The central claim of Charles Koch’s new book, "Good Profit," launched just today, is that the secret of success in business is “creating value for others,” citing the example of his own company, Koch Industries, supplying fossil fuels to energize economies.
Privatizing profits from dirty energy are precisely what made possible today’s $102 billion fortune shared by Charles and his brother, David (by comparison, Bill Gates $82 billion), although socializing the catastrophic costs of climate change caused by burning carbon-based fuels are conveniently excluded from Koch’s conceptual chicanery.
What Koch ignores is that inherent in using fossil fuels are the carbon emissions that scientific consensus concludes are causing a rapid rise in the Earth’s temperatures, setting off a series of ruinous reactions from melting icecaps, surging sea levels, record rainfall, deepening droughts, and widespread wildfires, among other dramatic disruptions.
Even Koch’s own climate skeptics concluded in two years ago that human’s carbon emissions are contributing to global warming, yet Charles continues to willfully ignore such evidence as recently as last month’s exclusive interview in Forbes.
Koch currently outspends all other oil companies to oppose policies to cut carbon use and stop solutions to the climate crisis. Koch Industries aims to monetize its massive tar sands assets in Alberta, Canada, where Koch has more oil-rich acreage than Exxon, Chevron, and Conoco combined.
The Koch Brothers’ behavior shows that if people can exploit what unique capabilities they possess that “create value,” then they can ignore any disastrous side effects provided they wield their wealth to manipulate the political process and rig the rules in their own favor.
In the case of Koch, that means funding an influence network that denies climate science and elects like-minded candidates who delay and derail any regulation or pricing of carbon.
"Good Profit" is poised to become human history’s epic example of capitalist propaganda by the person perhaps most responsible for polluting our planet beyond repair due to systematically stopping solutions to today’s spiraling climate crisis.