WHY DOES THE ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND WANT YOU TO REDUCE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT?

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by John Spritzler

September 3, 2015 and most recently updated July 13, 2023

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The URL of this article for sharing it is https://www.pdrboston.org/global-warmingclimate-change

 

 

 

FACT #1: The climate is changing (as it always has.)

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FACT #2. CO2 may have some--but not necessarily a substantial or alarming--global warming effect. (Read here what actual 'worst-case' effect.)

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FACT #3.* There is no persuasive evidence for the hypothesis that human-produced CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming (a.k.a. the "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming" or CAGW hypothesis.) [1]

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If you want to read a very detailed "human-caused global warming is a very serious problem" argument (I'll call it the "alarmist" argument) disagreeing with what I say about the consequences of human-produced C02 emissions from burning fossil fuel, go here.  You’ll have to judge for yourself what to make of it versus what to make of my article.

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One argument these alarmists make is that it is not legitimate to distinguish (as I do) between "Catastrophic" human-caused global warming versus just human-caused global warming, for this reason. Any bad consequence of global warming can be dismissed, the alarmists say, as "not really catastrophic." Here's the problem with this alarmist argument.

 

Alarmists today are saying that the threat of human-caused global warming justifies reducing net carbon emissions from fossil fuel to zero, which means drastically reducing the use of fossil fuel, which in turn will have arguably catastrophic consequences for billions of people, especially the poorest. Only catastrophic global warming could justify this. Merely modest global warming cannot justify it. That is why the distinction between catastrophic versus non-catastrophic global warming is crucial.

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FACT #4.* The so-called "97% scientific consensus" is merely around facts #1 and #2, not the CAGW hypothesis. There is only a 0.3% [2 & 52] scientific "consensus" around the CAGW hypothesis.

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FACT #5. The media (both mass and alternative) call people who agree with facts #1 and #2 but not with the CAGW hypothesis "climate change deniers."

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FACT #6. No honest reporter or news organization would call somebody who agrees with facts #1 and #2 but not with the CAGW hypothesis a "climate change denier"; they would call them a denier of the CAGW hypothesis. [Click here to read a clear explanation of what the "climate change" debate AMONG SCIENTISTS is actually about.]

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CONCLUSION: The mass and alternative media are engaged in a deliberate deception on the question of climate change and CO2, deception designed to persuade the public to accept the CAGW hypothesis by making it seem that the only alternative is to deny that there has been climate change. The media are obscuring the crucial difference between a) taking appropriate steps to adapt* to climate change and reduce real pollution (CO2 is not pollution!), which is obviously a good idea, versus b) attempting to prevent climate change by reducing or entirely eliminating the use of "fossil" fuels.

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READ BELOW TO SEE WHY THE MEDIA ARE DOING THIS.

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As reported [3] in a study prepared for Congress in 1974 (when Nelson Rockefeller was nominated by Gerald Ford to be appointed Vice President), the Rockefeller Family essentially controlled $70 Billion-worth of corporate assets. Today in 2015 (when I wrote the first draft of this article), forty-one years later, it is reasonable to assume that, with compound interest at merely 5% per year, that corporate wealth under the control of the Rockefeller family has grown to at least $517 Billion (and if it merely rose the same as the Dow Jones increased in these last forty-one years it would be $1.33 Trillion[4] and still more than $1 Trillion even if 20% were lost to taxes). This dwarfs the current (2015) personal fortunes of Bill Gates ($76 Billion[5]) or even the entire Walton (owners of Wal-Mart) family ($149 Billion[6]).

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Until his recent death, David Rockefeller was the patriarch of the Rockefeller family. He was the head of a huge private financial empire. He also was directly involved in managing the U.S. government's support for, and protection of, his empire and the social system of capitalism that enables people such as the Rockefellers to enjoy their wealth, power and privilege as a ruling upper class. Thus David Rockefeller was the honorary chairman[7] of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which is an exclusive "think tank" that essentially determines U.S. foreign policy and provides[8] the key government executives (such as Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice) who have implemented it. Six members of the Rockefeller family are members of the CFR. The domination by CFR members of the top U.S. government posts related to foreign policy is detailed online (up through the Clinton administration[9]) here, and the pattern continues[10].

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It is evident why it has been said of David Rockefeller that if he had been made president of the United States it would have been a demotion.

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The Rockefeller Family Fund Wants You To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

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The Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) on its website says[11]:

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"Our program emphasizes public education on the risks of global warming and implementation of sound solutions. RFF is interested in the development of initiatives designed to enact aggressive policies at the state and national levels to reduce carbon emissions; ..."

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A World Bank website headline[12] reads:

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"The Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank Group Innovate to Improve Cities’ Access to Funding for Low-Carbon Infrastructure."

 

The Guardian reports[13]:

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"Heirs to Rockefeller oil fortune divest from fossil fuels over climate change"

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and RT reports[14]:

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"Rockefeller oil dynasty to ‘divest’ from fossil fuels," adding that the Rockefeller family announced, "Our immediate focus will be on coal and tar sands, two of the most intensive sources of carbon emissions..."

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and

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"In a symbol of the times, America’s biggest 'oil family', the Rockefellers, has announced it will get rid of any investments or holdings in fossil fuels from its $860 million charitable fund, and target clean energy instead."

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Newsweek headlined[15], "Big Oil Heirs to Say Goodbye to Fossil Fuels" and reported,

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"The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), a private charitable foundation with $860[16] million worth of assets as of July 31, 2014, announced Monday that the fund would divest from fossil fuels."

