Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (28 page)

In January 2013, GLOBE International had launched the Climate Legislation Initiative, in collaboration with the London School of Economics, with funding from the Zennström Foundation and the British Foreign Ministry.
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Its purpose was to help lawmakers promote climate legislation around the world.

The summit, with 100 delegates from 26 countries, took place at the British Foreign Ministry (with the blessings of conservative Foreign Minister William Hague) and was led by GLOBE President John Gummer (Lord Deben). One of the speakers was Christiana Figueres from the UNFCCC.

The following year, 27–28 February 2014, Partnership for Climate Legislation was launched at a meeting of the World Bank's premises and the Senate in Washington, again with the support of UN and the World Bank and the participation of Figueres (UNFCCC), Achim Steiner (UNEP) and Jim Yong Kim (the World Bank).
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This was followed by World Summit of Legislators in Mexico, 6–8 June 2014, which gathered 300 parliamentarians from 80 countries and representatives from UN agencies such as UNEP, UNFCCC, the World Bank and Global Environment Facility (GEF).
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The result was a resolution which the participants would bring back to their respective Parliaments. They swore their allegiance to the climate agenda and the new sustainability goals and undertook to try to implement legislation that harmonised with them in their home countries. The goal was to create an international climate law.
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Ban Ki Moon counted on parliamentary support and announced at the conference that on September 23 he was going to call for a climate summit for governments, business leaders and representatives of the world of finance and civil society, and that he also intended to invite GLOBE representatives.
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From then on, GLOBE began holding annual meetings in connection with the UNFCCC's climate summits. These meetings were funded by the Global Challenges Foundation, who had partnered with GLOBE. There were close ties between these organisations and GLOBE was becoming an increasingly integrated part of the UN system.

The 2015 Climate March

During the months leading up to the COP21 Paris Climate Summit there was an increasing number of well-coordinated manifestations across the world aiming to spread climate awareness and pressure world leaders into action. This became a top priority for both RBF and Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF).

On September 21, 2014, two days before the preparatory UN Climate Summit in New York, 300,000 people filled the streets of New York in the mass demonstration People's Climate March. Participants included UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, Al Gore, primatologist Jane Goodall, author Naomi Klein, and actor Leonardo di Caprio.

2,646 similar manifestations were held in 125 other countries, including London, Paris and Melbourne.

Despite the name, however, these marches were not spontaneous expressions of grassroots climate anxiety, but had been initiated and orchestrated from above. They were organised by 350.org and funded by both RBF and RFF, following Pieter Winsemius's recipe for mobilising grass roots and “grass roots” organizations.

The People’s Climate March was just one major climate milestone of 2014. Two months later President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping jointly announced ambitious new targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and China. RBF partners in China helped pave the way for this historic announcement. (Rockefeller Brothers Fund Annual
Review
2014)
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RBF and 350.org Call for Divestment

On September 22, Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced that they would divest from fossil energy investments.
RBF
and
350.org
led a call, together with 800 organisations across the world, who all pledged to divest.

Given the RBF’s deep commitment to combating climate change, the Fund is now committing to a two-step process to address its desire to divest from investments in fossil fuels. Our immediate focus will be on coal and tar sands, two of the most intensive sources of carbon emissions. We are working to eliminate the Fund’s exposure to these energy sources as quickly as possible.
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The New York Climate Summit

On September 23, the UN Climate Summit was held in New York, where a hundred world leaders met to put pressure on the climate negotiations at the upcoming 2015 Climate Summit in Paris and push for concrete measures against climate change. Al Gore presented the call for divestment.
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The president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, presented the foundations investment of over half a billion USD in creating climate resilience and sustainable cities and communities. She also announced other RF initiatives, such as the Global Resilience Partnership and Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network.
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At this summit, Leonardo di Caprio was appointed United Nations Messenger of Peace, with special focus on the climate.

Naomi Klein Joins Climate Activists

The week of the great climate march, Naomi Klein’s new book,
This Changes Everything
– Capitalism vs. the Climate
, was published.

The book was part of the project The Message, initiated by the Rockefeller-founded organization Sustainable Markets Foundation (see 350.org in Chapter 9) and was funded by some prominent members of the “billionaire’s club” such as Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Energy Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, and Tides Foundation.

