The Grenfell Tower fire is a tragedy that should not be something we have to address. It is not something Carbon Brief should have to fact check. But here we are.
As Carbon Brief explains, The Daily Mail and other conservative outlets have pushed a theory that the fire was due to insulation installed primarily to meet green goals for reducing energy use.
This is false. Per Carbon Brief, savings on utility bills was the primary reason for the insulation upgrades, not pro-environment regulations.
But even the dozens of lives lost aren’t enough to stop some using tragedy to advance the Koch’s anti-regulatory agenda.
Enter Megan McArdle, a Bloomberg View columnist who thought it’d be a good idea to “‘well yeah but” a literal towering inferno.” McArdle’s subhead reveals why people are aghast at the heartlessness of her piece: “Perhaps safety rules could have saved some residents. But at what cost to others' lives? There's always a trade-off.”
Don’t bother reading the rest--it’s not worth the time or headache. But do remember this callous indifference to human life next time she writes a defense of Exxon or condemnation of climate “alarmists.”
Also remember that McArdle’s views are probably never going to differ from those of the Koch brothers, for a number of reasons. While she’’s been a columnist for a while at respectable outlets like Bloomberg and even the left-leaning Atlantic, her Koch-nections run deep.
For one, she’s married to Peter Suderman, who, before becoming features editor at Koch-funded Reason Magazine, worked for the Koch’s Freedomworks and CEI. We’ll give McArdle the benefit of the doubt that her husband’s paycheck has nothing to do with her opinions and is only an unusual coincidence.
However, a look at McArdle’s professional history shows significant Koch influence. A media transparency outfit called the SHAME Project took some time to track McArdle’s connections to the Kochs over the course of her career. The outfit itself appears (admittedly) somewhat sketchy and out-of-date, but they’ve collected an impressively in-depth list of McArdle’s conflicts of interest with plenty of legitimate-looking citations, beginning with her training at the Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies journalism program, to which she returned in 2011 as a guest lecturer and instructor. The SHAME page points out that McArdle is also a frequent attendee and moderator of Koch-network events, including her duties MCing the 50th anniversary of the Institute for Humane Studies, and was praised by them for her work “re-branding the Republican party.”
To get back on topic, one need not look far for a refutation of this particular example of anti-regulatory ideology. In fact, you can stay within the Koch operative world to find it! Michael Bastasch, just 48 hours after writing a post about how the fires were fueled by green energy rules, wrote that the US is unlikely to see a fire like this.
The reason? Bastasch doesn’t say it outright, but he does paraphrase a fire expert who said that the “U.S. localities have developed strict fire safety testing programs and building codes to mitigate fire risks.”
In other words: regulations.
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