Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (22 page)

Getting major corporations motivated to join in was an essential step in RBFs climate strategy, just as it was for GLOBE.

The business community is a critical voice for countering the oft-heard argument that policy regulating carbon dioxide will harm the U.S. economy. Forward-thinking business leaders have been quite vocal about the opportunities associated with the new energy economy and are positioning their companies—both internally and externally—to take advantage of climate change policy. Further, many of these companies are recognizing that ‘going green’ is good for their bottom lines. Grantees: Ceres, Clean Economy Network, American Council on Renewable Energy, The Climate Group (Rockefeller Brothers Fund, “Building Constituency Support for Policy Action”, S
ustainable Development Program Review 2005–2010
)
⁴²⁷

In 2004 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund established the organisation The Climate Group in London.
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It started to engage “newly converted" large corporations and local authorities to implement climate measures that favoured continued economic growth. There was money to be made on saving the world from the great climate disaster.

The Climate Group is an international coalition of some of the world’s most powerful leaders. It is globally recognized for its exceptional impact on the climate debate, and respected as one of the world’s most influential non-profits. Its membership is made up of over 100 major brands, sub-national governments and international institutions. The combined revenue of its corporate members is estimated to be in excess of US$ trillion, while its regional government partners represent almost half a billion people.
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UK Prime Minister Tony Blair also got involved and took part in the organisation’s events. The Climate Group started advocating the use of smart technology for reducing CO
₂
emissions, including LED-lamps, smart grids, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and electric vehicles.

This was the path of ecological modernisation and differed from the environmental movement’s focus on a simpler way of life and zero growth. Both perspectives were, however, flagships in the Rockefeller family’s armada for creating a world shift.

The fear of climate change had not yet taken hold with the general public. However, this would soon change when a self-confident former Vice-President would make a grand entry on the climate arena, just as media got obsessed with reporting on freak weather events…

8. EARTH IS RUNNING A FEVER

Earth is running a fever. We have measured it. We know the cause: the carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that we are pumping into the atmosphere. We also know if nothing changes, Earth’s fever will continue to rise and things will get much worse. And yet there is a cure; in fact, there is an array of real and executable remedies, and there are many physicians poised to tackle this most consequential challenge of our time (Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Annual
Review
2005)

CLIMATE POLITICS

F
rom 2005, everything was about climate change. In February 2005, just as the Kyoto Protocol was implemented, the European Commission issued the press release “Winning the Battle Against Global Climate Change.” If nothing was done to curb CO
₂
emissions, it warned, the result could be rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and eventually even “catastrophic events” such as an interrupted Gulf stream.
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The doomsday rhetoric was now reaching Biblical proportions.

RBF Sustainable Development Program

This was the year when Rockefeller Brothers Fund decided to use the lion’s share of their
Sustainable Development
Program funding on fighting climate change.
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David Rockefeller also decided to bequeath some of his personal funds to RBF after his death, which would increase the fund’s assets by 30%. RBF and its next generation chairman, Steven Rockefeller, were now convinced that there was no longer any doubt that global warming was real and that the debate was over.

From our vantage point as a philanthropy that has been supporting work on climate change for more than 20 years, it is clear to us that the scientific certainty of global warming is no longer worth debating. The naysayers have been revealed to be few, well paid, and partisan—self-serving ideologues on a premeditated mission to distract us from properly tending to the burning issue of our time. From now on let’s just supply them with a toga and a fiddle and pack them off to Rome. We have no time to waste in shouldering the burden of responsibility that falls on our shoulders. (Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Annual
Review
2005)
⁴³²

The RBF Annual Report also quoted James Hansen’s claim that the earth would be a completely different planet if carbon dioxide levels were not stabilised within the next 10 years. The climate was seen as a global issue, affecting all aspects of human existence.

The warming of the climate is no longer merely, or primarily, an environmental issue. It is an energy issue; a business issue; an investor issue; a moral issue; a security issue; an agricultural issue; a coastal issue; a religious issue; an urban issue; in short, a global issue that touches every conceivable facet of human existence.
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The Rockefeller family’s foundations were very well prepared and had assembled an army of agents of change.

