It’s Time to Hold Elizabeth Koch Accountable for Her Family’s Role in the Climate Crisis

Elizabeth Koch’s family has made its fortune driving the climate crisis. She’s used her share of the family billions to build a literary reputation without going on record to disavow the family’s political and cultural destruction. I’ve started this petition asking her to publicly act on climate.

Join me by signing here.

***

For over a hundred years, the Koch family has made billions of dollars fueling the climate crisis. Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States, earns over $100 billion annually from fossil fuels, industrial meat production, deforestation, and various other phases of the extraction and pollution cycle that has brought us to the brink of planetary disaster.

It would take roughly three thousand years to count the Koch fortune out dollar by dollar. Their wealth makes the Sacklers seem like a fumbling start-up, and yet, the literary community has been reluctant to call out the Kochs in the same way the art community has called out the family of opioid profiteers.

It’s time for that to change.

The family has used the fortune earned from the climate crisis to control and influence government institutions, school boards, and the media. They’ve created a network of PACs, advocacy groups, think tanks, and dark money sock puppets designed to protect the family empire by destroying public oversight, buying politicians, and drenching every available screen in right-wing propaganda.

If you follow the money funding every terrible thing in America right now — from school shootings to white supremacist terrorism to Cancer Alley — you won’t go far before you find the Koch family connection.

We desperately need someone in the Koch family to use their power for good. But it clearly won’t be Bill or Wyatt. Thankfully, there is one Koch who could make all the difference, and, even better, who seems to understand the crisis.

While the other Kochs have spent a hundred years using their money and influence to hoard and destroy, Elizabeth — granddaughter of family patriarch Fred Koch and daughter of current Koch Industries chairman and CEO Charles Koch — has used her privilege, in part, to create and uplift.

Instead of working tirelessly to further entrench racial capitalism’s oligarchy, she has quietly used her fortune to fund a different kind of empire.

Elizabeth is the co-founder and CEO of the literary organization Catapult, which is the umbrella organization for Black Balloon Publishing, Soft Skull Press, and Counterpoint. It’s a publishing enterprise which includes titles by Noam Chomsky, Lynne Tillman, Wendell Berry, Red Pine’s translations of the sutras, and the entire run of Sierra Club Books, among many others. The wider organization hosts online classes such as “Decolonizing Poetry,” and publishes essays about the exclusion of trans voices in audiobooks.

Just this month, while her father’s network of influence killed Build Back Better and helped ignite a wave of book bans, Elizabeth used her family money to begin pushing The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate, an anthology of essays that Publisher’s Weekly called “a poignant ode to a changing planet.”

The writers Elizabeth Koch publishes get it. But it’s unclear if she does.

A good start would be for Elizabeth to publicly call on her family to stop funding the American Legislative Council, the heart of the right wing climate denial machine.

Charles Koch helped found and continues to funnel millions of dollars to ALEC, the epicenter of state legislative action to protect the fossil fuel industry. ALEC’s most recent model bill is the “Energy Discrimination Elimination Act,” which would make it illegal to “unfairly discriminate against fossil fuel companies.”

Ridiculous, yes, but it’s no joke. ALEC boasts it passes nearly 200 of its model bills every year, and they’ll only pass more if Republicans keep winning.

By demanding her family stop funneling their fortune into climate denial, Elizabeth Koch can begin to meet her responsibility for her family’s role in the climate crisis.

I’ve started this petition asking her to use her power for good, and I hope you’ll join me in urging her to take action.

Unfortunately, it might take a lot of us. While her work shows she is the dividing line between her family interests, so far she’s done nothing to show which side she ultimately favors, which is perhaps by design.

She has claimed to be “apolitical,” though a little sleuthing reveals she’s been a registered Republican, regular voter, and, up until the launch of Black Balloon, a frequent donor to politicians like Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and George W. Bush. Her foundation has given money to PEN International and the Human Rights Foundation, but the bulk of its giving ($900,000) has been to something called the “Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.” While she hasn’t explicitly endorsed her family’s degradation of American life, she hasn’t done anything of consequence to stop it.

Through Catapult, Koch has spent a decade championing “the outspoken and the contrarian, the marginal and the disenfranchised.” Her presses have won a National Book Critics Circle Award, published titles like Where the Wild Ladies Are, Generation Occupy, and Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves. She’s hosted classes about developing a YA voices and asked “Why Don’t American Schools Value Creativity?” But it’s not enough.

These two simple public acts by Elizabeth Koch would help begin to stop the effects of her family’s century of crisis and denial, but she’s clearly not going to take them without a public push.

I know arts funding is always complicated, at best, but the artists exposing the Sacklers have shown there’s a way forward. It begins with public accountability and meaningful action. Elizabeth Koch has a responsibility to her authors and readers to be accountable for her family’s role in the climate crisis. She can start by publicly taking a stance on climate.

Please join me in asking Elizabeth Koch to do better. Sign the petition and ask her to use her influence for good. Demand she help stop the worst effects of her family’s century of extraction and exploitation.