56 ROLLING STONE
THE MEN WHO
SOLD THE WORLD
BY RYAN BORT
CLIMATE CRISIS
Donald J. Trump
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Trump has been a godsend
for the fossil-fuel industry,
gutting the budgets of the
Environmental Protection
Agency and Department of
the Interior while stocking
each agency with former
fossil-fuel-industry executives and lobbyists. He
has auctioned off millions of acres of public land
to oil-and-gas drilling and rolled back close to 100
environmental regulations, paving the way for
200 million more tons of carbon to be pumped
into the atmosphere per year. But Trump insists
he’s one of the good guys. “I’m an environmen-
talist,” he said last fall after bailing on a climate-
focused meeting of the G-7. “A lot of people don’t
understand that. I think I know more about the
environment than most people.”Andrew Wheeler
ADMINISTRATOR OF THE EPA
Since taking the helm of
the EPA in 2018, Wheeler
has curtailed the agency’s
ability to use scientific
data when establishing
regulations, rolled back
clean-water protections
that prevented polluters from dumping chemicals
in streams and wetlands, and waged campaigns
to strip numerous emissions regulations — from
checks on methane to tailpipe-exhaust restric-
tions in California. He came to the EPA after
spending years as a fossil-fuel-industry lobbyist.
“Wheeler is the embodiment of the anti- regulatory
‘deep state’ in Washington,” Ken Cook, president
of the nonprofit advocacy organization Environ-
mental Working Group, told us in 2018. “He’s
playing the long game. And that’s exactly what
makes him so dangerous.”Rupert Murdoch
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA MOGUL
The billionaire executive
chair of News Corp. and
founder of Fox News,
Murdoch started a network
of media properties that
has been instrumental
in the propagation of
climate-change skepticism, both in America and
abroad. As climate-fueled wildfires decimated
his home country of Australia, Murdoch’s outlets
spread disinformation — The Australian dismissed
the fires as “nothing new.” It’s even worse in the
U.S., where Fox News has been a platform for
climate deniers for years. In 2019 alone, its guests
called climate science “fake,” argued the climate
is bound to change “with the Earth rotating at
1,000 miles per hour,” and claimed that pumping
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere couldn’t
be bad because “we exhale carbon dioxide.”Robert Mercer
THE MERCER FAMILY FOUNDATIONBillionaire Robert Mercer
and his daughter Rebekah,
who directs the Mercer
Family Foundation, have
spread millions of dollars
across America’s most
influential climate-science-
denying groups, including the Heartland Institute,
the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.
Tax filings made public in December showed
they scaled back such donations in 2018, but
they did send more than $8 million to Donors
Trust, a Koch-funded dark-money group, and
$300,000 to the Oregon Institute for Science and
Medicine, whose founder Arthur Robinson, an
“alt-science” pioneer, once said increasing CO2
levels would result in a “host of beneficial effects”
for the environment.Warren Buffett
CEO OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY
The “Oracle of Omaha” is
a little shortsighted when
it comes to the climate
crisis. The billionaire finan-
cial guru has long been
pumping money into the
fossil-fuel industry, and it
doesn’t look like he has plans to stop. In 2019, Buf-
fett invested $10 billion in Occidental Petroleum’s
interest in the Permian Basin, marveling to CNBC
how “incredible” it is that the region is producing
4 million barrels of oil a day. He’s rationalized his
climate-killing investments by arguing that his first
priority is to enrich his shareholders, not save the
environment. Nevertheless, Buffett has described
the climate crisis as “an incredibly important sub-
ject.” Thanks for your concern, Warren.Charles Koch
CEO OF KOCH INDUSTRIES
Koch Industries pumped
more than 25 million metric
tons of CO2 into the atmo-
sphere in 2017, according
to a University of Massa-
chusetts study, more than
Chevron, BP, and a host of
other fossil-fuel-industry powerhouses. Charles
and his brother David (who died in 2019) began
funding climate denial long before the crisis
went mainstream. In 1991, Charles’ Cato Institute
hosted a conference for skeptics titled “Global
Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?” They
continued to work to prevent congressional ac-
tion on climate change for decades, founding and
funding anti-science advocacy groups like Ameri-
cans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners. Charles,
84, isn’t slowing down, either. In 2019’s Kochland,
author Christopher Leonard quotes Charles telling
allies in 2018 that they’ve “made more progress”The CEOs,
oilmen,
financiers,
politicians, and
ideologues
who are robbing
us of a stable
climateFROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: J SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHRISTOPHER SMITH/INVISION/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; J SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; SEAN ZANNI/PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICK T. FALLON/”THE WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES