The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

in America. They are exemplary capitalists, setting the standard for shaping America’s domestic and foreign policy in relation to black carbon production and distribution. They have purchased the services of willing politicians, legislators, regulators, and judges to do their bidding, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Beneficiaries of the brothers’ largesse must be climate change deniers and unambiguous friends of “drill baby drillers” in order to qualify for unconditional support from the Koch brothers’ foundations and the synthetic front groups they finance. They have also mastered the dissemination of propaganda, internalizing Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the paramount importance of ideological and cultural hegemony in the perpetuation of the status quo. Institutions of higher learning have long been among their primary targets for ideological subversion. As of 2015, Koch foundations were subsidizing pro-market supremacy, pro-disciplinary neoliberalism, and anti-tax programs in 347 institutions of higher learning, including the resource-rich Ivy League universities. Their generosity comes with strings attached. When the Koch brothers contributed more than $965,000 to the creation of the center for free enterprise at Brown University, the string attached was that the Koch foundations would participate in the selection of professors. When the brothers helped fund the creation of a freshman seminar in free-market classics at the same university, the condition was the course would be taught by a libertarian professor. Additional funding was provided to Brown graduates to do research on why and how bank deregulation would be beneficial for the poor.⁷¹

      To boost the production of sufficient intellectual materials, the Koch brothers themselves have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the production and grooming of pro-market ideology scholars and researchers. Between 2007 and 2011 alone, for example, the Koch brothers gave $30 million toward the endowment of professorships, the underwritings of neoliberal economic programs, and the sponsorships of pro-market ideology conferences and lecture series. Think tanks and private policy institutions then repackage the intellectual output in a fashion that could be intelligible and accessible to the mass public. One of the most vociferous and prodigious manufacturers of Koch-inspired propaganda is George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the premier outpost of neoliberal market ideology, funded by the Koch brothers. When George W. Bush became president, the Mercatus Center recommended fourteen of the twenty-three programs in the administration’s regulatory hit list, such as privatization of social security, further deregulation of taxes, deregulation of derivatives in energy, abolition of the EPA, ending the government-supported welfare system and Medicare. It was no accident that the Bush administration installed Susan Dudley from the Mercatus Center, notoriously known for her virulent anti-regulation credentials, as the top regulatory bureaucrat.

      The Koch brothers have also been active in creating their own propaganda platform, organizing annual seminars on law and economics and other topics for judges, justices, senators, congressmen, scholars, and the super-rich. Even Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas partook of these seminars. Between 2003 and 2010 alone, 140 reactionary bourgeois foundations, spearheaded by Koch foundations, distributed $558 million to 91 different nonprofit groups, think tanks, trade associations, and academic programs to wage permanent warfare against groups that sought to promote climate change mitigation through the re-regulation of the black carbon sector, as well as to block progressive advocacy groups from gaining ground in electoral politics and democratic legislative representation.⁷²

      The Koch brothers have never been short of corporate allies, especially in terms of promoting climate-change denial. Exxon, Chevron, and BP have all supported the construction of what we might call the climate change denial industrial complex. No fewer than 124 organizations have received money from Exxon-Mobil to describe climate science as “junk science” and environmental activists as charlatans and fanatics. These include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Frontier of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation, the George C. Marshall Institute, and many other groups with names that make them appear as though they are grassroots citizen organizations or academic bodies, such as the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change, the National Wetlands Coalition, the National Environmental Policy Institute, and the American Council on Science and Health.⁷³ Two of George C. Marshall Institute’s employees—the Institute received $630,000 from Exxon—wrote a long manifesto assisted by a Christian fundamentalist extolling the benefits of ghg emissions in these glowing terms:

      As coal, oil and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity and productivity of all people.… We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.⁷⁴

      Taking the Senate floor, James Inhofe, Republican senator from Oklahoma who then chaired the Senate Environment Committee, echoed the climate change deniers’ slogan in these terms: “The claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science. Carbon dioxide does not cause catastrophic disasters. Actually, it will be beneficial to our environment and our economy…. With all the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the funny science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people. It sure sounds like it.”⁷⁵

      The Koch brothers and the black carbon oligopolies were not alone in their epic war to expand the privatization trajectory of sovereignty; they received perpetual reinforcement in their war against the potential return of the regulatory state, as well as against progressive pro-climate advocacy groups from other key constituencies. In particular, their alliance with agribusiness and biotechnology oligopolies had been strategic as the latter, too, had been obsessively preoccupied with defending the food manufacturing system from state regulation. Between January 1999 and June 2010 alone, the fifty largest agriculture patent holders, two of the biggest biotechnology corporations, and the agrochemical trade association together spent $572 million on lobbying Congress. In addition to using permanent in-house lobbyists, these oligopolies hired 13 former members of Congress and more than 300 former congressional and White House staffers to promote legislation in support of GM food and agricultural products or to block labeling such products. In 2010, these oligopolies had retained more than a hundred lobbying firms to descend on Congress.⁷⁶

      These examples of the power of the fossil energy, agribusiness, and biotechnology oligopolies in American politics support the conclusion that no bourgeois reform, such as those ecological economists have proposed, could occur under the prevailing system in ways that would establish sustainable scale, allocative efficiency, and social justice. It appears that contemporary ecological economists are drawing on a past that is no longer relevant, a past in which Keynesian regulation of the market was embraced, largely as a result of working-class organizations and ruling-class fear of more radical change. We live now in a world of global corporations. The state’s autonomy, such as it was, has been severely compromised by capital’s global power. Interventions once possible no longer are. Capital will move away from them. It is no longer bound by national territories. In addition to having lost control over domestic industrial capital, the advanced capitalist countries could no longer avail themselves of the traditional means of geopolitics to have exclusive access to spheres of influence and domination in the Global South, because most corporations have already spread their assets across the globe. The metropolitan state now sees its primary function in how to capture the larger share of global accumulation as exporting more through an integrated global market. This requires the complete demolition of trade barriers to all goods and services including high-tech GM grains where the comparative/competitive advantages of the advanced capitalist countries lie. True, state intervention in the political economy, whether national or global, has not ceased, but the form has changed, decidedly in favor of accumulation and to the exclusion of labor. Now the state intervenes in the market to foster the hypermobility of capital and to redistribute tangible and intangible resources upwardly from the taxpayer to the giant corporations, as reflected in the rescue of the super-giant banks and hedge funds during the 2008 financial crisis. Other measures include gutting social protections and social