According to British environmental writer and activist George Monbiot, the United States government’s reluctance to combat climate change is due to “two great corrupting forces.” One is the corporate media, which he accuses of “downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it.” The second corrupting force is campaign finance. “The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose,” Monbiot writes in a recent column in the Guardian. “Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m.” Both political parties benefit, although the Republicans benefit most. “During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000.” Monbiot concludes bitterly that, “The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.”
Based on such compelling evidence, George Monbiot and other environmentalists understandably see the issue of global warming as a clearcut battle between self-serving oil companies recklessly funding climate change deniers on one side, and independent environmental groups selflessly fighting for the future of the planet on the other side. But the truth, as Oscar Wilde once observed, is rarely that pure and never so simple.
In the history of the oil industry, the Rockefeller family towers above all others. In 1870, John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company which quickly developed a monopoly over the fledgling industry through such means as “stealth, deception, spies, violence, and the secret takeover of enemies who became friends.” (Dewar, p.260). By 1904, Standard controlled 91% of production and 85% of final sales, earning it the nickname “The Octopus.” Eventually, the unpopularity of Standard’s monopoly, upheld by Ida Tarbell’s excellent muckraking, drew the regulatory attention of the federal government. In 1909, the US Department of Justice sued Standard under federal anti-trust law. On May 15, 1911, the US Supreme Court declared the Standard Oil group to be an “unreasonable” monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Standard was ordered to break up into 34 independent companies with different boards of directors. “This seemingly devastating blow apparently taught the Octopus members to pay close attention to the formation of public opinion,” Elaine Dewar writes in Cloak of Green (pp.260-261). By then, John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world, and the dissolution of the Standard Oil monopoly would not seriously hamper the family’s enormous power, which “did not spring from money, but from the unique network of Rockefeller institutions and associations, beginning in the economy but now stretching axcross all the political, cultural, and intellectual boundaries of the national enterprise.” (The Rockefellers, p. 486)
nor their influence over the course of the twentieth century and beyond.
In 1966, one of the 34 successor companies to Standard Oil, Standard’s Atlantic merged with the independent company Richfield to form Atlantic Richfield or ARCO. Despite the break-up of Standard, ARCO’s founder, Robert O. Anderson, knew the Rockefeller family well enough to share the million acre Bodoquena Ranch in Brazil with John D.’s grandson, David Rockefeller, and another partner. He also served on the board of Chase Manhattan Bank, of which David was chairman. Anderson also owned a million acres in the United States, making him America’s largest rancher. Apart from huge stakes in ranching and the oil business, Anderson was renowned for his environmental philanthropy. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he helped found the Worldwatch Institute, the International Institute for Environment and Development, and the John Muir Institute of the Environment. William Engdahl, in A Century of War, also credits Anderson with the founding of Friends of the Earth, which Engdahl claims was deployed by the oil industry to target the rival nuclear industry. Despite Anderson’s environmental largesse, he was severely criticised for spearheading the controversial drilling of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field discovered in American history. An opponent of the Alaskan pipeline once doused Anderson with a can of motor oil. But Anderson held some surprising views for an oil billionaire, seemingly at odds with the industry’s interests. “He was an oilman who warned of global warming caused by fossil-fuel consumption in the 1980s,” Douglas Martin wrote in the New York Times obituary, “and more than once advocated higher taxes on his industry.”
Bilderberg etc.
Robert O. Anderson had a lot in common with another of John D. Rockeller’s grandsons. Laurance Rockefeller, like Anderson, is remembered for his environmental philanthropy. He had founded the American Conservation Association in 1958. And in 1967, the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, called him “America’s leading conservationist.” But like Anderson, Laurance’s relationship with nature was not uncontroversial. He too was a substantial rancher in South America, owning a controlling interest in 1.5 million acres of prime agricultural land on the Magdalena River in Colombia. According to Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done, “Laurance’s interests ranged from harvesting rich mahogany timberlands to building a hotel on the the projected Pan-American Highway to raising cattle.”
