Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (18 page)

This second Villach meeting resulted in, among other things, the creation of the Advisory Group of Greenhouse Gases (AGGG), with Bert Bolin, Kenneth Hare and Gordon Goodman as members, and funding from RBF, Rockefeller Foundation and German Marshall Fund.
³²⁶

While Tolba was to approach the U.S. presidential administration, time had now come to issue specific policy recommendations, with the assistance of RBF.

Wahman had also been invited to Villach but was unable to attend and instead sent Michael Oppenheimer, Chief Scientist of the Environmental Defence Fund, to report to RBF and, together with Gordon Goodman, develop strategies, using the Brundtland Commission as a mechanism for drawing up a ten-year action plan for battling climate change.
³²⁷

Goodman, Oppenheimer, and Woodwell were then assigned by Wahman to organise an international scientific symposium, led by Woodwell, with a policy workshop led by Goodman. The steering committee included Bolin and Hare from AGGG, Jill Jäger from Beijer Institute, Carl Christian Wallén from UNEP, and W. C. Clark from IIASA.

The planned activities were intended to result in a report to be included in the final
Brundtland Report
. In December 1985, RBF granted $100,000 to the Brundtland Commission, but the main responsibility for the sub-report was later transferred to Beijer Institute.
³²⁸

Trilateral assistance

Heeding the advice from RBF and Goodman an increased activity to put the climate on the political agenda now ensued, with assistance from David Rockefeller’s TriCom network.

In June 1986, Woodwell and Oppenheimer, with GISS/NASA-scientist James Hansen, had warned about climate change at a U.S. Senate hearing, initiated by Republican TriCom member John H. Chafee.
³²⁹

In October 1986, Woodwell’s symposium was held in collaboration with World Resources Institute.

A month later, Karl-Heinz Narjes, Vice-President of European Commission (member of the Trilateral Commission’s executive committee and Council on Foreign Relations), held a meeting at the European Parliament with 60 leading climate scientists from Europe and the U.S. to evaluate the consequences of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
³³⁰

The RBF Climate Workshops in Villach and Bellagio

RBF went on to organise two climate workshops in Europe. The first Management Issue Workshop was held on September 28 to October 2, 1987, in Villach, Austria. The other, Policy Development Workshop, was held at Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy. The workshop included representatives from the European Commission, the Swedish government, the German Bundestag and the British Commonwealth Secretariat. It was funded by RBF, Rockefeller Foundation
³³¹
, the German Marshall Fund, W. Alton Jones Foundation (founded by oil magnate W. Alton Jones) and the Governments of Sweden and Austria.
³³²

The final draft, written by Jill Jäger from the Beijer Institute (with the help of Goodman, Oppenheimer and Woodwell), included recommendations for governments to immediately rethink their energy strategies for meeting emission requirements. In order to tackle the climate challenges, an institutional change in world governance was also called for.

This proposal happened to coincide with the wishes of their powerful sponsors – and with RBFs stated goals in
Prospect for America: the Rockefeller Panel Reports
(1961).
³³³
The initiative and the agenda were clearly intertwined with Rockefeller family interests.
The operation had been planned and orchestrated from RBF’s room 5600 in the Rockefeller Center.

The workshop was described by several participants as a way of transforming scientific facts into political truths.
³³⁴

‘A little money, some perseverance, some strategic thinking and planning coupled with a perception of the probable’ could ‘get some things done on the world stage.’ (Thomas Wahman)
³³⁵

The Bellagio conclusions would then serve as basis for the upcoming Climate Conference in Toronto the following year.

The Brundtland Report

The World Commission on Environment and Development project was initiated by UNEP, following a UN decision in 1983. The mission was to formulate a global agenda for change. As always, a more effective international cooperation was called for in order to manage the ecological and economic interdependence.
³³⁶
The project was launched just as RBF was planning its new One World strategy with a very similar goal.

The Brundtland Commission was headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland (member of the Trilateral Commission) and included Maurice Strong (UNEP, TriCom), Susanna Agnelli (sister of Gianni Agnelli) and the American representative, William D. Ruckelshaus (Monsanto, TriCom, CFR, World Resources Institute).

A sustainable development can be defined as a development that satisfies the needs of today without compromising the possibility of future generations to fulfil their needs. (
Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development
1988:7)

The report’s main author, Jim MacNeill, from Institute for Research on Public Policy in Canada, had close contacts with RBF and later became co-author of the Trilateral Commission’s
Beyond Interdependence
(1991). Gordon Goodman was special advisor and wrote the chapter on energy, in which he inserted concerns over climate change, referring to the Villach meeting in 1985, where it had been established that, “no nation has either the political mandate or the economic power to combat climatic change alone.”

The Brundtland report was the last in a series of three reports. The titles had a “common” theme which would be re-used by Pope Francis in 2915.

1. The first was the Brandt Commission’s
   North–South: A Programme for Surviva
   l (1980). This commission was initiated by Robert McNamara 1977 and led by Willy Brandt. The
   Brandt Report
   described international development and proposed the need for a large-scale transfer of resources from industrialised to developing countries (in other words, related to NIEO). Three years later, the Brandt Commission felt compelled by the financial situation to publish a follow-up report,
   Common Crisis North–South: Cooperation for World Recovery
   .
   