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The New York Times in 2008 reported[17] that the Rockefeller family was using its large holdings in ExxonMobil to pass board of director resolutions aiming to "start moving beyond the oil age" and that, "David Rockefeller, retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and patriarch of the family, issued a statement saying, 'I support my family’s efforts to sharpen Exxon Mobil’s focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us.'”[18] It also reported, "Kenneth P. Cohen, vice president for public affairs at Exxon, said the shareholders pushing the resolutions were 'starting from a false premise.' He added that the company was already concerned about 'how to provide the world the energy it needs while at the same time reducing fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.'”

 

Big Oil Also Says You Should Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

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It's not just the Rockefellers who want you to reduce your carbon footprint. It's Big Oil too. Here are the statements by the major Big Oil corporations on this topic. A typical one is by Chevron:

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“[W]e recognize and share the concerns of governments and the public about climate change. There is a widespread view that the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) is a contributor to climate change, with adverse effects on the environment.”

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Shell Oil and BP Corp. have both committed themselves to becoming carbon neutral by 2050 (an impossibility, but that's another matter.)

 

David Rockefeller was a (possibly founding[19]) member of the Club of Rome, and Al (“An Inconvenient Truth”) Gore is a member who chaired[20] its 1997 meeting. The Club of Rome is the premier organization warning about human-produced (anthropogenic) C02 causing catastrophic global warming (aka "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming," aka CAGW). Whether a member[21] of the Club of Rome or not, Bill ("the [once] richest man in the world") Gates also warns of the need to entirely eliminate[22] C02 emissions by the end of this century, "get to zero" as he puts it.

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Those who think skeptics of the CAGW hypothesis in the scientific community are merely agents of Big Oil, which supposedly denies the CAGW hypothesis, might be surprised to know that the Club of Rome has a very friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia's and Kuwait's rulers--the biggest of the Big Oil personages in the world. The Club of Rome's website[23] reports that its "Hellenic Chapter of the Club of Rome" held a conference titled "A New Development Strategy for Energy and the Economy" January 19, 2011 at the Public Power Corporation Athens Club. In attendance at this meeting were, among others, "Ministers and Counselors from the Embassies of Belgium, the USA, France, Turkey, Croatia, Slovakia, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Korea, and Kuwait..." (my emphasis). The Hellenic Chapter of the Club of Rome also held a conference titled, "Economic and Environmental Crises: An Opportunity to Build a Green Society" at the Office of the European Parliament in Greece on April 14, 2009. Attending this meeting was, among others, "Fahad Al-Mansouri, Counsellor from the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia."

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The Club of Rome has another solid supporter: Britain's Prince Charles. The prince solidly backs the Club of Rome's agenda, as is quite evident in a video[24] of Prince Charles addressing the UN's Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Prince Charles tells the conference that "its proposition that there has to be proper recognition of the peril we are in is one that I agree with wholeheartedly." He then goes on to say that he even "played host to a preparatory international gathering on board the old royal yacht Britannia in the Amazon delta some fourteen months before ... the first summit twenty years ago." He then lamented "the increasingly dire warnings issued by yourselves and others around the world that we are rapidly breaching one planetary boundary after another have been consistently and alarmingly ignored." This was an unwittingly ironical turn of phrase, given that the British royal family, in the person of Queen Elizabeth, stands solidly with British Petroleum Corporation[25], an oil company that "breached one planetary boundary" in the Gulf of Mexico most undeniably!

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A partial list of people who are a member of the Club of Rome or one of its sister organizations (discussed below) includes Al Gore[26], Mikhail Gorbachev[27], Kofi Annan[28], Joseph Stiglitz[29], the Dalai Lama[30], Elie Wiesel[31], Bill Clinton[32] and Jimmy Carter[33]; multi-billionaire David Rockefeller[34] (until he died); and royalty: Juan Carlos I – King of Spain[35], Prince Philippe of Belgium[36], Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands[37], and Dona Sophia – Queen of Spain[38].

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The Club of Rome has created sister organizations that work for its aims. One such organization is the Club of Budapest, which describes its connection to the Club of Rome on its website[39] and provides a list of its members[40].

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Another organization created by the Club of Rome is the Club of Madrid, which on its website[41] lists the Club of Rome as one of its "Partners." On their website the "World Leadership Alliance Club de Madrid" lists[42] (by my count) 106 members, all of whom are former presidents or prime ministers of a nation, plus others such as Kofi Annan (former Secretary General of the United Nations), Jacques Delors (former president of the European Commission) and Javier Solana (former secretary general of NATO).

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Billionaire Ted Turner (who personally owns 2.2 million[43] acres in 12 states and Argentina--twice the total acreage of the state of Delaware!) tells Charlie Rose in a video[44] that we have too many people using too much stuff and this is causing global warming that will have us all being cannibals in failed states before long. Edmond de Rothschild (whose bank group owns 150 billion euros in assets) urges the French president to keep up his strong leadership for dramatically reducing carbon emissions.

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Clearly, whether one agrees with or disagrees with the aims of the late David Rockefeller and his family's foundation and Big Oil and European royalty and billionaires such as Ted Turner and Bill Gates and the hundreds of former heads of national governments in the Club of Madrid, it is naive to believe that if one protests the failure or reluctance of certain politicians or corporate CEOs to do what these powerful people want them to do (i.e., reduce the use of fossil fuel) as quickly as they want, that one is thereby opposing the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. It just ain't so.