The RBF has supported ‘allied voices for climate action’ that include businesses, investors, evangelicals, farmers, sportsmen, labor, military leaders, national security hawks, veterans, youth, and governors and mayors. (Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
Sustainable Development Program Review
2005-2010
)
⁴³⁴

A total overhaul of the global economy, with a phasing out of fossil energy, was suggested by RBF. CO
₂
emissions needed to be lowered by 60-80% before 2050. The Rockefellers now decided to make global warming their top priority during the critical decade to come.

The climate threat was presented as a global problem requiring multilateral collaboration, under American leadership. However, the initiative on the global political arena initially came from Britain, just like in the 1980s (through Margret Thatcher and her advisor Crispin Tickell).

The G8 Gleneagles Summit

In 2005, the 4th Ministerial Meeting of G8 Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development was held in Gleneagles, Scotland. At this Summit, climate change, along with the threat of terrorism, was a top priority on the global political agenda.

GLOBE was the only NGO invited.
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The chairman of the G8, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, assigned GLOBE with the mission to gather legislators from leading political parties in the G8, the European Parliament, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. This was a first step towards including more nations and was initially called G8+5. After the Gleneagles G8 Summit, GLOBE got a more important role in anchoring the climate agenda in national parliaments around the world, and also got direct access to the important guidelines drawn up by this increasingly influential forum.

In the European Parlament this can be illustrated by how easily Anders Wijkman, chairman of GLOBE EU and later chairman of the Club of Rome, in November 2005 got his report (based on the European Commission memo),
Winning the Battle Against Global Climate Change,
adopted by the Parliament.
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Through the 2007 G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue, initiated in 2006 by Tony Blair, legislators were provided with advice and information by business executives to ensure that legislation was not only politically viable but also practicable. GLOBE thereafter came to function as a direct link to the European Parliament and other arenas for political policy making around the world, and become a major player in the global political machinery.

In 2012, 300 MPs from 86 nations were gathered at GLOBEs World Summit for Legislators. As of 2018 there were 27 GLOBE subdivisions over the world, coordinated by the head office in Brussels.
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Global Warning

Before the Gleneagles Summit, psychoanalyst David Wasdell had prepared a document called
Global Warning
. It was first presented during the World Environment Day on June 5, 2005, at a symposium led by Crispin Tickell
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before it was handed to the delegates at the G8 in order to push the climate issue higher up on the agenda, alarm the general public, and get a planetary emergency declared.
Global Warning
stated that earth’s resources were inadequate for sustaining a growing population. It reiterated the recommendations of
The Brundtland report
, that humans should not consume more than 88% of sustainable planetary resources per annum (leaving 12% for other species), and warned that this number was now 120% and increasing.
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We have a narrow remaining window to engage global strategic planning and mobilisation, followed by a maximum of fifty years to achieve the transition, to scale down resource usage, to terminate inequitable capital accumulation and begin the long time reduction of global population.

Clearly, the size of the world’s population was viewed as the greatest problem, echoing the Neo-Malthusian message of RBF and the Rockefeller Commission’s population report from 1972.

The solution advocated was – again – global governance of the environment, reduction of ecological footprints, and addressing the psychodynamics of human behaviour in order to reduce the risk of a “global social psychosis” and “pre-traumatic stress syndrome” (denial, paralysis, paranoia, aggression or spiritual refuge into “the passivity of a meditative trance state awaiting rescue by forces from the beyond”) in response to the threats and stress experienced during the transformation to a sustainable Utopia.
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The document had the desired effect. At the meeting, world leaders declared their unified support for these ideas.

Tony Blair (who had been recruited as advisor to the Chase Manhattan Bank after his political career) seized the opportunity to step forward as a champion for this cause.