1. The second report was the Palme Commission’s
   Common Security: A Blueprint for Surviva
   l (1982), about nuclear weapons and peace. It, too, concluded that individual nations could no longer seek security at each other’s expense and proposed that lasting peace could only be achieved through cooperation.
   

1. The Brundtland Report,
   Our Common Future
   :
   World Commission on Environment and Development
   , was published in June 1987. It was a continuation of the work initiated at the Stockholm Conference and included guidelines on how future politics needed to change in order to achieve the visions of “sustainable development.”
   ³³⁷
   

Within a few decades, sustainable development would grow into a global doctrine for humanity, based on fear of climate change – all to realise the vision of One World.

The 1988 Toronto Climate Conference

In the beginning of 1988 Oppenheimer reported to Wahman that the meetings in Villach and Bellagio had been successful. A policy response to the final document from Bellagio was needed. The report was published on June 7, and presented at coordinated press conferences in Washington, Stockholm, and Toronto.
³³⁸
A few weeks later, the 1988 Conference of the Atmosphere took place in Toronto, led by Ontario Premier Howard Ferguson (who had also attended the Bellagio and Villach conferences) with Gro Harlem Brundtland, and with Jill Jäger, Gordon Goodman, and Michael Oppenheimer on the steering committee. It gathered a number of political leaders and heads of state and had the desired effect on participants.

The climate issue had now grown into a million dollar venture.

The climate disasters threatening the planet can only be compared to a world-wide nuclear war. (Swedish Liberal Party leader Bengt Westerberg paraphrasing the conclusion of the Toronto Conference)
³³⁹

The 1988 Senate Climate Hearing

One of the Toronto Conference attendees was U.S. Senator and TriCom member Timothy Wirth.

Only a week before the conference, Wirth had organised the famous U.S. Senate Hearing in which GISS/NASA scientist James Hansen declared that he was 99% sure that the high summer temperatures that had been registered in the U.S. in 1988 were due to the greenhouse effect.
³⁴⁰
In a candid interview for the investigative TV show
Frontline
two decades later, Tim Wirth openly admitted to brazenly manipulating the hearing by picking a strategic date and sabotaging the air conditioning (!) to create unbearable heat in the hearing room:

Believe it or not, we called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6 or June 9 or whatever it was, so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo: It was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. It was stiflingly hot that summer. (…)

What we did was [we] went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room… So Hansen's giving this testimony, you've got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn't appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony. (Tim Wirth 2007)
³⁴¹

Just as during Kissinger’s address to the UN General Assembly 14 years earlier, local weather became a powerful ally in getting the message across. Few of other climate agreed with Hansen on his conclusions at the time.
³⁴²
The hearing, however, still gave echoes around the world and the climate issue got its political breakthrough.
³⁴³

In a speech to the Royal Society in London in September 1988, British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher warned of three changes in the atmospheric chemistry; the increase of greenhouse gasses, the thinning of the ozone layer, and the effects of acid rain on soil, lakes and forests. She also pointed out the success of previous efforts to reduce city smog and clean up the Thames.
³⁴⁴
The speech had been written by her scientific advisor, Sir Crispin Tickell.

In Sweden, the Toronto Climate Conference resulted in a parliamentary debate on October 19, 1988, where Conservative Party leader Carl Bildt (later TriCom member) pointed out the seriousness of the climate threat:

We must be able to address the new threats to our environment, besides the previous ones. I think Swedish environmental debate largely seems stuck in the rather outdated views of the 1970s nuclear power debate. This risks leading politics down the wrong path. Now, on a global scale, there are often other and far more serious problems requiring our attention. Around the world the threat of climate change, as a result of fossil fuel use, is being discussed.

What both Gro Harlem Brundtland, from her political viewpoint, and Margaret Thatcher, from a completely different political viewpoint, are talking about is the possibly greatest global threat to our environment for the rest of this century… This spring we on the Conservative side—against Social Democrat vote—actually pushed through the resolution that carbon dioxide emissions will not be permitted to increase. (Carl Bildt, Swedish Conservative Party leader 1986–99, Prime Minister 1991–94).
³⁴⁵

It may be noted that in the 1980s, the political interest in climate change came as much from Republicans/Conservatives as from the Librals/Social Democrats – a fact later forgotten.

The Founding of IPCC

After the 1985 Villach meeting, Mostafa Tolba had advised the U.S. Secretary of State, George Shultz, to adopt policies for mitigating climate change.
³⁴⁶

The Reagan Administration suggested an intergovernmental panel for studying climate science. Both the Department of State, Department of the Interior and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were involved in the process of drafting a proposal. The proposal was then sent to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) where it was adopted after a few amendments.
³⁴⁷

On March 25, 1988, an invitation was sent to member states to join the panel.
³⁴⁸
The coordinated efforts led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) by WMO and UNEP.

On December 6, 1988, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution where climate change was declared as a common concern for all of humanity and advised all organisations and programmes within the UN system to support IPCC. Now there was an organisation which could provide analyses with greater authority and issue policy recommendations to governments and NGOs.
³⁴⁹
Bert Bolin became its first chairman, at the recommendation of Mostafa Tolba.