Koch Industries, the private company of the billionaire Koch brothers, is one of the primary sources of carbon pollution in the United States. However, the actual emissions profile of the diversified giant, with its oil and gas, chemicals, cattle, forestry, and synthetics holdings, is unknown, because of the lack of mandatory carbon reporting in the United States. Furthermore, Koch is exempt from the risk disclosures that are standard for public corporations. The financial status of Koch Industries is similarly clouded in secret, with only vague statements of annual revenue around $100 billion and the Forbes estimates of the principals’ extraordinary wealth. Charles and David Koch have directed many millions of their shared $43 billion net worth into a vast propaganda machine denying the threat of global warming pollution, corrupting American politics to permit their pollution-based enterprise to continue.

Below, the Wonk Room makes some estimates of the Koch Industries carbon footprint, based on the pollution generated by its activities and from the use of the products it sells:

The Koch Industries Carbon Footprint Is About 300 Million Tons. With the assumption that Koch has a carbon intensity on the order of oil majors such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, each billion dollars of revenue corresponds to 2 to 4 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases. Therefore, each year, Koch Industries is likely responsible for about 300 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution every year. Flint Hills Resources, Koch’s refining subsidiary, processes 300 million barrels of oil a year. This one company — with its refining, pipeline, chemical, fertilizer, cattle, and forestry operations — is involved in up to five percent of the entire United States 7-gigaton carbon footprint.

Koch Climate Denial Is Dirty Self Interest. The virulence of the Koch brothers’ opposition to climate policy — to anything that would make polluters instead of society pay for the cost of their pollution — is purely a matter of self-interest. The immense profitability of their carbon holdings depends on their freedom to pollute without consequence — a toxic freedom they have sold to the American public, and particularly the Tea Party faithful organized by the various Koch front groups, as inherent to the American dream. If their pollution was fairly priced in a free-market system such as the cap-and-trade markets the Koch successfully demonized in Washington (but failed in their attempt to do so in California), the Kochs would be facing costs of anywhere from $1 billion to $40 billion a year. Spending well less than $1 billion a year on their political and philanthropic activities, the Kochs have made a brilliant investment to defend their killer business model.

The Carbon Liability Of The Kochs Is Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars. Over the lifetime of the Koch Industries, as it has grown from a $100 million enterprise built on oil refining in Stalinist Russia to one of the largest private companies in the world, its cumulative carbon footprint rivals that of most nations. Experts estimate that the social cost of carbon — the true cost to society of global warming pollution — is between $30 and $300 per ton of carbon dioxide. The potential liability the Kochs face for having knowingly destabilized the global climate system — and funded a propaganda network to prevent political action to end their pollution — represents practically the whole of their wealth.

Charles And David Koch Each Have A Carbon Footprint Of 100 Million Tons. The average American has a carbon footprint of 19 tons of carbon dioxide a year — much greater than the European average of 9 tons, the Chinese average of 5 tons, or India’s annual average of 1.4 tons of carbon dioxide per person. However, the annual carbon footprint of the Charles and David Koch is on the order of 100 million tons of carbon dioxide each. Just as their personal wealth is staggeringly greater than that of the average American, so is their damage to this planet.

Koch’s carbon pollution is inherent to its business model, putting them in direct opposition to people who care about preserving God’s creation and their children’s future.

Food prices were driven up by extreme weather and high oil prices

UPDATE: See “Expert consensus grows on contribution of record high food prices to Middle East unrest” and my ongoing series on “food insecurity.”  Get daily updates on climate and energy by clicking here.

Political unrest has broken out in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab countries. Social media and governmental policies are getting most of the credit for spurring the turmoil, but there’s another factor at play.

Many of the people protesting are also angry about dramatic price hikes for basic foodstuffs, such as rice, cereals, cooking oil and sugar.

That’s from the NPR story today, “Rising Food Prices Can Topple Governments, Too.”

This summer’s extreme global weather raised fears of a “Coming Food Crisis,” as CAP’s John D. Podesta and Jake Caldwell warned in Foreign Policy:  “Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse.”  Earlier this month I discussed how, in fact, “Extreme weather events helped drive food prices to record highs.”  Back then, experts were worried about food riots.  Now they are happening.

UPDATE:  The anti-science, pro-pollution crowd are going flat-earth over this post because I point out that leading political experts say the Middle East rioting is driven in part by the dramatic rise in food prices, which the agricultural experts say is driven in large part by oil prices and the extreme weather we’ve seen in the last few months.  Of course, the climate science experts have been saying for a while now that the extreme weather is driven in large part by human emissions — see Terrific ABC News story: “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming” and Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.”  See also Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” — NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”  I have some more comments on this at the end, but the analysis as written here stands.

The Washington Post reported on the connection between food prices and Tunisian  violence in mid-January, in a piece headlined, “Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence”:

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Our guest blogger is Pete Altman, in an NRDC Switchboard repost.

Let’s get straight to the point. When members of Congress choose to support bills that would prevent the EPA from updating Clean Air Act standards, they are making a choice to support polluters over the health of children and adults in America. Some of these bills will increase the amount of mercury, smog-forming, soot, toxic and carbon dioxide pollution that industrial plants will emit compared to if the EPA is allowed to do its job. Some will simply make it a law that we must allow industrial polluters to dump unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

That’s why NRDC and Health Care Without Harm are teaming up today to make sure that the constituents of the members of Congress that have co-sponsored one or more Bad Air Bill know that their representatives are putting their health at risk:

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce dug further into denial of the reality of global warming pollution Friday, attacking the Obama administration’s clean energy goals as “wholly unrealistic.”  Brad Johnson has the story.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for the end to billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for the oil and gas industry, and a national commitment to double low-carbon electricity by 2035. “Raising taxes on the industry that fuels our lives shows a profound detachment from our energy and economic reality,” former Bush official Karen Harbert, president and chief executive officer of the chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, lashed out. Harbert further attacked the president’s proposal for being too “ambitious“:

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What is China doing to promote innovation-led economic growth? What can the United States do to remain a global innovation leader? How do the Republican Study Committee’s budget cuts hurt our innovation?

Kate Gordon, CAP’s Vice President for Energy Policy, answers all these questions:

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