We Need a Hero
A rainy night, a lonely road, a scratchy windshield wiper, a flash of light from the sky, and a roaring turbine with a sick metallic whine. Then Dustin Hoffman, his face covered in aviation grease and his wet and soggy socks dragging from his limping feet, wanders up the muddy slope after saving fifty-four airline passengers from the exploding inferno that was flight 104 from New York. Andy Garcia is a tin-can-gathering raggedy bum making his way through traffic and he happenstances across a cursing and swearing wet Hoffman character called Bernie LaPlant. This is the movie Hero and its about a sad sack petty criminal who inadvertently and unavoidably becomes a plane crash angel, and then gets his identity stolen by another luckless man, the raggedy John Bubber of Andy Garcia.
This farcical comedy is no great cinema, despite the all-star cast. It’s true message is that celebrity is only worth its ability to help others. This is Bono spearheading African development or Keanu quietly giving money for children’s education. We can all be heroes by simply helping each other, says the soft-spoken and earnest-sounding John Bubber. Heroes never quit. More importantly, people want and need heroes, whether they are truly heroic or not. We believe what we want to believe.
As I read about David Koch, the billionaire brother who died this week at 79 years of age, I wonder about heroes. Here is a guy from Kansas who had a hard-charging older brother (Charles), who truly drove his private petrochemical company into the stratosphere. The brothers own 42% of what is apparently a $300 billion enterprise that is involved in farming, chemicals, polymers, fertilizers, minerals, glass, forestry, automotive components and electronics. In other words, they are involved in pretty much everything that modern post-industrial life is about. My guess is that most of what I touch every day has some part Koch Industries goods imbedded in it on an unbranded basis. Well, David Koch was diagnosed with severe advanced prostate cancer twenty-five years ago and given a year or two to live. Since then, he has deployed a raft of medical experts to extend his life while using his time to give away over $1.2 billion to various worthy causes. From all reports, he was a genuinely good and kind man, but also a man with a specific point of view of the world and how things should work.
Let’s take a step back and talk about what Koch Industries is mostly about. I am very familiar with their petrochemical activities because they are one of the biggest manufacturers of anhydrous ammonia and urea, both critical for fertilizer for agriculture. The method they primarily use for ammonia synthesis is called steam methane reforming which is a method refined over the past 110 years since the invention of what is called the Haber-Bosch method. As a family of Chemical Engineers from MIT, the Koch brothers were well-versed in Haber-Bosch technology and knew that its biggest byproduct, which largely gets released into the atmosphere is large amounts of carbon dioxide. It throws off over 2 tons of the harmful Greenhouse Gas for every ton of ammonia produced., making it one of the most polluting chemical processes. To be fair, let us remember that ammonia production is often touted by scientific historians as perhaps the most impactful technological development of the twentieth century, allowing food production to keep pace with population growth (50% of the world’s population is fed by ammonia synthesized in this manner). But as with most good inventions, what was good for the 20th Century is now proving very bad for the 21st, with the impact on climate change verging on disastrous.
The Koch brothers had a corporate manifest destiny, which, to their business credit, was very well-executed. Clearly their strategy involved staying very low-profile with their “dirty” and “questionably-beneficial” businesses. Additionally, they concluded that regulations were contrary to their interests, none more than environmental regulations that might impinge on their industrial activities. What does big business do when faced with these issues? They have the choice of changing their directions by throwing money at R&D in green chemical production (an expensive and length endeavor) or they throw money at lobbying to push back against the tide. The Koch brothers went the latter route and they went hard. They decided that they would characterize their efforts as “libertarian” and cloak them in the verbiage of freedom and staunch individualism, which were both bulwarks of Americana. There are enough people who want smaller government and less taxes and restrictions that they found an audience willing to listen and rally behind them. Some would say they started the Tea Party, but they denied it repeatedly…almost a bit too much…
The four Koch brothers got sideways with each other thirty years ago and took sides (two by two) against one another for control of their family business. The prevailing brothers (Charles and David) paid off the losing brothers (Frederick and Bill) to the tune of over $1 billion. While families squabble, this was an epic battle that the two dominant and do-whatever-it-takes brothers won on a big gamble. It’s not hard to imagine that such a thing would harden the heart and make success more than about money. The imperative of winning might even cloud one’s judgement and warp ones mind in being more short-term thinking rather than worrying about the future of the species or planet. Maybe they truly believed climate change was hogwash, but then again its hard to think they missed the classes at MIT when they taught the basics of geophysics.
A few years ago, David Koch focused less of his time on Koch Industries from his NYC apartment (he was deemed the wealthiest person in NYC) and more time on his charitable activities. His libertarian views diverged with brother Charles’ as well. Charles was decidedly anti-Trump as he saw Trump’s policies as against his business interests for several reasons. David was a bit too comfortable in the Republican mainstream by then and even attended a Trump inaugural party. So, in 2018, Charles did what he had done to his other brothers years before, he retired David unceremoniously from the business.
Who is the hero in this story? Is there any scenario where we can think of Charles Koch as a hero for the people? I think not. How about David, then, that generous man who donated $1.2 billion of his fortune (1.9% of his wealth…a tad less than the 10% recommended in the Bible)? Is he a hero who is dedicated to helping others? What about his twin brother Bill or his older brother Fred? Those poor souls had to make do on half a billion each. We need heroes for sure, but I think we may have to look beyond the libertarians of the world to find them.