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Or Is Big Oil Just Pretending to Agree with the Rockefellers about CO2 and Climate Catastrophe?

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It is possible that Big Oil is actually, contrary to its public statements, opposed to the Rockefeller drive to reduce our carbon footprint by reducing or even eliminating the use of fossil fuel. Click here to read a report, whose authors clearly represent ExxonMobil, that makes a persuasive case that the Rockefellers and their allies are using climate alarmism as a pretext for capturing control of the world's energy by destroying the oil industry and owning the alternative "green" energy industries. Click here to read a New York Times article titled, "Exxon Mobil Accuses the Rockefellers of a Climate Conspiracy," which strongly suggests a real conflict exists between the Rockefellers and ExxonMobil. More articles about the conflict between ExxonMobil and the Rockefellers are here and here and here.

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One thing is for sure, however. Big Oil is not engaged in making the powerful argument for increasing, not decreasing, fossil fuel use that it could make--namely by a) refuting the claims that there is persuasive evidence that C02 from fossil fuels is causing catastrophic global warming, and by b) educating the public about how fossil fuels are absolutely essential for enabling billions of people to eat, live safely, and have a chance to flourish. This argument is made extremely persuasively by Alex Epstein in his book, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less. 

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It is very plausible that the billionaires who own Big Oil have the same goal as the Rockefellers who used to own Big Oil, a goal that I discuss next.

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WHY Does The Rockefeller Family Fund Want You To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint?

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Either the Rockefellers and the host of rich and powerful people in their camp are telling the truth about why they want us to reduce our carbon footprint (i.e., burn less fossil fuel) or they are lying. Let's see how honest these people are, just as one would want to do if serving on a jury trial and a Rockefeller family patriarch were a witness. One way to evaluate a person's honesty on the witness stand is to see if they have or have not lied in the past about other things. So let's take a look at some things that the Rockefellers and "their people" are saying and see if we believe them.

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The Club of Rome's Secretary General, Ian Johnson, is promoting[45] a book titled, Enough is Enough. (The Club of Rome website itself promoted the book when it came out.) The Club of Rome, with this book, is telling the world what its aims are. Here's what that book says:

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"The 7 billion of us have to do better, and we'd better do better soon. We need to find ways to reverse the climate change we've set in motion and halt the extinction crisis. At the same time we have to eradicate poverty and erase the divide between the haves and the have-nots." [location 185 (4%) on the kindle version.]

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On the Rockefeller Foundation website[46], the president of the foundation, Dr. Judith Rodin along with Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, say that an aim of the foundation is "Universal Health Care" globally. They lament that:

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"100 million people fall into poverty each year to pay for health care."

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Rockefeller Foundation president, Dr. Judith Rodin, also expresses a great desire to make sure everybody has a good job. On the Rockefeller Foundation website[47] it asks, "What Exactly Is a Good Job?" There's a photo with a street display of the foundation that says, "GOOD JOBS FOR ALL." We also read:

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"The Rockefeller Foundation and our partner Purpose[48], found that one in five respondents lack basic benefits like health insurance, dental and vision care, paid vacation, paid sick leave, or paid paternal leave.

"With 83 percent of Americans saying that their employment impacts their overall well-being, we believe that they deserve more than the bare minimum—they deserve the chance to define what a good job means to them."

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So now it's time to ask, "Do you believe these people really want what they say they want?"

 

Does the patriarch of a family with a private fortune controlling at least $517 Billion (and more likely $1.33 Trillion) truly aim to "erase the divide between the haves and the have-nots"?

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Does Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank that partners with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation, truly lament the fact that 100 million people fall into poverty each year to pay for health care?

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Here's a clue. The World Bank has a notorious history of increasing, not decreasing, misery for the poorest people. Read about it online[49a,b,c] and watch a video[50] by "economic hit man, John Perkins."

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Here's another clue. Before Jim Yong Kim was made the president of the World Bank he was made the director of the Center for Health and Human Rights, at the Harvard School of Public Health where I worked. The Center had for many years sponsored events and published articles about health in Palestine, but had never said that the chief cause of poor health there was Israel's immoral and racist ethnic cleansing of non-Jews (resulting, for example, in women in labor being detained at checkpoints and thus denied access to the nearest hospital, just because they were not Jewish). I had for years been trying to persuade the previous director of the Center to at least sponsor a symposium where the morality of this ethnic cleansing would be debated in a proper academic manner. I argued that this should be done if for no other reason than the facts that 1) the Harvard School of Public Health had engraved in six languages on the exterior face of its building that "The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being" and 2) the last I heard, Palestinians were human beings.

 

The previous director refused to even sponsor a discussion of the question, privately telling me that the reason was "fear for the reputation of the Center." Fast forward to Jim Yong Kim's appointment as director. One day we were in the elevator together, and I asked him if he would consider doing anything to raise the question of whether Israel's ethnic cleansing was justifiable or not. He said no, he would not. Shortly after his very brief tenure as director of the Center he was appointed president of Dartmouth College, and then shortly after that he was appointed president of the World Bank. He was on the fast track all right, but not a track meant for people who take the side of the have-nots against the haves!

