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  Even these expenditures didn’t come close to capturing the size of Charles Koch’s political machine. Since at least 1974, Charles Koch had envisioned a political influence machine that was multifaceted, including think tanks, university research institutes, industry trade associations, and a parade of philanthropic institutions to support it financially. The machine was a reality now.

  The think tanks and academic programs were funded through nonprofit foundations such as the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation. In 2008 alone, the Charles Koch Foundation gave out $8.39 million in grants and gifts, while the Lambe Foundation gave $2.56 million. These grants supported conservative scholars and paid for supposedly independent policy reports released by Washington think tanks. The libertarian Cato Institute think tank, which Charles Koch cofounded and continued to support, operated with annual revenue of $23.7 million in 2008, up from $17.6 million in 2001.

  In later years, this political operation became known as the “Kochtopus,” a name that evoked a many-tentacled entity that seemed to grasp every lever of policy making. This nickname gave the Koch political apparatus an air of invincibility, as if it were an unbeatable juggernaut with which Charles and David Koch could buy off politicians, write policies, and tame the federal government to their wishes. This caricature failed to recognize a central truth about the market for influence in Washington, DC: there is no straight line between spending money and getting what you want. The market for influence and policy outcomes was a murkier and more complex market than any other in which Koch operated.

  That night, at his home in Wichita, Charles Koch made it clear that he was determined to win in this market, just as Koch Industries had won in so many others. The survival of the company seemed at stake.

  At that very moment, the biggest source of trouble for Koch Industries was a small group of dedicated liberal congressional staffers working long hours in an obscure basement office in Washington. This team had been laboring for years to write the thousand-page law controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The team was composed of underpaid, overworked idealists. One of them was a workaholic named Jonathan Phillips. Phillips didn’t know much about Charles Koch at that time. Which helps explain why Phillips was still optimistic that history was on his side.

  * * *

  In a different world, Jonathan Phillips could have ended up as a Koch Industries employee. He fit the Koch mold. He was entrepreneurial, idealistic, and thoroughly midwestern. The first time he was old enough to vote for president, in 2000, he voted for George W. Bush. Like so many Koch employees, he was trim and athletic. Phillips had short blond hair, and his blue eyes projected an air of absolute sincerity when he spoke.

  Phillips might have become a perfectly respectable conservative if he hadn’t served in the Peace Corps, which took him from the cozy confines of suburban Chicago to a tent in Mongolia. He gained a broader view of the world and America’s role in it. He lived amid extreme poverty and developed nuanced views about capitalism. He watched from overseas as George Bush launched an invasion of Iraq that was strategically disastrous and morally troubled. Phillips returned home from the Peace Corps and tried to figure out how he could help make the world a better place. He enrolled in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and, after graduation, got a job on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer in the House of Representatives. This is how Phillips found himself in the center of an effort to redraw America’s energy system.

  In the winter months of 2009, Phillips worked in the Longworth House Office Building, a towering stone complex near the US Capitol. The hallways inside the Longworth Building were austere and cold, lined with marble and capped with vaulted ceilings. Every morning, Phillips walked past these grand corridors to a stairwell that took him to the basement. Down there, the floors were made of varnished cement and the ceiling was covered in exposed ducts, pipes, and vents. Phillips walked to a set of doors that looked like they might conceal a utility closet. This was the headquarters for the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

  The Committee on Global Warming was formed in 2007, one of Nancy Pelosi’s first official acts after she became the Speaker of the House. Creating a select committee sounds mundane, but it was actually a radical act of rebellion, at least in congressional terms. To understand why, it’s important to understand the structure of Congress.

  It’s common to think of the US House of Representatives as a single organization with 435 members who propose laws and then vote on them. In fact, the House is a collection of smaller governing bodies, each with its own authority, called committees. There’s a committee to write tax law and another to write environmental law, for example. Each committee has a chairperson, who acts as the committee’s CEO. Bills in the House are written by committees, then passed by a vote of the committee members. This structure gives tremendous power to committee chairs, and it explains why any bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions never had a chance of passing.

  The committee that oversaw climate change was the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which in 2007 was led by the Michigan Democrat John Dingell Jr. Dingell had been chair of the committee, or the ranking Democrat on the committee, since 1981, and he wasn’t friendly to any bills that might limit carbon emissions. Dingell wasn’t just close to the Detroit automakers in his home state, he was the Detroit automakers, owning more than $500,000 worth of stock in the auto industry.

  Rather than push Dingell to pass a climate change bill, Pelosi just went around him and created the new House Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change out of thin air and stowed it in the basement of the Longworth Building. Dingell was less than enthusiastic. “These kinds of committees are as useful and relevant as feathers on a fish,” he told a reporter. So Pelosi put the Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey in charge of her new subcommittee. Markey was a passionate advocate for environmental regulation, and from the very beginning, Markey seemed dedicated to getting real results. He hired in the most talented staffers he could find and he immediately set to work to break down the barriers that had prevented climate change regulation for years.