The project also included a film with the same name, produced by film director Susan Rockefeller's Louverture Films. The film took a year to make and was released in 2015.
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The message in the book and the film was that the climate threat posed a chance to build a better world.

In November 2014, the United States and China signed an agreement on climate change—a subgoal that RBF and their partners had actively worked towards for a couple of years.
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The Road to Paris

2015 marked a new anniversary. RBF celebrated its 75th anniversary, David Rockefeller turned 100, while the family's “baby”, the United Nations, had been founded 70 years earlier. The climate threat which for decades had been a priority for both the family and the UN became central in the celebration.

That same year, the family office relocated to One Rockefeller Plaza (in Time-Life Building). “We decided to start again at One Rock”,
stated the new family patriarch, David Rockefeller Jr.
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During the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 21–24, 2015, where the Rockefeller Foundation was a partner, Al Gore presented the project Live Earth: Road to Paris, which was to whip up expectations for the upcoming Paris meeting and gather “a billion voices with one message to demand climate action now.”
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Musician and producer Pharrel Williams was enlisted to organise the project. The idea was to let 100 performers perform on seven continents on June 18. UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon praised the initiative. However, the concerts were cancelled and Gore announced that a free concert instead would be held in Paris in the fall. This resulted in the project “24 Hours of Reality”, a 24-hour live broadcast from Paris and eight other countries on November 13–14, featuring prominent performers such as Duran Duran, Elton John, Jon Bon Jovi and Peter Gabriel. Organisers were Climate Reality Project in collaboration with 350.org, WWF, CoalitionClimat21, and UNEP. The planned event would, however, take an unexpected and dramatic turn.

At the World Economic Forum, which this year had the theme “The New Global Context”, Johan Rockström presented “the planetary boundaries” to the world elite. Just like his fellow “planetary stewards” Al Gore and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Rockström had a busy schedule in 2015.

Earth Day 2015

On Earth Day, April 22, Global Challenges Foundation and Earth League (both including Rockström) launched the “Earth Statement” campaign with the goal of influencing world leaders to commit to “8 essential elements”, including keeping global warming within the two-degree target, 100% renewable energy and zero emissions by 2050.
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The petition was signed by prominent names such as Al Gore, Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines), Gro Harlem Brundtland (former Prime Minister of Norway), Mary Robinson (Ireland's former President), Paul Polman (Unilever), actor Russel Brand, Hans Vestberg (Ericsson) and Swedish archbishop Antje Jackelén.

Religious Leaders Become Climate Activists

Fifty years after the Rockefeller family helped put the climate threat on U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s agenda, it was now time for the world's religious leaders to get involved.

Religious Voices are a crucial block pushing for climate action. “Creation Care” has inspired many faithful Christians to understand that God calls upon them to be stewards of the planet, which includes supporting efforts to address climate change (RBF,
Sustainable Development Program Review
2005-2010
, November 2010).
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On May 24, the papal encyclical,
Laudato Si' of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Future Common Home
(note the reference to the Brundtland Report (
Our Common Future
) was issued. It supported commitments to
combat climate change.

A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.
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The goal was to create a global consensus and a plan for the world. The crisis could only be managed if all nations joined together and acted as a single unit.

On June 17, 2015, five days after David Rockefeller's 100th birthday, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (PIK) was elected as scientific advisor to Pope Francis together with, among others, Veerabhadran Ramanathan (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen (atmospheric chemist who popularised the term “anthropocene”).

In 2014, Schellnhuber had participated in a workshop at the Vatican, discussing his favourite topic, “tipping points” (based on the theory developed with David Wasdell and advice from James Lovelock).
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The Pope, supposedly God's spokesperson on Earth, now received his guidance from a more mundane source.

Two months later, the Muslim world followed. Religious leaders of Islam announced that it was a religious obligation for the world's 1.6 billion Muslims to fight global warming.
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Behind this proclamation we find the British organization IFEES and its founder, Fazlun Khalid.

A similar message came from other religious leaders.

Big Oil Pleading for a Global Framework