A new report shows that the Koch Brothers spent part of a $3.1 million fund to help get Scott Pruitt installed as the head of the EPA. Pruitt is a climate change denier who sued the EPA repeatedly as Attorney General of Oklahoma, a state where the Kochs do a lot of environmental damage, and they wanted to return the favors that he has so graciously bestowed upon them. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.





Transcript of the above video:

According to a new report, it was the Koch brothers and their millions of dollars that helped to give us Scott Pruitt, the former Attorney General of Oklahoma, as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. First of all, Scott Pruitt is a guy that doesn’t think climate change is real. Scott Pruitt is a guy that doesn’t think the Environmental Protection Agency should be a thing. He spent most of his career in Oklahoma suing the EPA because he didn’t like their rules.

He wanted industry to be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, which includes the Koch brothers, who have very large operations in the state of Oklahoma. So after Scott Pruitt fought for them fervently in the state of Oklahoma, the Koch brothers spent a couple million dollars lobbying members of Congress in order to get them to approve Scott Pruitt, a man who is grossly unqualified for the job, as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is partly because of that that last weekend we saw the climate march in DC where scientists and activists and concerned citizens got together, marched on Washington, and said you have to pay attention to this very important and potentially deadly issue of climate change. Unfortunately, considering our leadership in Washington, DC at both the Presidential, Congressional and Supreme Court, the majority don’t accept it. The majority of our leaders in Washington, DC do not believe that climate change is real.

That is why people like the Koch brothers, who obviously understand that climate change is real, otherwise they wouldn’t be spending all this money promoting climate change deniers to confuse and mislead the public … That’s why they want Scott Pruitt as the head of the EPA. Over the years the Koch brothers have had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines for violating the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules. In Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt fought for the rights of the Koch brothers over the rights of the citizens and the environment, and they wanted Scott Pruitt to do the same thing at the main EPA that he did as Oklahoma Attorney General, and he’s going to.

We have a former oil CEO as our Secretary of State. Any country on this planet that looks at the United States is laughing at us, not because we’re idiots, but clearly given what we’ve done we are, we’ve got to own that, but because they understand in a way that our leaders don’t what’s going to happen to us because of climate change. The city of Miami in the next 50 years … Miami, not a small city, will be completely under water, gone. Miami won’t exist in 50 years folks. I mean have you looked at the reports? Have you seen the climate change maps? Have you seen what rising sea levels will do?

We’re talking about tens of millions of people just in the United States who in the next 50 years, they’re not going to have a home. It will be under water. They will have somewhere else they have to go. It’s going to start this encroachment. Then we’re going to have refugees from other countries coming in here, all because we didn’t want to take it seriously, because we allow people like the Koch brothers to come in and buy our government and put climate change deniers in positions of power.

I promise you the Koch brothers know that climate change is real. They also know that they’re going to be dead and gone before any of those very real consequences hit us. Yeah, their children and grandchildren are going to be alive, but the hell with them, right? That’s the Republican mentality, you get yours, to hell with everybody else. That’s what’s happening. That’s what we have allowed to happen in the United States.

That’s what Citizens United has give us in the United States. It’s all about what I can personally get, and everybody else can go screw themselves. That’s what we’re looking at in America today, and that’s what the Koch brothers have done by spending a couple million dollars to put this climate changing denying, EPA hating bastard in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.