What I wanted to do therefore at this summit was establish the following, and I believe we have done this. I wanted an agreement that this was indeed a problem, that climate change is a problem, that human activity is contributing to it, and that we have to tackle it; secondly, that we have to tackle it with urgency; thirdly, that in order to do that we have to slow down, stop and then in time reverse the rising greenhouse gas emissions; and finally, we have to put in place a pathway to a new dialogue when Kyoto expires in 2012. (Tony Blair)
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The
Global Warning
report marked the starting point of an intensified campaign to give the climate issue greater impact politically and in the media. The United Nations Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC), and the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) had, according to Wasdell, not generated the desired results. The national interests of several countries and the fossil industry had blocked efficacy, and there was also political opposition.
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A few months after the G8 meeting, Wasdell was invited to the Club or Rome’s annual conference by Club of Rome chairman, Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordania (also a member of the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations). In Wasdell’s view the Club of Rome had the perfect competence to bring the message to the world. It had a sizeable network and
Global Warning
had been issued as an e-book to all members.

Wasdell's advice to the Club of Rome included:

a)
declaring “a global emergency”;

b)
branding an excess of CO
₂
as an “ecological toxin” that could have catastrophic effect on the global biosphere;

c)
presenting a strategy that could take the world to “zero CO
₂
” emissions as quickly as possible; and

d)
to develop institutional instruments for handling the transition. The survival of the planet required a “psychodynamic renaissance.”

He closed by saying,

Now is the time for all people to come to the aid of the planet. Its future is in our hands.

Wasdell was offered to head the British branch of Club of Rome but declined so as to not cause an imbalance in relation to other institutions. However, a close collaboration still remained.
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He also worked on a conceptual background analysis called
The Feedback Crisis in Climate Change
(2005) which concluded,

The analysis indicates that there is a critical threshold beyond which the process becomes self-sustaining and can no longer be brought back under control by any reduction in GHG emissions. Should that threshold be crossed, the resultant ‘extreme event’ in the climate system could lead to the extinction of life as we know it within the global biosphere.
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His thoughts were very similar to those of Potsdam Institute Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber's theory of “tipping points.” Wasdell and Schellnhuber would later combine their ideas in the Apollo–Gaia project, proposed by the father of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, and Martin Lees (British Royal Society and Club of Rome). This resulted in
Beyond the Tipping Point
(2006).
⁴⁴⁵
Wasdell presented the report at the Climate Institute in Washington and was – surprisingly – met with skepticism from its Chief Scientific Officer who said that both temperatures and CO
₂
levels had been significantly higher historically and that there wasn’t really a problem.

This objection, however, didn’t have much impact. The report was welcomed by the political elite and UN diplomats such as Sir Crispin Tickell (Club of Rome member and founding chairman of the Climate Institute).

Now the doors swung open to the European Environment Agency and the European Commission. Schellnhuber had been appointed scientific advisor to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and to the Government of Germany. He could thereby develop the climate agenda of both the EU and the G8 group.

The idea of “tipping points” rapidly spread to important players such as the newly appointed executive director of Stockholm Environmental Institute, Johan Rockström, as well as to Al Gore (to whom Wasdell had become advisor on recommendation of the president of the European Environment Agency, Dr. Jacquie McGlade).
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The Meridian Programme

Wasdell had earlier been involved in a project called the Meridian Programme (originally called the Manhattan Project of Behavioural Science) which had been initiated in 1997, during the last phase of the Cold War.

It originated from discussions onboard a ship in Moscow in 1985 where 24 behaviourists had gathered to develop technologies that could help create world peace. During the meeting, “A second Manhattan Project” was called for.
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In their technocratic plan the threat of climate change would later come to play a very important role.

In preparation for a coming Peace Conference, attended by American and Soviet behaviourists, Wasdell had reviewed the
Brundtland Report
. The question was how the environmental agenda most effectively could be implemented on a global scale. He thought the report failed to answer the question how the desired changes would be implemented and saw a need for a psychodynamic analysis on how large social systems function under stress, as well as a practical ability to get these insights spread to and adopted at all levels of all institutions working with the future well-being of humanity. This would require the creation of a transnational network of social scientists, analysts, researchers and agents of change, including his own educational research trust, Unit for Research Into Changing Institutions (URCHIN), established in 1981.