Want to Know Why the Koch Brothers Are So Opposed to Pollution Regulation and Controls and Fighting Global Warming?

Easy Answer, They Are Making Millions From Lack of Regulation and For Causing Global Warming

And Conservative Activists Who Support Them – A Bunch of Useful Idiots

The billionaire Koch Brothers fund conservative causes, and in spite of the fact that the causes they support are just awful, one at least hoped that they did so out of a dedication to principles.  Well it turns out the principles they are dedicated to are the principles of making millions and millions of dollars for the Koch Brothers and their companies.

Case in point, the problem of carbon waste that is generated from the processing of oil from tar sands. 

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Petroleum coke, a waste byproduct of refining oil sands oil, is piling up along the Detroit River.

An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.

And some is being piled near Detroit, which in case anyone noticed, already has enough problems without this.

Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

Now this stuff can be burned to produce energy, but, but, but

And what about the leftover coke? The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer allow any new licenses permitting the burning of petroleum coke in the United States. But D. Mark Routt, a staff energy consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies in Houston, said that overseas companies saw it as a cheap alternative to low-grade coal. In China, it is used to generate electricity, adding to that country’s air-quality problems. There is also strong demand from India and Latin America for American petroleum coke, where it mainly fuels cement-making kilns.

“I’m not making a value statement, but it comes down to emission controls,” Mr. Routt said. “Other people don’t seem to have a problem, which is why it is going to Mexico, which is why it is going to China.”

“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said. One of the world’s largest dealers of petroleum coke is the Oxbow Corporation, which sells about 11 million tons of fuel-grade coke a year. It is owned by William I. Koch, a brother of David and Charles.

Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, “It’s really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth,” he said.

So now everyone knows what in part drives the Koch Brothers in their quest to end regulation of pollution and to deny global warming.  Plain old ordinary unbridled greed.  And the people that support their causes, the ones who will suffer from lack of clean air and clean water, just a bunch of useful idiots thinking they are doing the right thing for freedom when all they are doing is helping billionaires get richer at the expense of the environment.