Okay, so you finally got the damn degree, but you're over a hundred grand in debt and your dick of a supervisor at KFC won't give you more hours. What are you going to do? Ask Mom for a loan? Sell your gold for cash? Walk the streets?
No! Right now, thanks to infamous petroleum giants David and Charles Koch, there is another option. If you want your debts paid off and maybe have a little foldin' cash (say, a million or so) to play around with all you have to do is DENY CLIMATE CHANGE!
Step through the orange gas cloud below. It's safe! Trust me...
Okay, first of all I have to acknowledge that David and Charles Koch have had a bad year. First of all, their little Florida voter purge scheme basically failed on every level, unsuccessful not only in electing Mitt Romney president but also santorum-ing the bed when it came to turning Florida even the faintest shade of pink.
Plus there was that extremely embarrassing incident where climate change denier, physics professor Richard A. Muller, finally joined the 20th century when he stated that his Koch-funded climate change research actually DID prove that the earth was warming and that human activity was responsible for it. I think Dr. Muller can now count on no longer being invited to future secret, invitation-only, koffee klatches. with Davy and Chuck and the rest of the Koch heads.
Oh, plus there was a record-shattering drought last year that brought triple-digit heat across most of the US for months at a time. That really brought climate change home for Americans. As of now, only 30% of all Americans deny climate change. That's the lowest number in history. Compare that to the 48% of Americans who believe in ghosts. Believe me when I say that climate change denial is, well, evaporating quicker than Arctic summer ice.
You'd think that with the embarrassment of Dr. Muller the Koch brothers would at least have the decency to admit that climate change is real.... but you'd think wrong. The Koch brothers are still denying climate change and funding bogus studies which falsely claim that renewable energy isn't efficient.
But here's the good news for you, Mr. I-have-a-Phd-now-but-still-can't-afford-to-move-out-of-Mom's-basement. The Koch brothers have been spending loads of money on right-wing programs at such staunchly conservative institutions as Utah State and West Virginia University. What is more surprising is that Brown University has ALSO been receiving money from the Koch Brothers. This is Brown University, remember.... the Marxist-Communist Pro-Obama Prius-driving dope-smoking dares-to-see-women-as-more-than-walking-wombs bugaboo university that ranks only behind Berkeley when it comes to the amount of angry words it receives whenever "The National Review" goes on its usual "conservatives are getting short-changed on college campuses" whine-a-thon. Still, despite being a target of the right-wing intellectual magazine that dared to print Charlotte Allan's eloquent words condemning the 6-year-old victims of the Newtown massacre, ... Brown University has shown itself to not be above receiving a little green from the most anti-green source available:
The Charles Koch Foundation funds the Political Theory Project at Brown, which provides funding for “Seminar Luncheons for undergraduates, academic conferences, research fellowships for graduate students, support for faculty research, and a postdoctoral fellowship program.” Amity Shales, a pop-conservative writer who argues that the New Deal made the Great Depression worse, an odd theory promoted by Charles Koch himself, has been a featured speaker at the Koch-funded Project at Brown. Moreover, Koch’s donation of at least $419,254 to Brown has underwritten a number of research projects in the Economics and Political Science deparments, including a paper arguing that bank deregulation has helped the poor.
Of course none of this money goes specifically towards denying climate change... though Lord knows it hasn't been through lack of trying! The problem for Koch-sniffers hoping to get some of that delicious petroleum moolah is that scientific evidence that goes against the irrefutable facts involving human-triggered climate change is ... well, such evidence isn't there.
Nevertheless this is the Age of Information, so for every ten-thousand studies showing the appalling consequences of global warming there is bound to be one quirky little study showing some quibbling detail that might, if you squint a bit, give the illusion that climate change isn't really happening.
Have you found evidence that California's Mt. Shasta's glaciers are growing? Publish it! Never mind that 90% of the world's glaciers are in retreat! Your gorgeous Mt. Shasta glacier report could potentially earn you a nice check from Les Freres Koch. Have you found evidence that Antarctic ice is thickening? Is the Sahara turning green? Has there been a lot of snow lately? Such news can make a Koch positively tumescent with delight! Well, if you rub your Koches the right way, you could parlay that cherry-picked data into some serious payout! Who cares if Greenland is basically gone now?
David and Charles Koch are both in their seventies anyway so they'll be long dead before the Earth is entirely roasted. Plus you'll be sitting on a stack of their moolah while typing studies showing that ice caps are expanding while the rest of us schlubs wilt in 150 degree weather. "But- but all your data concerns only Martian ice caps!" We'll whine... but in the end we'll be losing because we selfishly clung to our integrity instead of boarding the climate change denial money train.