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What about the Rockefeller Foundation's goal to ensure that everybody has a good job, as defined by the employee him or herself, with benefits like "health insurance, dental and vision care, paid vacation, paid sick leave, or paid paternal leave"? To help you decide if the Rockefeller Family Foundation is speaking truthfully about this being its real goal, consider the history of the last several decades in the United States, where David Rockefeller had more power than the president. Economic inequality has skyrocketed. There is huge unemployment and underemployment, college graduates scramble just to get unpaid internships, and hardly anybody has dental and vision care. The "good jobs" have been largely shipped to cheap labor foreign nations and the people who had them are lucky to have a lower paying job with fewer, if any, benefits, instead of no job at all. Unemployment among blacks was around 10% versus the comparable rates for whites, Hispanics and Asians of 4.7 percent, 6.6 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in February 2015)[51], while racist incarceration has climbed to obscene levels and is the "new Jim Crow." Do you really believe that the Rockefeller Foundation means what it says about wanting everybody to have a good job?

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If the Rockefeller Foundation can't be believed about wanting to "erase the divide between the haves and the have-nots" and wanting to prevent people from falling into poverty to pay for their health care and wanting to ensure that everybody has a good job, then why should you believe them when they say that you need to reduce your carbon footprint or else there will be catastrophic global warming?

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The Rockefeller Class And The Corruption Of Climate Science

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Perhaps you believe the scientific hypothesis that anthropogenic (i.e., human-produced, from CO2 resulting from burning fossil fuel) catastrophic global warming is occurring (aka the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, or CAGW hypothesis). If you believe this, it's very likely because you've read that 97% of climate scientists believe it. But it's not true. There's even a peer reviewed journal article that shows it's not true[52]. The abstract of this paper reads as follows in its entirety, and my bolding indicates the part most relevant to us:

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Abstract Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1% consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3% endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education. [my emphasis]

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Close inspection of the so-called "consensus" for the CAGW hypothesis, in other words, shows the "consensus" to be not 97%, but 0.3%. The illogical and misleading argument for the incorrect 97% figure is explained in great detail in the paper, and it does not take special technical knowledge to follow it. Please read it!

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What many climate scientists do believe is the following: There was about five times more CO2 in the atmosphere during the time of the dinosaurs than today. The earth was as warm or warmer than today about a thousand years ago in what is known as the Medieval Warm Period. That was followed by a cold spell known as the Little Ice Age. Since then the earth has been gradually warming again. CO2 may have a very modest warming effect, but historically CO2 increases have occurred after, not before, global warming; ocean warming, with a centuries-long time delay, may release CO2, making atmospheric CO2 more an effect than a cause of global warming. The future is uncertain, but some scientists believe that the current warming hiatus is the beginning of a new cooling period, based on sun activity cycles. And yes, of course we should take steps to adapt to climate change, whatever the climate change may be; but those steps should be based on good science.

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You've probably seen, and been frightened by, the infamous "hockey stick" graph that purports to show that global temperature has been low for a thousand years until the second half of the 20th century when it shot up unprecedentedly supposedly because of industrial-produced CO2 that started to rise then. Al Gore featured this "hockey stick" graph in his Inconvenient Truth film and it has been widely disseminated to make people believe the CAGW theory. But the basis for the "hockey stick" graph is scientific fraud, as detailed in the book The Hockey Stick Illusion[53], by A.W. Montford, which you should also read. The fraud consists of things such as cherry-picking data, i.e., selecting data that gives the pre-determined desired result and rejecting data that fails to do so. The book illustrates how "cherry-picking" has infected paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) by citing a paleoclimatology journal paper in which the author, Jan Esper, shamelessly admits doing it, with these words (about selecting data):

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"Before venturing into the subject of sample depth and chronology quality, we state from the beginning, 'more is always better'. However, as mentioned earlier on the subject of biological growth populations, this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology [a set of data--JS] by reducing the number of series [subsets of data--JS] used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology [the science of determining past climates from trees (primarily properties of the annual tree rings)--JS]." [my emphasis]

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The author of The Hockey Stick Illusion, Montford, after providing this quotation, rightly says, "...which is a statement to send a shudder down the back of any reputable scientist." Montford adds, "Esper argued that he had taken these steps to avoid getting a biased chronology. To some readers, however, they might sound much more like a way of obtaining one. After all, the object of the exercise was to discover what signal was in the tree rings, not to choose a subsection of the rings that gave a 'desired signal.'"

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As Montford describes in detail, the editors of the scientific journal, Nature, went out of their way to promote the fraudulent "hockey stick" graph not only by publishing it initially but by severely restricting subsequent criticism of it in their journal and thereby preventing their readers from seeing the full extent of the fraud behind it. Furthermore, despite that journal's policy of requiring authors to make their analysis methods (i.e., computer code in the case of the "hockey stick" graph) available upon request, the editors did not enforce this policy when critics of the "hockey stick" asked for this information.

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What Corrupt Science Looks Like

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From January 1990 to November 2014, the difference between the mean change in observed global temperature versus the mean change in global temperature predicted by the CAWG hypothesis was dramatic. The predicted increase was 0.69 degrees Centigrade but the observed increase was only 0.34 degrees Centigrade—less than half what was predicted. A graph of these temperatures is included in an article by Christopher Monckton, published January, 2015 online,[54]which is the source for the following statements about global temperature up to 2015. The observed temperature change is, as the confidence bounds in the graph indicate, too far below the predicted change to be reasonably attributed to random chance. The CAWG hypothesis has failed the test of science: what it predicted is not what was actually observed.

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Another graph (same source) shows no global warming for 18 years 3 months from October 1996 to December 2014; this is known in the scientific literature (which doesn’t deny it) as the global warming "hiatus."

