Oil apparently has stopped the overt disinformation campaigns named above, but it’s still spending a fortune in an effort to convince lawmakers and the public  that it’s working on hydrogen, biofuels, carbon sequestration, energy storage, and all kinds of other crap that has exactly zero chance of moving the needle on climate change.

Koch is still funding educational institutions on the condition that they teach libertarianism and environmental deregulation.

Let’s be honest; it’s likely that there is no way to use the law to stop these greedy pigs.  The only recourse we have is fighting lies with truth.