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Koch brothers get an even better climate denying stooge as U.S. Secretary of State

Rex Tillerson is out, and the Koch brothers are in.   https://grist.org/briefly/rex-tillerson-is-out-and-the-koch-brothers-are-in/

In an early morning tweet, President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and announced that Mike Pompeo, CIA director and unofficial third Koch brother, would be taking over. In other words, a guy who believes climate change is merely an “engineering problem” is being replaced by someone who probably doesn’t think it’s even real.

Pompeo’s environmental record is pretty damning:

• In a 2013 interview with C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, he argued that there’s considerable debate within the scientific community about the causes of global warming. There isn’t.
• Since 2009, he has accepted more than a million dollars from the oil and gas industry while campaigning for Congress.
• He was the largest recipient of Koch Industries campaign money in 2010. And soon afterward, as a newly elected Kansas representative, he hired a former Koch lawyer to be his chief of staff.

It looks like the Koch brothers, who’ve played a huge part in galvanizing the Republican Party against climate change, have Pompeo exactly where they want him.

And why is it important for our secretary of state to understand the basics of climate change?  For one, climate change poses a “growing geopolitical threat” to national security — a threat that Pompeo appears quite unequipped to tackle.

March 14, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, politics, USA