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Good science works like this. A hypothesis is proposed. To test it, the hypothesis is used to make a prediction about what will be observed. This prediction is stated explicitly and unambiguously before any observation is made. Then the observation is made. If the observation is what the hypothesis predicted, meaning it is closer to what was predicted than could be explained by random chance if the hypothesis were not true (i.e., if the "null hypothesis" were true), then the observation is considered to be statistically significant evidence in support of the hypothesis. Otherwise, it is considered to be NOT statistically significant evidence in support of the hypothesis; the hypothesis fails the test. When a hypothesis fails the test (despite the fact that--as in our case--sufficient data of a sufficient quality was collected so that the hypothesis would be unlikely to have failed the test if it were correct) the scientifically correct thing to do is to try to come up with a better hypothesis. The wrong thing to do is to try to "explain away" the failure of the hypothesis by claiming (post hoc, i.e., after seeing the actual observation) that what the hypothesis REALLY predicted is what was in fact observed. This kind of BAD SCIENCE enables one to defend virtually any hypothesis with clever excuses for its failure to predict what was actually observed. For example:

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Bad Scientist: "The earth is not spherical, it is flat."

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Good Scientist: "Let's put your hypothesis to the test"

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Bad Scientist: "Good idea. My flat-earth hypothesis predicts that if we go to the beach and look at the horizon when a Tall Ship first becomes visible, we'll see the top and bottom of the ship at the same time, not the top first as would be predicted by the spherical earth hypothesis."

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[After they return from the beach]

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Good Scientist: "Looks like your flat earth hypothesis failed the test; we both clearly saw the top of the ship before the bottom."

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Bad Scientist: "That's only because--who knew?--the bottom (hull) of the ship was painted blue and it was harder to see against the blue water than it was to see the white sail against the blue sky. My flat earth hypothesis was actually confirmed."

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Good Scientist: "Really? But when the ship got close to us we could plainly see that the hull was painted red."

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Bad Scientist: "True, and that means we have made an important discovery! Marine paint that looks blue from a distance looks red up close. I'm going to publish this fact in the Journal of Paintology."

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Climate scientists who defend the CAGW hypothesis have resorted to BAD SCIENCE. They are publishing articles in prestigious journals such as Nature that attempt to "explain away" the global warming hiatus in order to maintain credibility for the CAGW hypothesis despite the fact that it has failed its test.

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Thus Nature published an article[55], titled "Recent global warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling," which "explains away" the CAGW's failure by saying,

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"Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations [i.e., the predictions of the CAGW hypothesis by computer programs incorporating that hypothesis--JS] and observations."

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Nature also published an article[56], titled "Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus," which "explains away" the CAGW's failure by saying,

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"Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake...This hiatus could persist for much of the present decade if the trade wind trends continue, however rapid warming is expected to resume once the anomalous wind trends abate."

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So, according to these bad scientists, the CAGW hypothesis is still true, despite failing its test, because of "recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific." No, it's because of a "pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds." But wait! There's more. There are 52 different ways[57] the failure of the CAGW hypothesis has been "explained away" by bad science. Perhaps the leading way the failure of the CAGW hypothesis is explained away is the theory that the heat from global warming doesn't affect thermometers in the air because it's all going into the ocean by melting the polar ice instead. But this argument is numerically flat out false[58].

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Note, by the way, that whatever the climate does in the future, get warmer or not, the CAGW theory about how C02 affects global temperature is not the theory that will explain it; this theory has already been shown not to make correct predictions and even if, like the broken clock that is right twice a day but clearly not giving the correct time otherwise, its predictions are sometimes true, that does not constitute evidence for the theory. (The same author, Christopher Monckton, who published the article in 2015 cited above, published an updated article[59] in January 2017. The same very large difference between what the CAGW hypothesis predicts and what has been actually observed remains the case.)

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The question is, how come bad science has taken over in climatology? Scientists and science journal editors come from a long tradition of being very determined to understand the sources of bias, especially unintentional bias, and very careful to use methods designed to prevent bias. The whole purpose of the hypothesis testing procedure described above is to prevent bias in conclusions. In areas of science where Big Money does not have an agenda that it wants science to back up, scientists perform good science and journals weed out bad science. So why has bad science taken over climatology? Why do the most prestigious journals, such as Nature, publish bad science and severely restrict criticism of it in the journal?

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The answer to the above questions that is most likely the true one is this. Billionaires such as the Rockefellers and Ted Turner and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and royalty, for whatever reason, want people to believe that if they don't dramatically reduce their carbon footprint by reducing the burning of fossil fuels, then there will be catastrophic global warming and the end of human civilization. And these billionaires and royalty have enormous power in society, the kind of power that controls the mass media, the kind of power that makes or breaks an individual's career (the author of the "hockey stick" paper, Michael Mann, was only a recent Ph.D. when he published his "hockey stick" paper, but then he was catapulted to being the preeminent scientist in paleoclimatology), and the kind of power that can bend scientific journal editors in the direction of bad science to support the CAGW hypothesis.

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Why, Really, Is The Rockefeller Foundation Telling Us To Reduce Our Carbon Footprint?

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Just because David Rockefeller told us (in a video[60] of his speech, for example) that he was trying to save the world from "the spectre of an alarming and possibly catastrophic disaster to the biosphere we live in," that doesn't mean that was his real aim, any more than the Rockefeller Foundation’s claim of wanting to ensure that everybody has a good job means that is its real aim, or that the Club of Rome's claim that it wants to "erase the divide between the haves and the have-nots" means that that is its real aim.

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Nor is it likely that billionaires and royalty, with access to the same information that yours truly has, are unaware that the claims for the CAGW hypothesis are unfounded.