  Ed Markey built a team that resembled one of those motley groups of experts who are drawn together to pull off a bank heist. There was Jon Phillips, an expert in renewable-energy legislation. There was Joel Beauvais, a well-paid attorney and Clean Air Act expert who took a horrific pay cut to help the committee write its carbon control bill. There was Ana Unruh Cohen, a onetime congressional staffer who later studied climate change policy for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. There was Michael Goo, a congressional staffer who seemed to know everyone in the House. And there was Jeff Sharp, a onetime lobbyist and campaign worker who specialized in communications. Everyone on the team knew that they were overworked and underpaid. But they felt like they were part of something big. Lots of people came to Washington to change the world. This committee was on the precipice of actually doing it.

  Almost immediately, the Committee on Global Warming started to agitate and provoke virtually everyone in Congress. The committee didn’t have the authority to pass bills, but it had the authority to hold hearings, which it began to do at a militant pace. Phillips spent a great deal of his time booking hearing rooms and bringing in experts to testify. Sharp, the communications guy, helped calibrate the hearings to generate as much media attention as possible. Along with experts and politicians, the committee began inviting celebrities to testify. Phillips met the actor Rob Lowe and ushered him around the Capitol before Lowe testified at a hearing on electric cars.

  “We were always looking for celebrities. We’re always looking for, like, tearful stories,” Phillips recalled. “We’re always looking for ways to connect emotionally with people to raise the profile of the issue. It’s as much a communications apparatus as it is a fact-finding mission.”

  Jonathan Phillips and his teammates weren’t driven by the hunger for attention. They were drive
n by a cause. They truly believed that the future existence of human life on Earth was hanging in the balance. To understand their dedication to this cause, it is useful to consider the story that the committee was trying to communicate through its marathon series of hearings.

  This was a story of an unprecedented geological event that was initiated by humankind. It could be described as the detonation of a gigantic carbon bomb. The essence of this story would become a contested battlefield in itself, with groups like Koch Industries spending millions of dollars to sow doubt about the basic facts of the matter and the broader meaning of those facts.

  * * *

  The fuse of the carbon bomb began to smolder sometime around the year 1800, when industrialized cities started burning coal to heat homes and power primitive engines. In 1850, about 198 million tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere.

  Carbon is a curiously durable element. It can float in the sky for thousands of years without breaking down. Carbon has another important characteristic—it is translucent. That means that it blocks sunlight, just slightly, like a veil of smoke. This translucence is vitally important to life on Earth. A thin layer of compounds like carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere act like a shield, retaining some of the sun’s warmth on the surface of the planet. The mechanics of how this works are simple and well understood. About two-thirds of the sun’s heat hits the Earth, but then bounces off into space. The remaining third of the heat is kept on Earth because the thin layer of translucent elements trap it there. For about the past four hundred thousand years, carbon levels in the atmosphere bounced around in a very narrow band, between roughly 200 and 400 parts per million. This period of relative climate stability coincided with the rise of agriculture and the development of civilization.

  The fuse of the carbon bomb was truly lit in 1859, when Edwin Drake hit his gusher of an oil well in Pennsylvania and began the age of oil in America. When a barrel of crude oil was burned, it released about 317 kilograms of invisible carbon dioxide into the air. In 1890, 1.3 billion tons of carbon were released into the sky. Some of it went back into the trees, some of it went into the oceans, but some of it stayed in the atmosphere. In 1930, 3.86 billion tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere. In 1970, 14.53 billion tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere. It was joined by other industrial gases that wafted up from factories, refineries, feedlots, and fertilizer plants, gases like methane and nitrous oxide that were also invisible and seemingly harmless. Some of these gases blocked far more light than carbon, on the order of thirty to fifty times more. As more of these gases were released into the atmosphere, more heat would be trapped. This is incontrovertible.

  In the 1950s, a chemist and oceanographer named Charles David Keeling installed an air monitor on top of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Its measurements showed that carbon was accumulating in the atmosphere. In 1959, carbon composed 316 parts per million in the atmosphere. In 1970, it composed 325 parts per million. In 1990, it was 354 parts per million. Concurrent with this discovery, scientists tested air samples that were trapped in tiny bubbles in the glaciers of Antarctica. This proved that during the early millennia of human existence, carbon levels remained in the narrow band between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Now that carbon levels exceeded that threshold, it raised troubling questions: What would the world’s climate be like at 360 parts per million? Or at 380? Or at 400? There was no certain answer.

