Rockefeller – Controlling the Game
Rockefeller
Controlling the Game
Jacob Nordangård, Ph.D.
Copyright © Jacob Nordangård & Stiftelsen Pharos 2019
All rights reserved
EPUB edition 2022
Cover art: Kimmie Fransson
kimmiefransson.se
Edit and layout: Inger Nordangård
Primary font: Sorts Mill Goudy
Publisher: Pharos Media Productions
Norrköping, Sweden
info@
pharosmedia.se
ISBN: 978-91-985843-9-4
About the author
Jacob Nordang
å
rd is a Swedish
researcher
, author, public speaker, and musician. Ph.D. in Technology and Social Change;
Master of Social Science in Geography; Master of Social Science in Culture and Media Production.
Founder of Stiftelsen Pharos (Pharos Foundation) and CEO of Pharos Media Productions. He has previously worked as a
graphic designer,
editor, press officer, and Senior lecturer at the universities of Linköping, Jönköping, and Stockholm.
Jacob is also the singer and songwriter of the metal band Wardenclyffe, with lyrics inspired by his research. Each of his books, including his dissertation, has come with an optional soundtrack. The new concept album
Temple of Solomon
, has been published one track at a time each month (July 2021—February 2022) with an a public lecture about the subject of the song.
jacobnordangard.se
pharosmedia.se
stiftelsen-pharos.org
wardenclyffe.se
Contents
11. THE 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Appendix A. Rockefeller Family
Author’s Preface
This book is the result of some questions that arose when working on my dissertation,
Ordo Ab Chao: The Political History of Biofuels in the European Union
(2012).
My interest in energy and environmental issues, as well as reflections on our increasingly technological society, began in 1998 when I took a Social Science course on Cybernetics and Transhumanism, and was introduced to Jeremy Rifkin's book
Entropy
(1981). His grim conclusions had a strong impact on my view of the world.
Shortly thereafter, I joined the Swedish Green Party and became active on the City Planning Board in Norrköping. At that time, I could hardly imagine how closely related the ideas of cybernetics were to Rifkin's theories.
In 2004, I stumbled upon the Peak Oil theory and became very concerned over what would happen if basic functions of society could no longer be maintained due to energy shortages. This led me back to the university to study these areas more in depth. It surprised me that the climate issue at that time so dominated the debate while few spoke of Peak Oil.
My surprise became even greater when, in the spring of 2009, I was working on a background chapter on the origin and history of climate change and found that the powerful Rockefeller oil and finance family had been deeply involved in bringing the climate issue onto the international political agenda! This seemed highly contradictory, given their great influence over both the oil industry and the economic globalisation of recent decades.
I continued to dig deeper for my climate history chapter contribution to the book
Domedagsklockan
(2013), where new connections were found and investigated. However, my analysis ended with the founding of the United Nations Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the first UN Rio Summit in 1992. This meant that there was much more material to research about the decades that followed.
After writing the autobiographical
An Inconvenient Journey
in 2015, about what happens when you challenge powerful interests connected to the
university and the difficulties getting one’s research results out when contradicting general presuppositions, I wanted to continue researching the Rockefeller family's involvement in world politics and find answers to several remaining questions.
Why had the Rockefeller family funded and influenced climate research since the 1950s and helped shape climate policy since the 1980s? And why did Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2014 announce that they would divest from all of their fossil energy holdings? Why attack the very industry on which their immense wealth was founded? What was their motive in their own words – and how did it all begin?
My digging resulted in a long article series in which I followed the family from the founding of Standard Oil and Rockefeller Foundation, up to the aftermath of the Paris Agreement, with the declaration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in January 2016. The article series was then expanded upon, resulting in this book. This in-depth research project that took almost two years to complete and was made possible through the large quantity of material made available on the Internet. The Rockefeller family's foundations’ own reports and annual reports formed the basis for further research. I also read biographies and articles about the family to get a better picture of the most prominent members and learn what ambitions drove each of them.
