This odd and unexpected query came my way in the late summer of 2014 as a reply to a post on a Facebook exchange about the proposed Keystone XL northern leg. And how did I get there?
I had jumped into an existing, and already quite extensive, FB thread, adding some information that I had picked up largely from a podcast interview clip of Greg Palast. Greg asserted that the KXL would primarily benefit the infamous Koch Bros., conveying their tar-sands material from their Canada operations down to their Gulf Coast refinery, and the refined product would probably go mainly to markets overseas, as it evidently does now. According to Mr. Palast, the Kochs would save about $1 Billion a year by getting their raw material from their Canada operations rather than Venezuela, as they were currently doing.
A quick Google search had yielded informative articles from reliable sources confirming the multi-million-dollar Koch holdings in Canada tar sands operations, and their Gulf Coast refinery setup as well. Armed with some confirmable specifics, and basically trusting Greg Palast as a dependable source for the rest of it, I readily dove into the KXL thread with the evidence about the Kochs.
A day or two after I offered my input, I got back that strange question, accompanied by one or two others and the usual bogus BS about the purported benefits of the KXL project. Did I have some vendetta against the Kochs? Did I have a climate change axe to grind?
The woman’s Steyer question implicitly assumed that anyone spending that much time posting and discussing environmental issues on FB must be getting paid for doing so. It might be one thing to discuss your latest recipe or your cat’s recent antics, but who would put in that kind of time on an FB page just out of concern for breathable air and a livable environment? Not her, obviously. I thought her question quite likely revealed something about her own motivations, and while I could not prove that she gets an income from the Kochs, I do know that the petrochemical dynastic duo buys a lot of propaganda in various guises, so I suspected that she might very well number among that bought-and-paid-for crowd, or she may have a first cousin on the board at TransCanada.
Since I could really only guess at the woman’s reasons, I replied by telling her that if I had the honor of working for Tom, I would openly and freely admit it, which is something the Koch Bros. writers never do, to the best of my knowledge. I didn’t mention it, but I certainly understood that if you collect a paycheck to further the malevolent interests of a pair of filthy-rich sociopathic jerks to the detriment of everyone else, then you might have something to hide, whereas if you work for someone trying to do something positive, you have no need to hide that fact.
Anyway, not too surprisingly, the FB exchange ended there, as the KXL defender apparently couldn’t craft a readable response. I meant what I said, though, and if I had the privilege of working for Mr. Steyer, then I would not make a secret of it. I would hope, however, that I could do something more substantive in the fight against fossil fuel pollution than simply countering pro-fossil-fuel Facebook posts, which I will happily continue to do for free.