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So what, then, is the real reason why David Rockefeller told us that the "spectre of an alarming and possibly catastrophic disaster to the biosphere we live in" haunts us and the only way to make it go away is to stop producing so much CO2 from burning fossil fuels?

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The obvious answer is that David Rockefeller (when he was alive) and the other billionaires and royalty in his camp want people to believe that it is vital, for the sake of saving human civilization, to drastically reduce fossil-fuel-based industrial production. Whatever their real reason is for wanting to reduce this type of industrial production, they apparently don't think it is a sufficiently convincing or appealing reason to get the world's population to accept, never mind embrace, such a goal. Catastrophic global warming, on the other hand, will, they feel, "scare the bejesus" out of people and make them passionately support lowering material productivity however much may be necessary to avoid using fossil fuel. Promises to provide a good job for all and to "erase the divide between the haves and the have-nots," they hope, will help even more to persuade people to follow the leadership of Rockefellers and other upper class climate fear mongers.

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Before considering why the Rockefellers et al want to abandon the use of fossil fuels, let's note another reason why they like making people fear anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. This reason can be gleaned from the writings of intellectuals whom David Rockefeller relied upon to think for him and act in his interests.

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In 1991 the Club of Rome published a report, titled The First Global Revolution, authored by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider. The authors write:

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"There appears to be a general loss of the values which previously ensured the coherence of society and the conformity of its individuals. In some places this has been the result of a loss of faith in religion and the ethical values it promulgates. In other cases it stems from a loss of confidence in the political system and those who operate it." [pg. 41]

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"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." [ pg. 115: This is the entire text of a sub-section titled "The Common Enemy of Humanity is Man" and it concludes the chapter it is in, titled "The Vacuum", my emphasis --J.S.]

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In 1997 David Rockefeller's protégé, Zbigniew Brzezinski, published The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski, with David Rockefeller, founded[61] (and Brzezinski, appointed by Rockefeller to be the Executive Director, ran) the Trilateral Commission[62], an organization[63] of the corporate and government elites in Europe, the United States and Japan; and Brzezinski was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977-81. (Just to remind us of what that means, recall that Carter increased military aid to Indonesia’s President Suharto who used it to occupy East Timor and to kill 200,000 East Timorese. Carter also backed Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran, both notoriously anti-democratic and brutal rulers. Carter similarly backed the murderous Somoza regime in Nicaragua and had the U.S. Army School of the Americas train 250 Salvadoran officers and non-coms for El Salvador's brutal and violently repressive military that blew up every union meeting place and opposition newspaper as it killed opposition leaders.) In his book, Brzezinski writes:

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"More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. Yet the dominant culture of the country has become increasingly fixated on mass entertainment that has been heavily dominated by personally hedonistic and socially escapist themes. The cumulative effect has made it increasingly difficult to mobilize the needed political consensus on behalf of sustained, and also occasionally costly, American leadership abroad...In addition, both America and Western Europe have been finding it difficult to cope with the cultural consequences of social hedonism and the dramatic decline in the centrality of religious-based values in society. [location 3225 in the kindle version]

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"Unfortunately, to date, efforts to spell out a new central and worldwide objective for the United States, in the wake of the Cold War, have been one-dimensional. They have failed to link the need to improve the human condition with the imperative of preserving the centrality of American power in world affairs. Several such recent attempts can be identified." [location 3267 in the kindle version] [Brzezinski then cites the failure of the following: "the advocacy of 'assertive multilateralism' in the Clinton administration, the "notion that America should focus on global 'democratic enlargement'", the "elimination of the prevailing injustice in the global distribution of income," the "shaping a special 'mature strategic partnership' with Russia," "containing weapons proliferation," "safeguarding the environment," and "combating local wars."]

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The theme here is clear: some new Big Idea (a veritable new religion) must be found with which to get the masses to follow the leadership of the upper class; it needs to restore "the coherence of society and the conformity of its individuals." The Big Idea is that "The real enemy, then, is humanity itself," that some humans are living too well materially (and the others dangerously want to live better materially than they do presently) and therefore, for the sake of protecting human civilization and "the planet" from "the spectre of an alarming and possibly catastrophic disaster to the biosphere we live in," people must obey the rich and powerful who will make the world safe by sharply limiting the amount of material comfort that the great masses of the world will be allowed to enjoy.

 

Economic production (including things like building dams to make us safe from flooding as well as to produce energy, and digging mines, and laying down gas pipes, etc.) must, according to the new Big Idea, be eliminated as much as possible; this is why the rich and powerful lately have been promoting the "Green" idea (a.k.a. "sustainability") that it is morally wrong for humans to have any impact on nature, that "pristine" nature must be left untouched because otherwise whatever humans do to it will upset the supposedly delicate balance of nature and cause catastrophe. We are told to forget that humans have always had to change nature in order to survive. Even beavers to it to survive!

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The elite have been grappling with the problem of finding such a Big Idea. After 2001 it seems the elite decided to go with "The War on Terror" but apparently David Rockefeller and company thought and think something better is also required. (Brzezinski, for example, says in an online article[64], that the War on Terror is in many ways harmful and far too unsophisticated ideologically to be the basis of American power in the world for the long term, and (in another online article[65]) how he identifies the threat of Global Warming as the real threat.)

