Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (17 page)

There is no better time to implement radical changes than after a world-wide catastrophe. (W. Warren Wagar)
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Through the ‘80s
also included other concepts from the 1930s Technocracy movement, such as “circular economy” – a concept with would re-emerge 30 years later (see chapter 11). More far-reaching technological solutions were also presented at the conference. For the first time, transhumanist ideas were introduced, presenting the vision of a technologically upgraded human with a brain connected to a computer (
"Symbionic Minds”
).
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The development of a technologically improved human and artificial intelligence was also discussed at the conference by later New Age guru, Barbara Marx Hubbard from the International Committee for the Future. These ideas were thereafter presented to the general public via science fiction films and popular science magazines.

The ultimate computer will be grown in a petri dish implanted inside the skull, and interfaced with the brain. (Lewis M. Branscomb, head of R&D at IBM,
Populär Vetenskap
, 1/1982)

Chairman of the closing session was Maurice Strong from the Club of Rome, who would later include many of the conference ideas in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (and after his chairmanship of UNEP become executive director of Petro-Canada oil company).
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Soon, the Rockefeller family’s long-time goals of reducing population in developing nations would be transformed into climate change action and reducing fossil fuel consumption.

It was time to create “a common future” for humanity.

6. ONE WORLD

When the Fund began making grants to address climate change issues in 1985 it was difficult to persuade citizens and policy makers of the significance of this threat to life on the planet. Today, the knowledge base as well as perceptions of the problems that could result from global warming are dramatically different from what they were just five years ago.
(Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Annual Report 1989)
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ONE FAMILY

After the family turbulence at the end of the 1970s, the Rockefeller family now agreed to strive for unity by sharing a common vision about creating a more just world without rasism and prejudice; eradication of poverty; improving education; and finally figuring out how humanity could survive without degrading the environment.
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The overarching goal was global interdependence. The family would work in unison to realise the utopian vision of sustainable development. Few, however, realised what this vision would mean when implemented in the real world.

The One World Programme

From the mid-1980s, family efforts were primarily focused on getting climate change awareness onto the international political agenda. They had already laid the foundation decades earlier by founding scientific institutions and funding climate research. RBF now openly started funding organisations and scientists working to make climate change a political issue.

The RBF began grantmaking on climate change in 1984 and has consistently maintained an interest in climate change through this entire period. The RBF’s work on climate change can be thought of in four phases, which we briefly describe here.

The first phase, stretching from 1984 to 1992, focused on basic research on science and policy. Two strategies underpinned this phase of grantmaking: 1) distilling consensus on climate science and, 2) moving the discussion of climate change from the scientific community into the policy arena. (Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
Sustainable Development Program Review 2005–2010
)
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The ambitions for what later came to be known as “sustainable development” were implemented within the framework of RBFs new One World Programme, which had been developed by the leader of the next generation, David Rockefeller Jr. at request of chairman David Rockefeller.

The purpose of the project was to realise the Rockefeller family’s common vision. It was initiated in 1982, and implementation started in 1983.

The planning committee included cousins Larry Rockefeller and Abby Milton O’Neill; Lucy Rockefeller’s husband Jeremy Waletzky; and board members Gerald Edelman (Nobel laureate in Biology from Rockefeller University) and Peter J. Goldmark. Goldmark would later implement the ideas of the One World Programme in his position as president of Rockefeller Foundation (1988–97).

Committee members were carefully chosen. David wanted the most apt to take the lead in passing on the family legacy. There was no room for compromise or chance.

The RBF Board of Directors

In 1981, Thornton Bradshaw (ARCO oil company and Aspen Institute) was elected to the board of directors of RBF, joined in 1984 by former chairman of the American delegation at the Stockholm Conference and friend of Laurance Rockefeller, Russell Train

Laurance himself resigned from RBF in 1982 and stayed on as advisor only, while delving into fringe interests such as New Age, Egyptology, and UFO research (later including Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project).
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Some of the older cousins had already been given seats on the RBF board since the end of the 1950s. The younger ones had been trained in charity work in the smaller foundation Rockefeller Family Fund (founded in 1967 by John, Laurance, Nelson, David, and Martha Rockefeller). Now they were considered experienced enough to take over RBF and able to add their own priorities.

In addition to David Jr., who succeeded his father as President of RBF in November 1987, the board included Nelson's son Steven, Babs’ daughter Abby Milton O’Neill, Laurance's son Larry, and David's daughter Neva.

During the 1970s, John’s son Jay (John D. IV) had been active in Rockefeller Foundation, and was also invited to the Trilateral Commission in 1977, served as Governor of West Virginia (1977–85) and U.S. Senator for West Virgina (1985–2015). With the exception of Jay and Steven, the cousins kept a much lower profile than their famous fathers.

RBFs Green Profile

The One World program consolidated the environmentally oriented profile that RBF had developed in previous years. It stated that the nations had become more economically and ecologically dependent on each other and that the problems of resource consumption, environmental degradation and international security could only be solved through cooperation at regional or global level.
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These goals were shared by the Trilateral Commission (which included David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Gianni Agnelli in the TriCom Steering Committee); The world had to be united to deal with these threats from several fronts.
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David had undertaken to be one of the central driving forces in implementing them. Chase Manhattan's private airplane and David's well-established contacts with world leaders would now come in handy.