  In 1988, a group of scientists working with the United Nations formed a consortium called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which set out to synthesize the research on global climate change occurring around the world. Initially, the IPCC was very cautious and even seemed to downplay the potential risks from higher carbon concentrations. The panel said that more study was needed, and that no rash actions should be taken that might dampen the prosperity that came from burning fossil fuels. Each ensuing IPCC report, however, became more certain than the last. Carbon concentrations were increasing, which inevitably trapped more heat in the atmosphere. Humans were responsible for the increase. The future implications were unpredictable, but could be severe. The world could expect more dramatic rainfall events and bigger storms in part because warmer air held more moisture. Areas that were parched would become drier. Weather data showed that the world was already getting warmer, as would be predicted when greenhouse gases increased.

  While the scientific community was in agreement on these facts, the American public was in doubt. This wasn’t accidental. As early as 1991, Charles Koch and other executives in the fossil fuel industry helped foster skepticism about the evidence of climate change. When George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a treaty to limit carbon emissions, the Cato Institute held a seminar in Washington called “Global Environmental Crises: Science or Politics?”

  The seminar featured scientists who questioned the prevailing view that humankind’s carbon emissions caused the Earth to warm, including Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, Charles Koch’s alma mater. A brochure for the seminar featured a large-print quote from Lindzen in which he said: “The notion that global warming is a fact and will be catastrophic is drilled into people to the point where it seems surprising that anyone would question it, and yet, underlying it is very little evidence at all.”

  The seminar was not a fringe event. Lindzen and other speakers at the conference were invited to join White House staffers in the Roosevelt Room while they were in town for the conference, according to an internal White House memo from Nancy G. Maynard, who worked for the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Maynard’s boss forwarded the invitation to Bush’s chief of staff, John H. Sununu, under the subject line “Alternative Perspectives on Global Warming.”

  Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other firms spent millions of dollars to support the idea that there was an “alternative” view about climate change between 1991 and 2009. These groups had a distinct advantage in the debate. It took many decades for firm scientific consensus to take shape. Scientists are, by nature, cautious and self-doubting. They were hesitant to push the narrative further than the data would support. And the mechanisms of climate change were impossibly complex and hard to quantify. It was difficult to estimate, for example, just how much carbon the world’s oceans might be able to absorb over time, or exactly how many degrees the earth might warm over a hundred years if the atmospheric levels of carbon reached 400 parts per million. Even as the global scientific community slowly cohered around the understanding that human activity caused climate change, this cottage industry thrived—a cottage industry built to highlight all the points of uncertainty in the scientific debate.

  ExxonMobil eventually abandoned this strategy, but Koch Industries persevered. In 2014, Koch Industries’ top lobbyist, Philip Ellender, said that the evidence was in doubt. “I’m not a, you know, climatologist or whatever,” Ellender said. “Over the past, I think, hundred years, the earth is warmer. Over the past roughly eighteen, it’s cooler.I . . . Whether or not the increases and fluctuations are anthropologic or not is still a question.”

  In private, Koch Industries officials were even more dismissive of the science around climate change. One former senior Koch Industries executive, a trained scientist who only made business decisions after first analyzing reams of data, explained that he believed global warming was a hoax invented by liberal politicians who sought to use the fiction as a way to unite the populace against an invented enemy. After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, this executive explained, American elites needed a new, all-encompassing enemy with which to frighten the masses, and so they invented one with global warming. All the data on atmospheric carbon levels and rising temperatures were part of this conspiracy, the executive said.

  This is what lent the sense of desperation to Phillips and his team, as they conducted their series of hearings on climate change. Phillips and his colleagues were painfully aware of the data underpinning climate change. They
spent their days reading the scientific research about global climate change, and they felt like they had a window into a terrible truth that most people needed to see. This was the reason behind the parade of hearings and the celebrity appearances that they held on Capitol Hill. Their desperation derived from the fact that no one seemed to be listening.

  * * *

  When Markey’s committee realized that hearings alone weren’t changing the political dynamic, they took a more provocative step. They wrote a bill of their own. The Select Committee couldn’t pass the bill or even introduce it for a vote. But the team knew that the mere existence of a bill would make the issue all the harder to ignore.

  The shape of the bill reflected the politics of the time. There were many ways that the government could stanch greenhouse gas emissions. Congress could tax carbon emissions, incentivizing companies to use lower-carbon sources of energy. Or Congress could regulate carbon like a pollutant, setting strict limits on its release. Rather than take these straightforward approaches, the committee settled on a complicated, far-reaching regulatory structure that embodied the internal paradoxes of the neoliberal philosophy that dominated policy making from the Clinton administration onward. The bill sought to dramatically expand the reach of government, while harnessing the power of private markets. In this case, the approach was called cap and trade.

  There was surprisingly little dissent within the committee against this approach. “Very early on, people got the sense that this is going to be a cap-and-trade bill,” Phillips recalled. “The think tanks in town and everyone in the talking head community—no one was talking about a carbon tax. Everyone was talking about cap and trade as being the vehicle. At that time, there was sort of this consensus that it was the moderate, most economically efficient way of dealing with pollution.”