“America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face — not acting.”
– President Obama, “Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline,” November 6, 2015.
” … if Keystone had been in operation it would have lowered Koch Industries’ overall profits by $260 million per year.”
– Charles Koch, Good Profit (New York: Crown Business, 2015), p. 46.
In 1959, Fred Koch purchased an interest in Great Northern Refinery in Minnesota to turn Canadian crude oil into refined products for the Midwest. At the beginning (1955), the facility refined 25,000 daily barrels. Full control by Koch Industries came in 1959. Today, the renamed Pine Bend Refinery has a daily capacity of 339,000 barrels of crude oil that can be turned into 14 million gallons of petroleum products.…
“As an idealistic man in my twenties, I became passionate about the urgency of finding freedom-fueled solutions to human problems, even if the solutions were radical.” (p. 11)
“My readings covered the entire philosophical spectrum…. I discovered my own political orientation was much more nuanced than simply ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal,’ in the contemporary use of those words.” (p. 13)
– Charles Koch, Good Profit (New York: Crown Business, 2015)
Charles Koch’s Good Profit: How Creating Profit for Others Built One of the World’s Most Successful Companies defends the free and prosperous commonwealth against cronyism (aka ‘bad profit’). But more than that, the author presents insights about economic freedom to set up his business management ideal, Principled Entrepreneurship.
A baker’s dozen of quotations from Koch’s new book, and one more for good measure, follow.…
Another Halloween has come and gone. But the Malthusian virus of doom-and-gloom toward self-interested, voluntary choice rages on. The neo-Malthusians may now concede that we are not running out of resources, but the new line is that we cannot mine and burn what we know we have because we are running out of climate.
More can be added to this list, but the ‘big three’ of today’s alarmism are climate scientist James Hansen, Obama’s science advisor John Holdren, and deep ecologist and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben. Some quotations follow:
“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”
-James Hansen, 2006. “The Threat to the Planet.” New York Times Review of Books
…“We cannot afford to put off [climate policy] change any longer.