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In the period of feudalism, the Big Idea that enabled the upper class to control the masses was the idea that if one did not obey the Church (and its anointed royalty and aristocracy) one would suffer hellfire and brimstone for an eternity. This was a powerful idea indeed! Even people (such as Pascal famously[66]), who were very skeptical of the "eternity in hell" threat, reasoned that if there were even the slightest chance that it were true then it's safer to assume it is true and obey the rulers than to disobey them and risk finding out the hard way that eternal hell is the consequence.

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Today the upper class climate fear mongers argue that we must put aside fighting for economic equality and against environmental pollution caused by profit-driven capitalists (such as BP and its destruction of much life in the Gulf of Mexico just to make a buck) because the "real enemy" is human-caused catastrophic global warming that can only be defeated if we all unite behind people like the Rockefellers and Al Gore and Bill Gates and Prince [now King] Charles to reduce our CO2 "footprint"; furthermore, if we don't do what these people say we must do, then the consequence will be even WORSE than an eternity of personal suffering in hell--it will be the end of the human race entirely because of climate catastrophe. How convenient is the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming thesis! How much safer is the world for the likes of Rockefellers and royalty when the masses are persuaded that the enemy is not a small but extremely privileged upper class but rather that "The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

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Note carefully this point. It is possible that the motive of the Rockefeller Foundation and its allied billionaires and royalty for telling us to reduce our carbon footprint is ONLY the above-described motive: to create essentially a new Big Idea, a veritable new religion, that will enable the upper class to control humanity the way The Church made this possible for the aristocracy in Europe for many centuries.

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But if the Rockefellers' et al's motive is ALSO (as they tell us it is) to actually reduce (or even eliminate) the use of fossil fuel, then I think their reason for having this motive is the one described in the next section.

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Why MIGHT The Rockefeller Foundation Want Us To Stop Using Fossil Fuels, Assuming this Is Its Genuine Motive?

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It's not clear that the Rockefeller Foundation and its allied billionaires and royalty TRULY want to reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuel. 

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In 2023 an article titled, "Big Oil’s Radical Proposal: Curtail Consumption, Not Production," by Irina Slav, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry, originally published at OilPrice, reports this:

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"The truth is that the world is not moving away from hydrocarbons. Demand for oil has hit 102 million barrels daily. Demand for gas is soaring, too, notably from transition poster continent Europe. U.S. oil consumption is also growing after a drop in 2020—the lockdown year."

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Half the world's population lives by eating food grown with nitrogen fertilizer produced from natural gas (a fossil fuel) by a method that releases twice as much C02 by weight as the ammonia making the fertilizer. If there were ever a serious attempt by the rich and powerful to stop using fossil fuel this way, it would amount to a death sentence for billions of people. Since hunger is one of the most powerful incentives to revolution, this elimination of fossil fuel use would dramatically increase the risk of revolution on a huge multi-national scale. This is something the rich and powerful definitely do not want!

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Yes, there is lots of talk about the need to get to "net-zero" (which means adding zero C02 to the atmosphere, by hook or by crook) by 2050. Read here a local example by the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts: "Cambridge enacts ambitious building emissions reduction standards: The new mandates are some of the most stringent in the country, experts say." We read in this article that "BEUDERO, the final part of Cambridge’s three-fold Green New Deal policy bundle, is intended to put the city on track to meet its goal of using only renewable energy by 2035."  

 

Typical of all such declarations of intent, they are ONLY declarations of intent; they avoid specifying HOW the lofty intended goal will actually be achieved. How come? Because there is no known way of actually keeping the billions of humans on earth alive and even moderately safe, not to mention happy, without continuing to use fossil fuels more and more (or to use nuclear energy, which I oppose for the reason I discuss here). To understand this fact, you might want to read a book-length explanation of it in this book.

 

One could argue (and I personally favor this argument) that if eliminating the use of fossil fuel were the billionaire/royalty's true motive (as opposed to creating a new religion for social control as discussed in the above section) then they would have done far more than they have to reduce the use of fossil fuel by now. Fair enough. But if we assume that these powerful people truly do want to reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuel, the following seems to be the most likely explanation for why.

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Independently of the question of global warming, the Club of Rome has been saying since its founding publication in 1972, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind,[67] that world population and material production--regardless of whether the energy is from fossil fuel, nuclear or solar--need to be limited because the world is finite. The Limits to Growth book does not single out fossil fuels from other things such as minerals (aluminum, chromium, etc.), the finite supply of which also constitutes a limit to material growth. Everything is finite, so why does the Rockefeller Foundation focus on fossil fuel?

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Very likely, here's why. The Rockefellers, along with others in the billionaire and royalty upper class, are thinking ahead. They have apparently concluded that material growth on this planet cannot go on forever. But this creates a big problem for the upper class. Why? The ideological basis for the legitimacy of the capitalist upper class has, since the time of the Industrial Revolution, been based on its claim that its economic system--unlike the old feudal system it overthrew--increases economic production and will keep increasing it more and more and more forever. But what if that is no longer possible? The Rockefeller Foundation sees that, "Houston, we have a problem!" What to do?

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The solution that the Rockefeller Foundation is laying the groundwork for is this. Change the basis of legitimacy for the upper class enjoying its immense wealth, power and privilege. Change it from the claim that it will increase economic production forever to the claim that it will RESTRICT economic production and consumption in order to save the planet and human civilization. The Rockefeller Foundation apparently believes that it will be much harder to persuade the masses to live with less economic production and consumption if the argument is "Use less non-renewable resources so people have some in the future" than if the argument is "Save the planet and human civilization from imminent destruction!"