My main focus has been the Rockefeller family's involvement in climate research and politics, but the actions and motives of some of their allies are also mentioned, as well as the family's influence on the development of modern medicine, family planning, agriculture, art, architecture, behavioural science, information technology, and politics.
It should be pointed out that I do not see my research as an absolute or complete account of the history of climate change research and politics. This story only gives
one
perspective on how this issue has come to grow to the proportions it has today. However, the Rockefeller family has undoubtedly been one of the most influential global players through its top position in American business, close contacts with the White House, and as one of the world's leading private research funders. With their immense financial power they have, in collaboration with other influential business partners, been able to anchor the climate issue both scientifically and politically.
Finally, I want to thank Hans Holmén and Staffan Wennberg for their manuscript reading, comments and financial support for the project, and readers who have encouraged and helped fund my writings. And last but not least my wife Inger for her editing, layout, translations, and invaluable support during the work.
Jacob Nordangård, Ph.D.
PROLOGUE
The Rockefeller Family Fund is proud to announce its intent to divest from fossil fuels. While the global community works to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, it makes little sense—financially or ethically—to continue holding investments in these companies.
1
In March 2016, the small foundation Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) announced, with much fanfare, that they would be divesting from all holdings in fossil fuels, including the Rockefeller family's old crown jewel, ExxonMobil. The Paris Agreement had given a clear signal: if humanity and the ecosystem were to survive the coming decades, fossil fuels would have to stay in the ground.
At the same time, RFF accused ExxonMobil of having misled the public and of having spread doubts about the theory of anthropogenic climate change. An Exxon spokesman said,
It’s not surprising that they’re divesting
from the company since they’re already funding a conspiracy against us
.
2
Less than two years earlier, during the great Climate March in New York, the bigger foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, also announced that due to their fight against climate change they would start divesting from coal and oil sands. The Rockefeller family, having for nearly a decade tried to pressure their old family company Exxon into changing their position on climate change,
3
now accused Exxon of having known about climate change since the 1980s and attempting to hide its implications from the public.
Around the same time, Exxon became subject of a real indictment by the state prosecutors in New York and California for having lied to their shareholders and the public about the seriousness of climate change.
4
The indictment was initiated by the Rockefeller-funded Climate Accountability Institute.
5
The oil industry, now joined in with social activists against neoliberalism and globalisation like Naomi Klein, and climate activists like Bill McKibben – both members of the Rockefeller-funded 350.org which organised the People's Climate March in 2014 and the Global Climate March in 2015.
It was a very odd situation where the old oil barons attacked the very business upon which their power and wealth had been built. The industry which had, for good and ill, enabled the 20th century industrial development, the agricultural revolution, the pharmaceutical industry, and mass motoring. The family that had made us dependent on oil was now taking a leading position against it, by declaring the burning of fossil fuels as immoral, destructive, and sinful, with mankind as the sinner.
Had they suddenly changed their position on moral grounds?
Perhaps not. Despite its eagerness to divest, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund would keep its shares in Exxon in order to “be able to continue exerting pressure”, while their largest foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, totally opposed any divestments in fossil energy. The family still had strong ties to its old company.
Looking closer at the Rockefeller family’s actions from the founding of Standard Oil to their climate activism today, their accusations against the
flagship company
appears to rather be part of a larger scheme pursued fo
r more than a century – a
plan to consolidate power on a world-wide scale and creating a world with a more effective Global Governance and a new economic system, Smart Globalization.
6
A technocratic world where the interdependent parts relinquish their sovereignty to serve a wider community under a planetary-wide institutional management.
This vision rings of Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan
and the old dream of the Omega Point where the world (man, economy, and ecology) is united into in a technologically interconnected and synchronised whole – a cybernetic World Organism. It was now time for the Great Transformation.
7
Behind the philanthropic façade one finds a desire to manage both the population and the planet’s natural resources by using Hegelian dialectics to reach the desired synthesis – a sustainable Utopia and a new economic system. All to save the world from the great climate catastrophe.
The age of nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the earth. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)