Billionaires funding climate change denial

April 17, 2010
Issue 

The article below is an excerpt from a March 2010 Greenpeace report entitled Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, published in March 2010 by Greenpeace. The full report can be read here.

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Most Americans have never heard of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the country, because it has no Koch-branded consumer products, sells no shares on the stock market and has few of the disclosure requirements of a public company.

However, it is now playing a quiet but dominant role in a high-profile national policy debate on global warming. Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.

This private, out-of-sight corporation is now a partner to ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other donors that support organisations and front-groups opposing progressive clean energy and climate policy.

From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent US$8.9 million, while the Koch Industries controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organisations of the "climate denial machine".

Charles and David Koch, brothers who own the corporation and control its political spending, are two of the top 10 richest people in the United States.

Kansas-based Koch Industries is a conglomerate dominated by petroleum and chemical interests with approximately $100 billion in annual sales and operations in nearly 60 countries.

Koch Industries has been ranked as the first- or second-largest privately-held company in the US in recent years, currently ranked second behind Cargill corporation.

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