Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Robert F. Kennedy Jr

Author:Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2017-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Man Who Pioneered Fracking, and a Granddaughter’s Quest

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For the descendants of fossil fuel families, talking about their lives and their heritage doesn’t come easily. Many have simply followed their fathers’ lucrative but stained paths, the sons of Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson among them. Even those who harbor dark anxieties about their family legacies generally prefer to keep these feelings to themselves. Very few we sought out for this book were willing to go on-the-record about their families.

Anna Getty is one of those who couldn’t keep silent. The adopted great-granddaughter of J. Paul Getty, the oil tycoon once crowned the richest man in the world, has grown increasingly appalled by the behavior of big oil companies and other corporate giants. “It’s shocking and atrocious, and bad karma if you want to get into the spiritual sense,” she told the press, “All I can think is that [these corporate executives] just don’t care. They don’t care what is going to be left in 50 years, because they’re all going to be dead.”

Now in her forties, Getty has long had a passion for green living and a holistic lifestyle. She’s served on the boards of numerous environmental organizations, including the Environmental Working Group and Global Green. She quietly helps underwrite documentary films like Fuel, which promote renewable energy and biofuels as replacements for fossil fuels. Her second home, in Ojai, California, is off-the-grid and hosts an organic farm.

Getty is not the only oil heiress who has devoted herself to saving the planet. Based in western Massachusetts, Jenny Ladd, a Standard Oil heiress (her great-grandfather Charles Pratt became a partner of John D. Rockefeller in the 1870s), pursues a variety of philanthropic green activities, contributing to groups like Greenpeace, Bill McKibben’s 350.org, and an indigenous organization fighting the expansion of Canadian tar sands mining operations.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix is the granddaughter of Texas oil tycoon and notorious right-wing funder, H.L. Hunt. Now living in Brooklyn, she describes herself as a radical philanthropist and was deeply involved in the Occupy movement and the New Economy Coalition. She wrote in The Nation in 2014, “We can start by shifting the endowments of foundations and universities away from investment in fossil fuels and private prisons and into a renewable economy owned and operated by communities, with members accountable to each other and to future generations.”

Among the most interesting heiresses to a fossil fuel-related fortune is Katharine Lorenz. Since 2011, Lorenz has overseen the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, whose primary goal is to ensure that the natural gas shale drilling pioneered by her grandfather doesn’t exacerbate climate change and other environmental problems.

Lorenz’s Austin, Texas-based foundation has funded major studies on the impact of methane emissions caused by hydraulic fracturing (“fracking,” as it’s better known), and on how Texas can best meet the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. The foundation has also tried to find common ground between environmentalists and conservatives, hosting a gathering of those on the right who called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and a tax on carbon pollution.

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