In 1984, Larry Rockefeller (member of the RBF Board of Directors and lawyer at the Natural Resource Defence Council) had wanted to strengthen organizations working with climate, acid rain, the greenhouse effect, biodiversity, population, toxins, and water – now with climate as top priority.
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Sir Crispin Tickell

The climate concerns had previously been raised in the European Community and at the G7 meeting in 1979 by British diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell (related to Julian Huxley of UNESCO). Tickell was a sherpa for G7 and 1977–1981
Chef de Cabinet
to British Roy Jenkins, chairman of the
European Union
(and also a member of the Trilateral Commission).
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Here, too, Henry Kissinger played a part. During his time as a fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs
³¹⁰
1975–76, Tickell had been commissioned to analyse how climate change could affect world politics.
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This resulted in the book
Climatic Change and World Affairs
.
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As advisor to Margret Thatcher, Tickell also brought it up the climate issue at the 1984 G7 Summit.
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Just like the Rockefeller family, Tickell was deeply engaged in the population issue and later became involved with the British organisation Population Matters which advocates a drastic population reduction in order to preserve the planet and its resources.
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The
Geneva
World Climate Conferences

In 1979, 1990, and 2009, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) organised a series of World Climate Conferences in Geneva, Switzerland. At the first of these conferences, prepared by William W. Kellogg
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and Jesse Ausubel (IIASA and Sloan Foundation), global cooperation for predicting and preventing any potential impact of human activity on the climate had been called for. The scientific foundation prepared for the conference was based to a large extent on Carroll L. Wilson’s 1971 SMIC climate report.

The Charney Report

Later in 1979, together with veterans George Woodwell (from Conservation Foundation), David Keeling, and Roger Revelle, geophysicist Gordon J. F. MacDonald
³¹⁶
wrote a memorandum about the effect of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere for the Nixon administration’s Council on Environmental Quality (of which MacDonald was a member 1970–72, when Russell Train from Conservation Foundation was chairman).
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The Carter administration and the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, James Gustave Speth (from National Resources Defence Council) responded by assigning the NAS Climate Research Board, under Jule G. Charney
from MIT, to investigate it further
. The NAS panel included Bert Bolin from University of Stockholm.

The resulting
Charney Report
gave additional support to MacDonald’s and Woodwell’s memorandum.
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Bolin would thereafter be given one of the leading roles in anchoring the theory.

World Resources Institute

In 1982, by government mandate, James Gustave Speth (who would later become a member of the board of RBF) founded World Resources Institute, with funding from MacArthur Foundation. Speth gave Woodwell and later Bert Bolin and Maurice Strong places on the board.

There were close ties between the carbon dioxide theory proponents, and all were more or less linked to the Rockefeller network. The pieces were slowly but surely falling into place, with RBF as a coordinating force.

The 1980 Villach Climate Conference

In 1980, the year after the first World Climate Conference, a series of intergovernmental climate conferences were initiated.

The first was held in the little Austrian town Villach, sponsored by UNEP, ICSU, and (WMO), with Bert Bolin as chairman. The goal was, according to UNEP Director Mostafa Tolba, to provide nations with guidance on the climate issue. This laid the foundation for the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

As there was still at this point much uncertainty about the scientific foundation of the CO
₂
theory, it was decided at the first meeting that a thorough analysis of causes and consequences would be prepared by Bert Bolin at the International Meteorological Institute (IMI) in Stockholm.
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The results were to be presented at the next Villach meeting in 1985.

The RBF Climate Programme

In June 1985, RBF vice-president Russell Philips assigned an official at RBF, Thomas Wahman, to start looking into the research on climate change. Part of Wahman’s assignment was to award one or two $100,000 donations for policy-driven research which would alert policy makers, private leaders, and the general public to the problem, as well as attracting funding from other foundations. Wahman was expected to present a proposal that would make Larry Rockefeller “enthusiastic.” The climate issue was to be the flagship of Rockefeller’s One World Program.
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In September 1985, after consulting Gus Speth and other experts, Wahman submitted the report on climate change to RBF executive officials. He stated that he had never faced a research field with such large uncertainties.

He pointed out that it would be very difficult to secure an international treaty on the regulation of carbon dioxide.

Strategies for moving the climate issue to the political forefront were suggested. This was something RBF was very good at. Wahman suggested that RBF support biologists and ecologists focused on climate change, and to use the Brundtland World Commission on Environment and Development, to draw up a world-wide action plan.

The idea was accepted by the Brundtland Commission’s Chief Secretary Jim MacNeill and by British professor and ecologist Gordon Goodman from the Beijer Institute.
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The Beijer Institute was thereafter chosen by RBF to execute the plan, together with World Resources Institute, Woods Hole Research Center, and Environmental Defence Fund.
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The four institutes soon became RBF’s main grantees in the areas of Environment and Energy. It was a very strategic plan.

The 1985 Villach Climate Conference

In October 1985, the second Villach Climate Conference was held, organised by IMI and Beijer Institute and sponsored by ICSU, UNEP, and WMO.

At this conference, Bert Bolin’s study,
The greenhouse effect, climatic change, and ecosystems
,
initiated after the first Villach Conference, was presented.
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Rockefeller henchman Gordon Goodman, chairman of Bolin’s panel on CO
₂
emissions in the atmosphere, now declared that scientists must play a more politically active role in eliciting an international response to climate change.

It was clear to Goodman that science “was at a new dawn” due to the climate issue. Despite uncertainties, he felt that the global climate was changing due to human activities and that the debate needed to be focused on how an intervention could best be handled. This meant “channeling available resources in such a way that we can understand, predict, and possibly make direct changes in the global climate for the benefit of mankind.”
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UNEP chairman Mostafa Tolba (recipient of the private climate tuition at Aspen Institute) declared in his speech that time was ripe for a serious discussion between politicians and industry leaders on how to lower carbon dioxide emissions. He called for an international committee that could encourage research, evaluate data, and issue action plans for governments, international organisations, and the general public.
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