Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (21 page)

Both László and Peccei thought a “cultural and cosmopolitan consciousness” was needed in order to tackle the “enormous challenges” of mankind.
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The Club of Budapest would soon be involved in an effort to bring this goal to fruition with the help of a former communist leader.

The Earth Charter

Two years after the Rio Conference, the project of drafting an Earth Charter, based on the Rio Declaration, for the “emerging global civil society on values and principles for a sustainable future” was initiated.
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The vision of an Earth Charter had existed since the founding of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1948.
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It had also been proposed by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 but did not receive enough support at the Rio Conference.
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In
Beyond Interdependence
(1991) the Trilateral Commission pointed out that common values and commitments had to be gradually developed to protect the global community and future generations.
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In 1994, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands invited Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, Jim MacNeill, Maurice Strong, and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to a meeting for the development of an Earth Charter.

Nelson Rockefeller’s son Steven (vice-president of RBF), was then appointed to lead a small team drafting the document – all under the patronage and funding of the Dutch Government.
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The drafting project was initiated at the Rockefeller family estate Pocantico in Sleepy Hollow, New York, which RBF had just started into using as a conference center.

Like his uncle Laurance, Steven Rockefeller (Professor Emeritus of Religion) was especially interested in matters of religion and its relationship to nature. In 2001 he was editor of the book
Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue – An Interfaith Dialogue
. With the help of religion the world could be remoulded according to their visions. During the draft for the Earth Charter, Steven Rockefeller was clearly inspired by Teilhard Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas about the development of mankind and the world.
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The Earth Charter consists of 16 “commandments” for the New Age (see Appendix B).
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Consensus around the phrasing of the paragraphs was reached at a meeting at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in March 2000, before it was made public in a ceremony at the Peace Palace in Hague, Netherlands.

We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. (The Earth Charter, June 2000)
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The document was then placed in a richly painted wooden chest called the Ark of Hope, complete with “unicorn horns” as carrying poles in order to “render evil ineffective.”. It was presented at the Earth Charter celebration “For the Love of Earth" at Shelburne Farms, Vermont, on September 9, 2001, featuring global peace walker Satish Kumar, musician Paul Winter, Dr. Steven Rockefeller (as member of the Earth Charter Commission), with conservationist Jane Goodall as keynote speaker.

Two days later, ark designer Sally Linder began a two-month pilgrimage where the ark was carried in procession from Vermont to New York. It was described as a spontaneous reaction after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center when the two towers, ‘David & Nelson,’ were destroyed.

As the United Nations was seen as central to solving global problems threatening humanity, the ark was displayed at the UN headquarters during the preparations for the UN environmental conference in Johannesburg in 2002.
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Attempts to have it formally recognised during the same conference did, however, not fully succeed.
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The religious symbolism, however, was more than obvious. The original Ark of the Covenant, with its Ten Commandments, was now to be replaced by the new environmental religion.

From the 1990s, religion also came to play an increasingly important role in the area of climate and conservation, and became another tool for the Rockefeller family in their efforts to realise the vision of a unified global community.

In 2014, Steven wrote that all the religions of the world must change and be influenced by the new global spiritual awareness if the transformation to a just, peaceful and sustainable planetary civilisation was to be achieved.

Finding ways to foster and encourage the further evolution of the world’s religions is a necessary task if humanity is to find its way to a just, sustainable, and peaceful future. The formation of a planetary civilization is itself the major force driving the further evolution of religion today.
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The War on Terror

Soon after the terror attack, the new Bush administration launched the “war on terror”, led by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. In a speech at the Council of the Americas Conference at the Department of Foreign Affairs on May 6, 2002, David Rockefeller commended Dick Cheney's and the Bush Administration's prompt action against terrorism.
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After a few years, the threat of terrorism was merged with the threat of global warming in the international political arena and became one of the main points at the Trilateral Commission’s annual meeting in Washington DC in April 2002, attended by Cheney, Colin Powell (Secretary of State), Donald Rumsfeld (Minister of Defence), Prince El Hassan bin Talal (chairman of the Club of Rome ), and the ever-present Henry Kissinger.
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Vice-President Cheney had previously been a
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oard member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a member of the Project for a New American Century, in which the US's aggressive military strategy for the early 2000s was laid out. The project was influenced by Chicago professor Leo Strauss's neoconservative ideology. The policy document stated that,

…this process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.“ (Project for a New American Century, “Rebuilding Americas Defences”, September 2000)
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The Great Transition

Meanwhile, the future global and sustainable civilisation which the Earth Charter would serve as commandments for, was prepared elsewhere.

