Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (24 page)

The 2007 G8 Summit

The climate threat also became a focus during the G8 meeting in 2007, headed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Heiligendamm. Behind Merkel, giving directions, was Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute. At this meeting the Heiligendamm process was initiated, which strengthened cooperation between the G8 grop and developing economies such as China, South Africa, Mexico, and India. One of the four areas of cooperation was the climate.
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Smart Globalization Programme

That same year, the
Rockefeller Foundation
launched the Smart Globalization Programme for transforming the world, concluding that climate change and pollution were the biggest threats to developing countries.
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Luckily, the family’s foundations had created an impressive armada of organisations now ready to act.
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A number of philanthropist-funded green NGOs, such as Alliance for Climate Protection (now Climate Reality Project), 1Sky, Energy Action Coalition (now Power Shift Network), Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, were created or jumped on board.

The Nobel Peace Prize

In December 2007, Al Gore and IPCC (represented by Rajendra Pajauri) jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The crisis, however, opened up for “hopeful” solutions.

“We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.” (Al Gore’s acceptance speech to the Nobel Committee, December 10, 2007)

9. THE FUTURE WE WANT

The ultimate challenge is to shape the common concern of most countries and all major ones regarding the economic crisis, together with a common fear of jihadist terrorism, into a common strategy reinforced by the realization that the new issues like proliferation, energy and climate change permit no national or regional solution.
(Henry Kissinger, “The chance for a new world order”,
New York Times
, January 2009)
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PREPARING THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION

N
ow the time was ripe for action, creating the future that the family and their allies in the philanthropic billionaire’s club wanted. Politicians, environmentalists, youth, futurists, and the New Age movement, were enlisted to help them achieve their goal. Among the agents of change were the newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama, the Soviet Union's last President, Mikhail Gorbachev, the always present Club of Rome and its sister think tank, the Club of Budapest, and José Argüelles.

The time had come to move ahead into a new era – the Big Global Shift in 2012. The dream of sustainable utopia with a united world civilisation was now about to be made into reality.

The Rockefeller Family Attacks ExxonMobil

In 2008, the Rockefeller family started a revolt at the Exxon Mobil Corporation’s annual meeting and declared that it was time to leave the oil era. They submitted resolutions that the company should take the global warming issue more seriously, reduce emissions, and invest more in the development of renewable alternatives. In addition, they wanted to divide the posts as chairman of the board and managing director (both of which were currently held by Rex Tillerson). The revolt was led by John D. Rockefeller’s descendents, Neva Goodwin Rockefeller and Peter O’Neill, and was supported by Neva’s father and family patriarch, David Rockefeller:

I support my family’s efforts to sharpen ExxonMobil’s focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us.
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Both Peter O'Neill and Neva were RBF board members. As of 2006, RBF was headed by Neva’s brother Richard, an MD who had worked for Doctors Without Borders and been a board member at Rockefeller University. Peter (grandson of David Rockefeller’s sister Babs Rockefeller Mauzé) was chairman of Rockefeller Family Office and Rockefeller Family Council, and board member of Rockefeller Financial Services. Both Richard and Peter had been chairmen and presidents of Rockefeller Family Fund.

The gambit was coordinated and supported by 73 of John D. Rockefellers 78 adult heirs. The family did, however, support Rex Tillerson whom they saw as a phenomenal oil and gas manager. But the company needed to reinvent itself into an agent of change instead of being an obstruction.
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The Rockefeller family’s direct personal shares in ExxonMobil were at the time just under one per cent, but they pointed out that they were the oldest continuous shareholder. The family, however, had a much greater influence by their holdings in the various funds and banks under their control.
^477
(
The actual value of the family’s assets is a closely guarded secret. In 1974, the family was willing to sacrifice Nelson Rockefeller’s vice-presidency in order to keep it from getting out). The campaign did not achieve much beyond media acclaim for the family's “new” priorities but they would soon be back to exert more pressure on their old flagship company.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVISM

350.org

The climate project was still under way, and climate activism intensified. Again, young activists were to be used to forward RBF’s agenda.

Youth is a growing constituency with mobilize-able members around the country. Because they will inherit the planet, their voice brings a moral element to the debate. In recent years, this constituency also has become more organized politically.

Grantees: Energy Action Coalition, Focus the Nation, 350.org. (RBF, “Building Constituency Support for Policy Action”, Sustainable Development Program Review 2005–2010)
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In 2008, the NGO 350.org was founded (with funding from RBF and Rockefeller Family Fund).
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The name came from “350 parts per million – the safe concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
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It was founded by author Bill McKibben, together with some of his university friends. McKibben, who became its chairman, had written “the first book on global warming for a general audience”,
The End of Nature
(1989).
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In 2006, McKibben had led the Rockefeller-funded campaign Step it Up (organising a protest walk against coal-fired power plants), followed in 2007 by 1Sky (for clean energy economy). 350.org was built on the earlier projects.
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350.org has the look and feel of an amateur, grassroots operation, but in reality, it is a multi-million dollar campaign run by staff earning six-digit salaries. (…) Back in 2007, the 1Sky Education Fund had starting revenues of US$1.6-million. Of that, US$1.3-million was from the Rockefeller Family Fund. In 2008, 1Sky received a further US$920,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as well as US$900,000 from the Schumann Center, tax returns show. What this means is that from the get-go, McKibben’s campaign was bankrolled by the Rockefellers and the Schuman Center.
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350.org was founded as a project under the Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF), which in turn was founded with the aid of the Rockefeller family and led by “fractivist” attorney Jay Halfon. Through the SMF, funds were channelled to various projects with capital from Environmental Grantmakers Association members such as Park Foundation, RBF, and RFF. Between 2008 and 2017 RBF granted the 350.org US$1,825,000.

