Besides
spending fortunes to
deprive people of
health care, Koch and his repugnant sibling made their living by spewing
pollution,
cancer, and a host of
other ailmentsinto often poor communities. Their hostility to government regulation and insistence on unsafe working conditions led them to
kill and maim workers and bystanders alike, such as the two Texas teenagers blown up by a defective Koch pipeline that led the Kochs to pay one of the largest wrongful death judgments in US history. It may be impossible to quantify exactly the damage done by the Kochs’ right-wing network, but the “welfare reform” of the ’90s alone
shortened lifespans.
But even this repellent legacy is dwarfed by Koch and his brother’s singular contribution to the climate crisis. It is the darkest of ironies that the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s wing dedicated to the story of human evolution is named after Koch, given that, other than his brother, arguably no single individual has done more to try to shut the book on that story than Koch.
We’ve known for a good while that the Koch network has been funding and fuelling climate denial and inaction by the government for decades, in concert with the growth of the Kochs’ own fossil fuel-based profits. Thanks to the release of Christopher Leonard’s
Kochland last week, we now also know they were
on the ground floor of the fight to ensure human extinction, spreading climate denial and working against political action on the subject as early as 1991, when the world still could have embarked on a gradual transition away from fossil fuels.
And as the climate crisis became ever more visible and tangible in recent years, did Koch and his brother put the unimaginably colossal wealth they’d amassed from poisoning people and killing the earth toward undoing the damage they’d caused? No, they
used it to
kill public transit projects at the local level because these threatened Koch Industries’ bottom line, further hamstringing future efforts to prevent planetary catastrophe. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, evil doesn’t even begin to describe this.
...
Koch’s death itself doesn’t matter much either; it simply means he’s been able to parachute out of the plane whose engine he sabotaged. But it’s a powerful symbol. It comes only a week after we learned the full scale of the Kochs’ role in spreading climate denial, and amid a truly terrifying weeks-long inferno ravaging the Amazon rainforest under Jair Bolsonaro, easily the greatest threat to global security right now.
...
We can only hope that whatever hell David Koch has gone to, it resembles the one to which he spent his entire life trying to condemn the rest of us. But ultimately, this isn’t about Koch or any of his abominable family. The only reason the Kochs have been able to do what they’ve done — just as the only reason
Jeffrey Epstein was able to commit
his crimes — is because of the colossal wealth they were allowed to hoard, which they parlayed into political power that they then used to set the world on the path to crisis. And if we don’t deal with this fundamental fact, there will always be more Kochs, more Epsteins, and all the other depraved elites who would happily commit us to extinction if it means another dollar.
