Author: admin

This week, Kochs Off Campus!, a grassroots organization of faculty members and alumni at the University of Arizona and local Tucson residents, staged aday of action to highlight the encroachment of corporate influences on public institutions and public educational facilities in Arizona.

The event, co-hosted by Unkoch My Campus and held on Tuesday, October 28, focused on “state capture” through education, highlighting how billionaires and corporations attempt to use their donations to academic institutions to advance their private interests.

Continue reading “Faculty and Alumni Demand that University of Arizona Kick Koch Money Off Campus”

Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, is receiving credit for launching a COVID-19 relief fund, as he urged a “distinctly American response” of private charity — and not public benefits — to address this deadly pandemic.

Koch kickstarted the fund with a $5 million contribution, pocket change for a man who runs the second largest privately held corporation in the country, which makes about $5 million every twenty minutes.

His “distinctly American response” is not for the government to do more but for a billionaire to solicit help from Americans who make far less: his contribution amounts to 0.000125 of his net worth of roughly $40 billion, about the equivalent of a $5 donation for someone who makes $40,000 a year.

Continue reading “Op-ed: Charles Koch’s Radical Free Market Ideology Is Not a Symptom of America’s Disastrous Response to COVID-19. It’s a Cause.”

Billionaire libertarian activist and oil industry tycoon David Koch died on Friday, leaving a toxic legacy that includes helping birth the climate denial movement, fighting against regulations that protect worker and public health, and—critical to our work here—helping fund and coordinate a decades-long attack on clean energy and low carbon energy solutions. We will leave the mourning to his family and friends, and the condemning to those who were immediately impacted by his efforts—a massive group, considering the far-reaching impacts of climate change, which are already being felt across all continents and latitudes.

Billionaire industrialist David Koch is dead.

He deployed his stupendous fortune funding climate denial in the years when the science was clear and there was still time to avert catastrophic warming. He died as fires raged from the Amazon to the Arctic.https://t.co/edFPH7DC0P

— Alexander Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) August 23, 2019

On KochvsClean, our focus is on the Koch network’s ongoing efforts to stall the spread of clean energy and the decarbonization of the global economy. And those efforts will be wholly unchanged by David Koch’s passing. Continue reading “On David Koch’s Passing and the Koch Network’s Ongoing War on Clean Energy”

The Koch network and their oil industry allies have launched an all-out offensive on the electric vehicle tax credit. This effort applies the same tactics as the Koch network’s broader campaign to undermine public and political support for electric cars, directing them acutely at the tax credit.  Continue reading “Koch Attacks on the Electric Vehicle Tax Credit, Explained”

Yesterday, during the House Committee on Natural Resources’  hearing on “Climate Change: Impacts and the Need to Act,” Representatives heard about the threats that climate change poses to the safety, prosperity, and general well-being of Americans, and particularly to marginalized communities of color. Multiple experts testified on environmental and climate justice issues. However, one of the Republicans’ experts, Derrick Hollie of Reaching America, told a dramatically different story, attempting to argue that climate-friendly policies actually harm low income and minority communities.

During the hearing, Hollie did not disclose his organization’s involvement in multiple campaigns funded by the oil and gas industries.

Continue reading “Big Oil Ally Derrick Hollie Dismisses Environmental Justice, Promotes Natural Gas, at House Climate Hearing”

This morning, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, published an op-ed in Fox News, arguing for an end to the federal electric vehicle (EV) tax credit and a new “annual highway user fee for alternative-fuel vehicles.”

Barrasso, who has cashed more money from Koch Industries in the 2018 election cycle than all but two senators, and has taken in $45,400 from Koch Industries from 2013 to 2018, introduced a bill last October that would immediately amend the tax code to terminate the EV tax credit and calculate a new annual user fee for drivers of cars that aren’t powered by gasoline or diesel. A similar bill was introduced at the same time in the House by Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady of Texas, a key Koch ally. Continue reading “Senator John Barrasso Parrots Koch Talking Points to Kill Electric Car Tax Credit”

When Koch Industries needs a study to cast doubt on the benefits of electric vehicles (EVs), where does it turn? Unsurprisingly, to an industry-funded study mill that infamously produced a key report defending the tobacco industry  that was deployed by Philip Morris in the 1990s, and which has since published studies commissioned by the LNG industry, the coal industry, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Continue reading “Koch-Commissioned Study Aims to Kill Electric Vehicle Tax Credit”