by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
October 8, 2017
The following article is excerpted from The Corbett Report's new documentary, Why Big Oil Conquered The World. Watch the documentary for free, download the mp3 audio, or read the complete transcript at corbettreport.com/bigoil
On paper, it would be almost impossible to find a less likely candidate for "Godfather" of the modern environmental movement than Maurice Strong. A junior high school dropout from a poor family in rural Manitoba struck hard by the great depression, Strong's meteoric rise to the heights of wealth and political influence is itself remarkable. The sheer number of environmental organizations that he founded, conferences he chaired, campaigns he directed and accolades he received over the course of his career is even more remarkable: Organizer of the Stockholm Environmental Conference, founding director of the United Nations Environment Program, Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit, founder of the Earth Council and the Earth Charter movement, chair of the World Resources Institute, commissioner of the World Commission on Environment and Development, and board member of a bewildering array of organizations, from the International Institute for Sustainable Development to the Stockholm Environment Institute to the African-American Institute.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Strong, this ubiquitous figure of the 20th century environmental movement, was his background: a Rockefeller-connected millionaire from the Alberta oil patch who divided his time between environmental campaigning and running major oil companies.
To understand how this came about, we have to examine the history of the emergence of the environmental movement. In the post-war period, the desire to control the population put on a new mask: protecting the world from resource depletion, pollution and ecological catastrophe. And, as always, the Rockefeller family was there to provide the funding and organizational support to steer this burgeoning movement toward their own ends.
In 1969, President Nixon comissioned a report on "Population Growth and the American Future." And who did he choose to chair that commission? Why, John D. Rockefeller III, of course. And what did Rockefeller and his associates conclude?
"Population cannot continue to grow indefinitely. Nobody questions that and we said in our findings we felt that now the nation should welcome and plan for a stabilized population. The whole question of pollution, environment and population came very much to the fore in amazingly rapid time."
Joining the Rockefellers in shaping the international environmental movement were their fellow oiligarchs across the Atlantic, including the British royals behind BP and the Dutch Royals behind Royal Dutch Shell. And facilitating the transition from eugenics to population control to environmentalism was Julian Huxley, brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley and grandson of "Darwin's bulldog" T.H. Huxley.
Julian Huxley was a committed eugenicist, chairing the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. But, like the other eugenicists of the post-war era, he understood the need to pursue the now-discredited work of eugenics under a different guise. The founding director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Huxley wrote in the agency's founding document about the need to find ways to make the cause of eugenics politically viable once again:
"At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable."
Huxley found the perfect front for the re-introduction of those "unthinkable" eugenical ideas in 1948, when he used UNESCO as a springboard for founding the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and then again in 1961, when he used that agency as a springboard to create the World Wildlife Fund. Joining Huxley as co-founders of the fund were not only Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, founder of the Bilderberg Group and former employee of the IG Farben conglomerate, and Prince Philip of England, but Godfrey A. Rockefeller of the Rockefeller dynasty. Together, they pledged to "harness public opinion and educate the world about the necessity for conservation."
Years of "education" about the strain that the growing human population put on the resources of the earth, paid for by the very oiligarchs who had just spent the past century monopolizing one of the world's key resources, led, inevitably to a predictable conclusion: that the "cure" for the "disease" of mankind was to be found at the United Nations, whose headquarters had been so graciously donated by the Rockefeller family itself. And the first step toward discovering that cure was to organize the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, the world's first international environmental conference.
And who better to oversee the conference and lay the institutional groundwork for this burgeoning, oiligarch-supported movement, than a consummate oil man? Enter Maurice Strong.
All his life, Maurice Strong had the uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time to meet the right person to advance up the ranks. Having been born in Oak Lake, Manitoba, in 1929, and suffering through the Great Depression, the ambitious young Strong dropped out of school at age 14 and headed north to look for work. Finding his way to Chesterfield Inlet, Strong got a job as a fur buyer for the Hudson's Bay Company and there met “Wild” Bill Richardson, a prospector whose wife, Mary McColl, hailed from the family behind McColl-Frontenac, one of Canada’s largest oil companies.
Through the Richardsons, Strong made a series of increasingly unlikely connections. First he was introduced to the Treasurer of the then-brand new United Nations, Noah Monod. Unbelievably, Monod didn't just secure Strong a job as a junior security officer at UN headquarters, he allowed the young Manitoba farm boy to live with him in New York. And while there, Monod introduced Strong to the most important contact of his life, David Rockefeller.