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By focusing on fossil fuel, rather than non-renewable resources in general, The Rockefeller Foundation kills two birds with one stone: it can use the "Save the planet from climate catastrophe!" argument to justify ending the use of C02-producing fossil fuel, and by ending the use of fossil fuel it thereby dramatically reduces ALL economic production.

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Regardless of which of the above theories about its motivation is correct, the future that the Rockefeller Foundation is preparing us to accept is one in which the upper class will be like the old feudal upper class. It will be the owning (not productive) class; it will be the class that owns the wealth of the planet, keeps the lion's share for itself, and doles out the rest to the masses in quantities small enough--as the masses will be told ad nauseam--to avoid "the spectre of an alarming and possibly catastrophic disaster to the biosphere we live in." (F. William Engdahl in chapter 5 of his book, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, makes essentially this same argument and provides a wealth of evidence for it.)

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DOES THE SELF-INTERESTED GREED OF "CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALIST" FUNDERS, SUCH AS THE KOCH BROTHER(S), MEAN THAT THE CAGW HYPOTHESIS IS TRUE?

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As shown above, the biggest and most powerful billionaires (private ones such as the Rockefellers and people such as Ted Turner and Royal ones such as the British and other royals) have a plan to change the basic method by which they will rule over and dominate the world's population. Clearly there are some very wealthy people, such as the Koch brother(s) and perhaps the major owners of ExxonMobil (as discussed above), who are not on board with this plan, presumably for very self-interested greedy reasons. The only source of substantial funding for scientists who refute the CAGW hypothesis is wealthy people such as the Koch brother(s). Such scientists can only achieve any substantial public visibility at all by relying on Big Oil support; they cannot obviously do it by relying on the non-existent Egalitarian Bank of America, can they? It is not possible to judge whether the CAGW hypothesis is supported by actual observations or not by merely looking to compare how greedy and self-interested are the people funding one side versus the other side of this issue, since both sides are funded by extremely greedy and self-interested persons. One must, instead, look at the data and think about what it means with proper scientific reasoning. One can start by looking at data sets of C02 and global temperature such as those given in footnote #1 below, or by finding equivalent such data sets on one's own.

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What Should We Do?

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As long as society continues to be ruled by a privileged, wealthy, powerful, anti-democratic upper class, science will be subservient to that upper class. Ordinary people know this, and will therefore have every reason in the world to distrust scientists no matter whether the things scientists say are true or not. (This is why more and more people are starting to disbelieve what scientists tell them today, about things such as the benefits of pharmaceutical drugs versus alternative therapy, the safety of vaccinations, and even whether C02 is causing catastrophic global warming.)

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In order for people to have confidence in scientists who study things such as climate and the limits to growth due to finite resources, we need to abolish the class inequality that prevents people from trusting such scientists. Until people trust scientists, and until--therefore--people have abolished class inequality to have genuine democracy and equality (i.e., egalitarianism), they will not be able to democratically make important social decisions based on trusted scientific knowledge, and they will not willingly make sacrifices (such as producing and consuming less) that may--or may not[68]--indeed be called for. This is why, no matter what the truth is about climate and limits to growth, we need to make an egalitarian revolution.

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Postscript August 20, 2018: "Climate Alarmism is a Scam and a Hoax" by Barbara McKenzie

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Postscript November 24, 2018: "Antarctica's Ice May Be More Durable Than We Thought: A study found that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has survived higher temperatures than we've created."

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Postscript November 24, 2018: "New report reveals a 23 year long pause in stratospheric temperature: STATE OF THE CLIMATE REPORT REVEALS 23-YEAR TEMPERATURE PAUSE IN THE STRATOSPHERE"

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Postscript November 24, 2018: "New Met Office study suggests natural factors, including the sun, are the biggest reason behind “the pause”"

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Postscript April 16, 2019: I posted the following on Facebook in response to a Guardian article titled, "Extinction Rebellion vows to disrupt London rail and tube lines" :

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These thousands of no doubt very idealistic and well-intentioned people have been totally manipulated by the Rockefeller-et-al dominant part of the ruling elite (including folks like Bill Gates and Ted Turner and Prince Charles) into thinking that we're going to have a climate catastrophe unless CO2 emissions are brought to zero by 2025.

This is delusional.

There is no persuasive scientific evidence it is true and there is no "scientific consensus"--never mind that absurd "97%" myth--that it is true; quite the contrary. There is only assertion after assertion after assertion by the mass media and politicians and scientists afraid of career-death if they disagree (note the *retired* scientists ARE speaking out against this nonsense!), coupled with cherry-picked reports about glaciers and polar bears, etc.

Go ahead and believe this ruling class propaganda if you wish. I DON'T!!

And when, in the name of doing what these Extinction Rebellion people are demanding, the ruling class ratchets up the attack on the working class (as the French government did recently by laying a tax on car fuel to make it too expensive for ordinary people to drive to work) and the working class rises up against the ruling class (as the Yellow Vests are doing) and the ruling class uses the Extinction Rebellion people AGAINST the working class and claims that it's only trying to prevent the extinction of the human race (and not, oh no!, certainly not trying to maintain the class inequality that the Rockefellers et al notoriously murdered countless people to maintain during the past centuries, oh no!), THEN you'll have to decide WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Will you continue to believe (just because some "experts" on behalf on the ruling class say so, like the "experts" who have insisted for decades that "we can't afford good health care for all" and that Saddam Hussein had WMD) that C02 (plant food) is killing us? If so, you're going to be sitting right in the pocket of the ruling class! Your call.

 

Click here to go to the footnotes page.

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