Soon, 350.org would start gathering young environmental activists in street protests, demanding changes in both governance and lifestyle.

TechRocks

Jay Halfon had close ties to the Rockefeller family and had a past in Rockefeller Family Fund's TechRocks project 1999–2003 which helped foundations and activist organizations use modern communication technologies in the promotion of their causes. Chief Executive of TechRocks was the former head of Rockefeller Family Fund, Donald Ross, founder of the political consulting and PR agency M+R Strategic Services with a host of clients from the Rockefeller network, including Greenpeace U.S., where Ross served as chairman of the board. While TechRocks never become a major success the Rockefellers, through Ross, gained a significant influence on how environmental and climate issues were communicated.
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TOWARDS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Obama, The Climate President

2008 was also the year of the U.S. presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama won and promised to take climate change seriously. His campaign was all about changing the world and he was well prepared for his mission:

My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process.
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The Obama administration included 11 members from the Trilateral Commission. Neo-Malthusian John Holdren, who had worked with Paul Ehrlich, became scientific advisor (he had also been advisor to Bill Clinton).

Obama had also been advised on which climate policies to pursue, through the Presidential Climate Action Project (financed by RBF and headed by William S. Becker). The project had been initiated in 2007 by RBF and University of Colorado Foundation with the objective to identify which policies the President could implement without involving the Congress.
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It was supported by Holdren and John Podesta (TriCom member) from President Obama’s Transition Coordinating Council.
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Everything was in place. It was now time to act.

The week before the inauguration of President Obama on January 20, 2009, Henry Kissinger, in an article in
New York Times,
as always took the liberty of outlining the strategies for the new administration. The world was at that time facing one of the worst economic crises of the postwar era. In this dire situation Kissinger called for a new international order. The economic crisis was coupled with other risks, such as climate change and the fear of terrorism. According to Kissinger, these crises could not be solved on a national or regional level but required international coordination.
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The conclusions from RBFs Special Studies Project, which Kissinger had led in the late 1950s, were still as applicable. The solution was always the same. Only the problems and motivations shifted.

The Good Club

Luckily, some of the world’s leading philanthrocapitalists were ready to come to the rescue in these difficult times.

On May 5, 2009, David Rockefeller Jr. called Bill Gates and Warren Buffet for a meeting at the Rockefeller University campus on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York, in The President's House from 1958 (formerly used as office by Detlev Bronk and Frederick Seitz). It now became the discreet meeting place for the “The Good Club” (as they called themselves) and included venture capitalists such as Ted Turner and George Soros, TV show host Oprah Winfrey, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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Together, the members were worth US$ 125 billion. Their foundations, including Soros’ Open Society Foundation (founded in 1993), Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation (founded in 1998), Bloomberg Philanthropies (founded in 2006), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (founded in 1994), were tasked with “saving the world” from the deep global crises identified by Kissinger as the key to the construction of a unified new world.

The 2009 G8 Summit

These crises also became central topics during the G8 Summit in Italy, July 2009, hosted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. There was much hope of being able to reach the desired results before the upcoming Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December. At the end of the summit, G8 leaders were in agreement. Besides the G8 group, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, and Brazil were also represented, although among these leaders there was less agreement on binding climate measures.

In order to manage the crises the world was facing, there was now a call for an expansion of the collaboration initiated with the G8+5 to include more nations. The prospect of a strengthened international political architecture had been explored through initiatives such as the UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004),
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the Swedish–French initiative International Task Force on Global Public Goods (2006),
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and Managing Global Insecurity (Brookings Institution, 2008).
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A common link was UN advisor Bruce Jones (vice-president and director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at Brookings Institution and Center on International Cooperation, New York University) who was involved in all three reports, as well as participation from trilaterals such as C. Fred Bergsten, Brent Snowcraft, John Podesta, Enrique Iglesias, and Madeleine K. Albright.

RBF funded both the UN report and the Brookings reports, along with foundations and EGA members such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation and the UN Foundation, as well as a number of governments. The
Global Public Goods
report was mainly funded by the Foreign Ministries of Sweden and France. Both reports highlighted problems and provided a foundation for change.

G20 – The Global Steering Committee

This created an opportunity for the G20 group (Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) which since 1999 had assembled Finance Ministers of the 20 largest economies, to develop into a Council for Global Governance – an informal World Government. In the fall of 2008, at the initiative of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, George W. Bush hosted a G20 Summit in Washington, DC, to deal with the financial crisis in a coordinated way.

After two subsequent summits in London and Pittsburg, the upgraded status of the G20 became permanent and more areas of cooperation, such as the climate, were added after 2010. OECD in Paris eventually got the role as the “quasi-secretariat”
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and G8 lost its exclusive position.

In June 2009, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa founded BRICS. G8 summoned the Western nations, while BRICS summoned the emerging economies. A new international political architecture was beginning to take shape, with G20 at the hub as leading forum (see Chapter 11). That same year, the Trilateral and President-elect of the European Council, Herman von Rompuy said,

2009 is also the first year of global governance with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of a financial crisis; the climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.
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Kissinger’s and the Rockefeller family’s goal now finally seemed close to being realised.

Countdown to the 2009 Climate Summit

In preparation for coming climate Summit in December there had been an intense propaganda campaign and there were great expectations among leading politicians of reaching a binding agreement – at least outwardly.