From that moment on, Strong was a made man. And from that moment on, wherever Strong went, Rockefeller and his associates were there somewhere in the background.
It was a Standard Oil veteran, Jack Gallagher, who gave Strong his big break in the Alberta oil patch when he quit his UN security job to return to Canada. And when Maurice Strong suddenly decided to quit that oil patch job, sell his house, and travel to Africa, he supported himself working for Rockefeller’s CalTex in Nairobi.
When he quit that job in 1954 and started his own company back in Canada, he hired Henrie Brunie (a close friend of Rockefeller associate John J. McCloy) to manage it, and appointed two Standard Oil of New Jersey reps to its board. By his late 20s he was running his own company and was already a millionaire.
As he would throughout his life, Maurice Strong capitalized on these connections and opportunities to full effect. After being chosen to organize the UN environmental conference in Stockholm, he was appointed a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, which then funded his office for the Stockholm summit and supplied Carnegie Fellow Barbara Ward and Rockefeller ecologist Rene Dubos for his team. Strong commissioned them to write "Only One Earth," a foundational text in the sustainable development arena that is heavily touted by globalists as a key document for promoting the global management of resources.
The 1972 Stockholm summit is still hailed as a landmark moment in the history of the modern environmental movement, leading not only to the first governmentally-administered environmental action plans in Europe but the creation of an entirely new UN bureaucracy: the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Naturally, the UN appointed Maurice Strong as UNEP's first director.
Shortly thereafter, Strong continued his double life by jumping straight back into the oil patch.
The oiligarchs wielded UNEP as a weapon to achieve the next stage of their grand heist: the creation of a carbon trading regime which would, of course, be controlled and manipulated by them and their bankster friends.
In the early 1990s, Enron—the disgraced Texas-based energy trading company that turned out to be a complete fraud—spearheaded the EPA's $20 billion cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide, promptly becoming the largest trader in the market. As a follow-up, the company, led by Ken Lay, began lobbying the Clinton administration, and particularly Vice President Al Gore, to create a similar market for carbon dioxide. Making lavish contributions to environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project argued for restrictions on carbon emissions, Enron then hired Christopher Horner, a former staffer on Senator Joe Lieberman’s Environment Committee, to lobby for an international treaty that would restrict emissions and allow for trading in emission rights.
They were joined in this quest by Goldman Sachs, the infamous Wall Street investment bank known today for the revolving door between the firm and the US Treasury, who helped establish the Chicago Climate Exchange as the first North American emissions trading platform. In 2004, Al Gore, who has spent the last two decades lobbying for the creation of a carbon trading market, founded Generation Investment Management, an investment management partnership that sells carbon offsets, with David Blood, the CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who stepped down from his position with Goldman to go into business with Gore. By the end of the decade, Gore was already being hailed as a candidate to become the world's first carbon billionaire.
Gore himself is an oiligarch. His father, Al Gore, Sr., was a close friend of Armand Hammer, the oil tycoon behind Occidental Petroleum. After losing a Senate race in 1970, Gore's father went to work for Hammer at Occidental for $500,000 a year. Over the course of his career, Gore, Sr. accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Occidental stock, which fell into the hands of the executor of his estate at the time of his death: none other than his son, Al Gore. The Occidental connection does not end there. Discovering zinc ore on their Tennessee estate, Hammer bought the Gores land and sold it back to them with a claim on the mining rights, complete with a $20,000 annual payment, which also went to Gore after his father's death. In 2013, Gore earned $100 million from the Qatari government on the sale of his "Current TV" venture, and then was surprised when reporters were more interested in discussing his oil money than his new book on the global warming cause.
But Gore's story is only an example of a larger phenomenon. In 2006, the United States Climate Action Partnership was formed to create "A Call for Action" to cut down on carbon emissions. It drafted the Blueprint for Legislative Action, which became the basis for the American Clean Energy and Security Act, seeking to create an emissions trading regime modeled on the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. And the members of the US Climate Action Partnership? A who's who of the oiligarchy, including BP, ConocoPhillips, and General Motors.
Carbon taxes and carbon trading have proven to be a hard sell for an increasingly wary public, but with the Paris Agreement of 2015 the world saw the biggest step yet toward this technocratic future of energy control and carbon rationing. No surprise, then, that the summit itself was sponsored by and prominently supported by big oil...
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