KeystoneA fundraising letter sent out this week by Sierra Club activist Bill McKibben contains an outright fabrication about Koch. Urging opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, McKibben writes, “the only argument for the pipeline comes from folks like the Koch Brothers — ‘we can make a lot of money.’ … but that money buys votes in Congress, unless we stand up.”
Koch has never made any such statement or argument. McKibben is citing something that simply doesn’t exist in an attempt to make money for his own partisan activist group. Koch has stated publicly and repeatedly that we have no stake in the Keystone pipeline. It is troubling that the Sierra Club and McKibben are somehow taken seriously by news media covering this issue when they have such brazen disregard for the truth. Even Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune (a cohort of McKibben), had to be formally corrected by the Los Angeles Times this past July when he tried to mislead readers into thinking Koch had some connection to Keystone.
It’s worth noting that the Sierra Club was just exposed for surreptitiously taking $26 million from a natural gas company to fund criticism of competing industries. It now seems obvious that this tainted funding has also been used to drive Sierra Club’s activities on the Keystone issue.
Given that the Sierra Club secretively took millions of dollars from a natural gas company in return for attacking other energy industry participants and that McKibben is willing to invent statements from others out of whole cloth and pass them off as legitimate, no one should believe anything else that he or the Sierra Club has to say.
