Koch Industries
We’re really starting off with a bang here. In 2019, Koch Industries posted a video on Facebook celebrating its company’s “pollution prevention practices.” (The video was technically for International Earth Day, which is in March, not U.S. Earth Day, but the irony is so dark that we’re gonna let it get the top spot anyway.) In the video, shots of a family exploring a beautiful forest by a lake are set to up-tempo music, with title cards celebrating the strides that the manufacturing giant has made in eliminating production-related “waste” from its facilities (no specifics on what kind of “waste” the company is talking about here).
“You love the Earth,” the video’s title cards read. “So do we.” Okay!
The chairman of Koch Industries is Charles Koch, who, along with his late brother David, used some of the fortune earned from his family’s company to become heavily involved in right-wing activism. The Koch brothers are perhaps the two people who have most significantly shaped the climate denial machine of the past two decades, spending billions of dollars over two decades funding dark money groups that deliberately delayed climate action and promoted fossil fuel interests.
Strangely enough, none of that is mentioned in the video. Loving the Earth by spending millions so that fossil fuel companies can keep polluting sure is a weird flex, though.