The global transition has begun—a planetary society will take shape over the coming decades.
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In 1991, Gordon Goodman from SEI and Paul Raskin from the Tellus Institute had initiated the PoleStar Project to explore scenarios of how a transformation to a planetary civilisation could be achieved.
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This project, too, was sanctioned and supported by the Rockefeller family and funded by Rockefeller Foundation.
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In 1995, the project was developed further in the Global Scenario Group, which was funded by the UNEP, Rockefeller Foundation, Nippon Foundation and SEI. (The scenarios developed later came to be used by, among others, IPCC, OECD, and UNEP.) Steven Rockefeller had contributed both financially and with ideas during the early stages of writing the report. The referee group included Gordon Goodman, Gus Speth, and Bert Bolin from SEI and IPCC.

The project resulted in the report
The Great Transition – The promises and Lures of the Times Ahead
(2002).
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The ideas from the report were then further developed in the network The Great Transition Initiative, coordinated by the Tellus Institute, resulting in strategies for bringing the message of necessary changes to the world. It was all based on the visions of a sustainable Utopi – a sort of global socialism under the control of United Nations. To implement the goals, a coordinated global citizens’ movement was required.

The dreams of a sustainable Utopia were very similar to Oliver Reiser’s vision about the development of a World Sensorium and Teilhard de Chardin’s theory about the Omega Point. A technologically interlinked humanity, subject under a World Government, where a new religion based on evolutionary humanism (also called transhumanism) would replace traditional faiths.
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These Utopian ideals, which had been spread in futurist and New Age circles since the 1970s, were now being revitalised.

Implementing this agenda required a coordinated global citizens’ movement.
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For this purpose, The Widening Circle – Campaign for Advancing a
Global Citizens Movement, was initiated for working towards implementing the transition to a planetary civilization and fostering the idea of global citizenship. TWC was formally launched in September 2010 in California by leaders of 12 organizations (including Earth Charter Initiative,
Kosmos Journal
, and the Club of Budapest) were welcomed with “an open invitation for others to join this process of widening and proliferating circles linked in common purpose.”
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The global transformation requires the awakening of a vast movement of global citizens expressing a supranational identity and building new institutions for a planetary age.
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A few years earlier, a large number of organisations had already been launched to implement this new agenda. In 2005, Gorbachev Foundation, the Japanese Goi Peace Foundation, the Club of Rome, the Club of Budapest and others launched the Creating a New World Civilization Initiative.
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The Kyoto Protocol

In 1997, UNFCCCs arranged its third climate conference, COP3, in Kyoto, Japan. Rockefeller Brothers Fund had worked with a clear focus
to build support for the adoption of the Protocol through education and the media. Internet was also used as a forum for climate propaganda.
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RBF saw the legally binding national targets as a success for the fund's efforts (including the financial support to a number of organisations). According RBF, it was all carefully orchestrated by themselves.

Carefully orchestrated media and communications strategies supported by the Fund at the Kyoto meeting itself played a helpful role encouraging negotiating progress that resulted in Al Gore making an unplanned trip to Kyoto during the penultimate day of the two-week negotiation to announce U.S. support for a reductions target (RBF
Sustainable Development Program Review, 2010
)
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Their network presented evidence for anthropogenic climate change being a real phenomenon. Climate change was also connected to human behaviour and thereby to the need for changing mankind at a fundamental level.

Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, but it was not ratified by the Senate. In March 2001, President George W. Bush announced that climate change was a global problem that had to be addressed jointly by the nations of the world. However, the Kyoto Protocol was found disadvantageous to the United States, which meant that they would now withdraw from the agreement.

Still, efforts were being made. Bush suggested technological solutions to the climate problem, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) instead of emissions reductions.
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RBF Climate Funding

During Steven Rockefeller's presidency, RBF now started funding organisations and creating networks across national borders, with the ambition of educating corporations, conservationists, researchers, the health sector, and religious groups on climate change.
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After the turn of the millennium, an impressive network was created, ready to inform the masses about the climate threat. During the period 1998–2004 RBF invested $10 million on the climate issue.
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In 2001 they funded ten environmental groups working on climate-related projects. The Greenpeace Fund received $75,000 for their Global Warming Campaign.
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The purpose of this campaign was to lobby the 100 largest companies and encouraging them to work together with the rest of the world in the battle against climate change.
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It was launched before the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg August 26–September 4, 2002. Despite this summit failing to address the climate threat (Friends of the Earth accused ExxonMobil for having pressured President George W. Bush to undermine the process)
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the support from leading corporations and oil companies for the climate issue would increase during the following years.

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