Nelson Rockefeller’s “shining dream” …
Apart from his inherited oil money, much of Laurance Rockefeller’s wealth derived from his investments in aviation and the military-industrial complex, neither considered to be very environmentally-friendly enterprises. As his obituary in the Washington Post recalls, “A meeting with J.S. McDonnell Jr., the St. Louis aircraft engineer and designer, led to an infusion of cash that created McDonnell Aircraft Corp., one of the most important military contractors in the aftermath of World War II.” Although his personal wealth was estimated at $1.5 billion, Laurance advocated a “simpler life-style” for fellow Americans. Writing in the Reader’s Digest in 1976, he championed the “emerging ecological ethic and the change in life-style which [accompany] it.”
“wolf in sheep’s clothing” – Constantine
CIA, UFOs
Opening the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, [chairman?] Maurice Strong echoed Laurance Rockefeller’s call for a radical change in lifestyles:
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption pattern of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”
Strong, like Laurance Rockefeller, apparently didn’t see anything jarring about a billionaire, with at least five homes around the world, exhorting the middle class to lead a simpler lifestyle. Hypocrisy is not the only thing they have in common. As Canadian journalist Elaine Dewar showed in Cloak of Green, Maurice Strong’s career, like Robert O. Anderson’s, is closely tied to the Rockefellers. Introduced to David Rockefeller when Strong was only twenty, Rockefeller money seems to have followed him all his life. When asked by Dewar about Strong, David’s spokesman said his boss considered they had “a strong working relationship.” Soon after their first meeting, Strong began work at the UN in New York, the land for which John D. Rockefeller Jr. had donated. But he quickly returned to the oil business. As the first chairman and CEO of Petro-Canada, the first oil company Strong bought was the Canadian subsidiary of Arco, owned by his friend, Robert O. Anderson. He was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1971 to 1978, during which time he became prominent in UN environmental affairs. As secretary general of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the running of his office, and received the writing services of ecologist Rene Dubos from the Rockefeller University. In 1997, he was joined by Steven Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, on the Earth Charter Commission, which published the Earth Charter in 2000. Funded by the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Earth Charter is described as a “declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society for the 21st century.” Strong quit his position as … over his connections to Tongsun Park, who was indicted in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. Although he owns a large ranch in Colorado, Strong now spends much of his time in Beijing where he does business. He is reported to be exporting Chinese cars to the US in partnership with George Soros. Strange activity indeed for an environmentalist.
Although Maurice Strong has played an enormous role in environmental activism within the UN, he is not that well known to the general public. That certainly can not be said about a close friend of his, who is without doubt the world’s best known environmentalist.
Al Gore
Presidential campaign sponsored with $100,000 from Strong.
Less well-known is his involvement with the oil business.
Elk Hills Charles Lewis
Armand Hammer, Occidental Oil
Ford Foundation: Natural Resources Defense Council (L.Rock.) Engdahl p.147
Colombia U’wa
omission of “who” Catherine Austin Fitts
Coincidentally, … Jacob Schiff
So, in this cursory tour of the strange interlocking history of the oil industry and the environmental movement, we’ve come full-circle. But what does it all mean?
“Philanthropy and its purposes remain the same as when John D. dispensed millions to winch the family name out of the mud,” Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein write in American Babylon. “Today the environmental movement receives about $40 million a year from three oil companies which operate front groups politely described as private foundations.” One of the big three is the Rockefeller Family Fund…
There is one thing we can be reasonably certain of though, the earth cannot sustain many Rockefellers and their mega-rich friends and associates.
There is one thing of which we can be certain though. The relationship between the oil industry and the environmental movement is not the unambiguously adversarial one that environmentalists such as George Monbiot would have us believe.
[David H. Koch]
“speaking from the pocket, not the gut.” – Monbiot
Notes
George Monbiot, “Hurray! We’re Going Backwards,” The Guardian, 17th December 2007
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/17/hurray-were-going-backwards/#more-1096
Douglas Martin, “Robert O. Anderson, Oil Executive, Dies at 90,” New York Times, December 6, 2007
Adam Bernstein, “Laurance Rockefeller Dies at 94,” Washington Post
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page B04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43444-2004Jul11?language=printer
Will Banyan, “Rockefeller Internationalism,” Nexus, February-March 2004.
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/rockefeller.6.html
Laurance Rockefeller, “The Case for a Simpler Life-Style”, The Reader’s Digest, February 1976, p. 61
The Earth Charter Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
http://rockpa.org/special_programs/the-earth-charter-fund/
http://www.philanthropy.com/stats/
http://www.muckety.com/
