Proposition 23 and the Koch Kingdom

A New York Times opinion piece by Frank Rich today connects the activities of the billionaire libertarians, the Koch brothers, to the Tea Party, undermining that movement's claims to be grass-roots. An earlier magazine article by Jane Meyer, in the New Yorker last August made explicit some of the workings of their various think tanks and funding choices. The bottom line seems to be, if we believe Meyer and Rich, that these guys give millions, and likely hundreds of millions, each year to campaign against government interventions of all kinds, but especially environmental regulation.

I could care less about this, except that some of the ideas the Kochs spend millions to stifle are the most important in the world.

Most recently, they have been implicated in funding the vast Proposition 23 campaign to overturn California's energy bill, AB 34, a cap-and-trade bill not unlike RGGI here in New England.

Both Rich's and Meyer's articles, but especially Meyer's which goes into great detail, explain how the Kochs' point of view is essentially libertarian, small government, anti-interventionist. They're small businessmen who made good, became big businessmen, and now get to enjoy their money. Unfortunately, the way they enjoy it is by attacking ideas they don't agree with.

Rich and Meyer don't explain, and most of today's commentators on the Tea Party phenomenon also fail to explain, how modern political libertarianism, when it succeeds which is rarely, uses the mythology of small people and small businesses, but seems to work primarily for the further power of very large corporations. This is the irony of the Tea Party -- the beneficiaries, if any, of a swing to the libertarian right in American politics are unlikely to be the rank-and-file, self-employed, small-business types. Corporations will benefit, and not all corporations. There are plenty of corporations that stand to benefit from the green jobs agenda that is, by default, the alternative to the proposed deregulation of the Tea Party.

So excuse me if I find it ironic that the Koch's are well-heeled theoretical libertarians, while the Tea Party's supporters are vernacular libertarians, but the real ideological debate, the one that actually matters, that will actually result in change of one kind or the other if either the Koch's or Obama are successful this fall, is between a clean jobs agenda for corporate welfare and a dirty jobs agenda for corporate welfare.

But both are corporate welfare.

So it goes. How silly, that we can't see clearly the failings on both sides. When Dick Cheney wanted to study the energy problem he put together a secret team of corporate insiders from the energy industry, who came up with a nice new package of tax breaks and easier policies for themselves. Arguably, this contributed to the Gulf oil spill. The inherent failure to recognize the deadendedness of a policy based on post-peak oil also contributed to our involvement in Iraq. Massive benefits for the likes of Haliburton and Koch Industries ensued. Corporate welfare.

While Obama, who given his druthers would certainly advance climate regulation and fund green energy, seeks a cleaner, greener kind of welfare. But much as I like subsidies and other government assistance to clean energy and efficiency, it is still often corporate welfare.

If the Koch's investments were in companies like Nanosolar or Clipper Windpower, would they still be funding the campaign for Proposition 23?

So much for libertarianism. A pity, because I've always been deeply in favor of individual liberty.

I think I know who the real libertarians are, these days in the great Republic.

The real libertarians are Americans like the Mainers who call or email me in their dozens and tens of dozens each year, or that talk to me every year at the Common Ground Fair, seeking to know if a wind turbine would work on their property, or if I can explain how to build a household solar power system, or show them how to conduct an online energy audit, or solve a particularly tricky insulation problem. These folks are trying, all by themselves, without the aid of Obama or the Kochs, to move the energy economy a few more electrons or a few more barrels towards energy independence and away from climate disaster, for themselves and the country.

In doing so, they are helping move the US and the democratic west away from dependence on undemocratic, repressive, petro-states like Russia or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

The other real libertarians, and sometimes they are the same people, are the academics and ordinary people that have mastered the very complicated area of climate science, looked deeply into the future, and realized how vital it is to get greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere down.

Because there will be no better chance for either repressive corporations or repressive regimes to take over than when the planet is fully in the throes of dangerous climate change, above 2 degrees Celsius AAT increase.

I have to admit, it isn't easy to understand climate science and to project the results of that inquiry into the even more nebulous fields of economics, political economy, and national security. I've been studying these areas for nearly fifteen years now, and I've had good teachers, some of the best minds in the field, and I still can make big mistakes and jump to incorrect conclusions. I can see why it might be easier, intellectually, to opt for a simpler story, to jump to a self-satisfying conclusion.

But all that will happen if I get it wrong will be that one more professor didn't do as good a job as he should of lecturing. This would not be a good thing.

But how bad would it be?

See, I don't have the real bully pulpit that comes with being able to spend millions of dollars on promoting my favorite bugbears.

If the Koch brothers are wrong in their ideas about climate change, and yet they succeed in bringing down this influential Californian law, and bring down others that may come after it, then the USA and the democratic west in general may have a much harder job surviving the next few decades.

In the very best possible outcome, we will miss out on an opportunity to begin to shed our dependence on a source of energy that is less and less available on our own safe ground, and more and more available from land and sea that belongs to the natural enemies of liberty.

In the worst, we may trip over the threshold of a tipping point and accelerate warming, fry our agricultural regions within a few decades, melt the ice sheets in a couple hundred years, and then have to somehow weather the planetary civil war that will ensue.

And where will be the liberty in that, Messrs. Koch?

Are you sure that your ideas about these issues are the right ones?

You'd better be right. I hope you are. At the very least, I hope you're willing to take your share of responsibility if you are not.

That's the real question for all of us, isn't it, the most important scientific and policy question of all.

How sure are we that the things we think are real, really are?

Unfortunately, since both the Kochs are over seventy, they won't likely be the ones that have to deal with things if they are wrong.