Hurricane Katrina
In August 2005 hurricane Katrina struck with full force and caused devastation in New Orleans, while Central Europe was flooded and Portugal ravaged by wildfires. In political debates and the media these events were linked to climate change. The concept of climate change was starting to penetrate public awareness.
Around the same time the Rockefeller foundations intensified their funding of green NGOs campaigning for the threat of climate change and related issues. The campaigns grew ever more intense and aggressive until, only a few years later, it started to resemble a revivalist movement. The world needed saving. For some, climate change became a cash cow. The super-rich philanthrocapitalists now joined in the fight against climate change and unholy alliances were formed.
Al Gore – the Climate Messiah
2006 the threat of climate change became truly mainstream through the documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
, written by and starring former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore.
Gore entered the political arena in the late 1970s and was part of the inner circle through membership both in the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations.
Back in the late 1960s, he had received tuition and been shown diagrams over rising CO
2
levels by Roger Revelle at Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies, and had been giving lectures on the human impact on climate since 1989. He was already a veteran.
In 1981, Gore had arranged a congressional hearing on global warming, with fellow Democrat James H. Scheuer (who had been part of the Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future, 1969–72).
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Among expert witnesses were veterans Roger Revelle and Stephen Schneider (one of his last public performances before passing away in July 1991).
Gore was deeply anchored in the same Neo-Malthusian world view as the Rockefellers and Population Council, and had been influenced by the fear of overpopulation in Fairfield Osborn’s
Our Plundered Planet
and William Vogt’s
Road to Survival.
In the early 1970s Gore, who was a baptist, just like John D. Rockefeller and John D. Jr., had been admitted to the Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville through a Rockefeller Foundation curriculum designed to attract promising young students to theology studies. Here, in a course combining theology and natural science, he was indoctrinated with Club of Rome’s bleak outlook on the future.
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In the mid-1980s, Al and his wife Tipper (who had co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center, PRMC), led the famous crusade against “immoral” rock music. In 1985, Al Gore arranged a Senate hearing with rock musicians such as Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider. The eloquent musicians won the debate but Tipper Gore still got her Parental Guidance labelling.
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Religion and environmental concerns also merged with Gore’s futurist world view, inspired by World Future Society and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
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Gore was a given prophet in this techno-spiritual movement and preached how environmental crises could lead to a global spiritual awakening and a transhumanist Utopia.
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Gore
collaborated with futurists and spiritual leaders such as Barbara
Marx Hubbard
,
Ervin László
, and
Steven Rockefeller
, in projects like The World Commission on Global Consciousness & Spirituality, which was a fertile ground for such ideas.
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In his book
Earth in Balance
(1992) Gore had presented the idea of a “Global Marshall Plan” to save the world.
The new plan will require the wealthy nations to allocate money for transferring environmentally helpful technologies to the Third World and to help impoverished nations achieve a stable population and a new pattern of sustainable economic progress. To work, however, any such effort will also require wealthy nations to make a transition themselves that will be in some ways more wrenching than that of the Third World.
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The transformation to a planet in balance would require harsh measures.
A decade later (2003) the Club of Rome and Ervin László’s Club of Budapest gathered in Frankfurt (with, among others, ATTAC and Eco-Social Forum Europe) to actually launch Gore’s Global Marshall Plan Initiative.
After having lost the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore was perfect for the part as the new Climate Messiah.
An Inconvenient Truth
The film
An Inconvenient Truth,
premiering on May 24, 2006, meant a major breakthrough for Al Gore and for public climate awareness. It was shown on TV and in schools all over the world. However, after a High Court ruling in May 2007, it may be shown in UK schools without the teacher pointing out the film’s 9 scientific errors and one-sided presentation.
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The idea for the film came from the film producer and environmental activist Laurie David (1958–) after seeing a presentation which Al Gore had held in connection with the climate catastrophe film
The Day After Tomorrow
(2004). The following year, she started working on getting the climate issue into popular culture.
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Executive production company and co-financier was Participant Media, founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Skoll (earlier CEO of eBay).
After having made a fortune making him the seventh richest man in Canada he became a philanthrocapitalist and founded Skoll Foundation, Skoll Global Threats Fund (2009), and Participant Media in order to “save the world.” During a trip to India with the chairman of IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, Skoll became convinced that the climate threat was much greater than he had thought. He saw it as a problem that the two billion at the bottom of the pyramid would start using fossil fuels, which would lead to the world losing the battle against climate change
.
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In 2011, Skoll started funding Al Gore’s “grass roots” Climate Reality Project which provided climate education for leaders and activists.
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It had been initiated by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and was funded by RBF and Skoll Foundation.
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The board of Climate Reality Project included veteran James Gustave Speth (board member of RBF from 2007).
