BP and other climate-destroying companies buy this legitimacy at an incredibly cheap price. This year, BP renewed its partnerships with the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House, and Tate Britain for £10 million (less than $17 million) over the next three years – a pittance compared to the company’s $13.4 billion in profits in 2013, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in public relations spending that BP has undertaken to clean up its image since its 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and continues to wreak havoc on the region’s ecosystems. Sponsorship of cultural institutions and the arts by multinational oil companies and climate change deniers is far from limited to BP in the UK. In 2008, David Koch, one of two notorious brothers at the head of Koch Industries, a company with major oil and gas pipeline and refining operations, donated $100 million over ten years for the New York City Ballet’s theater, which was renamed in his honor. In 2013 he made a $65 million donation to the New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the renovation of its plaza, which again was renamed in his honor. These donations might seem generous, until you realize that David Koch’s net worth is $41.7 billion – they do not make a dent in his accounts, amounting to just 0.4% of his fortune. At the same time that some of New York City’s most renowned cultural institutions are heaping praise on David Koch for his contributions, he and his brother are simultaneously fueling a massive political machine of climate denial. They have poured tens of millions of dollars into organizations like Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute that actively seek to undermine climate science and block any progress on climate policy, including the Obama Administration’s recently-proposed EPA greenhouse gas emission standards. The Koch brothers also funnel hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign contributions to elect climate deniers in both state and federal Congressional elections....
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 03:46:10 +0000
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