Merchants of Doubt
Skoll’s partner in eBay, philanthrocapitalist Pierre Omidyar, would later become executive producer of the film
Merchants of Doubt
(2014), based on the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. In the book and the film, climate skepticism is linked to the tobacco lobby and to conservative and libertarian think tanks such as the Heartland Institute (founded 1984) and fossil industry representatives such as coal magnates Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers were later identified by Greenpeace and Desmogblog as the major funders of the “climate denial lobby.”
Like the Rockefeller family, the Koch brothers were philanthropists who had made their fortune on petroleum products in the multinational corporation Koch Industries and were thought to have good reason to create doubt about climate science. Their foundations funded think tanks, cancer research and political lobby groups.
While supporting climate skepticism, however, David Koch was also a board member of Aspen Institute, Rockefeller University (from 1996), and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Buildings named after him can be found at Aspen Institute, the Rockefeller University campus, and Lincoln Center, New York. In 2010, David Koch joined David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger in the celebration of Rockefeller University’s medical success. Here we find a striking parallell to the leading climate skeptic of the 1990s, Frederick Seitz, and his close ties to the Rockefeller family.
Philanthrocapitalism
There was now a growing network of philanthrocapitalists eager to save the planet. For would-be philanthropists in need of guidance, the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors was founded in 2002, offering a Philanthropy Roadmap as a “multi-faceted international campaign to engage and educate donors in planning, implementing and maintaining an effective philanthropy programme with a long-term goal of creating a new culture of giving”.
It was a continuation of the efforts orchestrated through the Rockefeller Family Office since 1891.
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It rapidly grew to be the largest philanthropy advisory business with 235 full-time employees and 150 clients in 50 countries by 2008 .
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The family was also deeply involved in the Environmental Grants Association (EGA) which was founded in 1985 by the Rockefeller Family Fund, with a host of large corporations and 250 foundations as members.
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EGA shared office space and objectives with both RBF and RFF.
According to an investigation by the U.S. Senate, the EGA acted as an important hub for environment-related charity where the donors' activities were coordinated according to the billionaire club's goals. This included the creation of a faux environmental movement aimed at implementing “the low carbon economy."
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This made the Rockefeller family, despite the fact that their foundations had moved down on the list as the nations's most wealthy, able to benefit from other major foundations' program activities – especially foundations built up with capital from the IT sector and companies such as Google, Hewlett Packard (HP), and Intel. These corporations were pivotal to the construction of the coming Brave New World. The coordination took place in the John D. Rockefeller Junior’s Interfaith Center (the God Box).
The family’s largest foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, was also co-founder and financier of the Council on Foundations, which had coordinated philanthropy in the United States since 1949, was also a strategic partner to the globally oriented Global Philanthropy Forum.
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In 1995, RF launched the Philanthropy Workshop. Through these channels, the family could influence the direction of philanthropy both in the U.S. and the world.
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In a 1999 report, included in the RBF Project for World Security, Amir Pasic noted that foundations could not change the world on their own.
By devising well-orchestrated grantmaking endeavors, however, they can serve as catalysts in forging new policy directions, furnishing incubators for innovative ideas, and establishing and sustaining networks of scholars, activists, and public officials.
"
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(Foundations in Security: An Overview of Foundation Visions, Programs, and Grantees, Rockefeller Brothers Fund)
The Doomsday Clock 2007
In early 2007, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 5 minutes before midnight and announced that the climate threat, together with the threat of atomic weapons, was the biggest threat to humanity – 50 years after the journal’s board member and hydrogen bomb inventor Edward Teller had warned of melting glaciers and ensuing floods.
Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.
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Design to Win
In 2007 the report
Design to Win – Philanthropy's Role in the fight against Global Warming
was published by California Environmental Associates.
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The mission was to save the world from the climate threat.
As we prioritized the initiatives, we were guided by philanthropy’s comparative advantages. Politicians are fixated on the next election; CEOs are focused on next quarter’s numbers. Philanthropists, by contrast, have longer time horizons and can tolerate more risk. Besides being more patient investors, philanthropists have a strong tradition of filling gaps, spurring step-changes in technology and pursuing programming that transcends both national boundaries and economic sectors. Such capacities are exactly what are needed to tackle global warming. (Design to Win, 2007).
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One result of the report was the founding of two foundations entirely focused on the fighting climate change: Climateworks in the USA and the European Climate Foundation (ECF). These rapidly grew to become leading funders of climate-related philanthropy in the U.S. and Europe. Beneficiaries included GLOBE and the Club of Rome. Soon, chapters were also opened in China and India. Both the RBF and Eileen Rockefeller Growald's Growald Family Fund Foundation became financial supporters of ECF's operations.
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Strategic partnerships were also formed between the Rockefeller Foundation and the world's wealthiest foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which had been founded at the turn of the millennium). This partnership also meant keeping the population matter on the agenda – now increasingly clearly linked with the threat of climate change.