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One founded on oil. And by the end of the 20th century, that order was firmly established. Heating. Transportation. Industrial power. Plastic manufacturing. Pharmaceuticals.
There is
no facet of modern life that is not, one way or another, dependent
on oil.
...were not content with mere financial domination.
The power that came with their near-total monopoly on
the world's most important commodity was enormous, and they had no
qualms about using that power to re-make the world in their image.
...oil money has been used to shape every aspect of the world we live in.
With the rise of the petrodollar in the 1970s, even the international monetary system itself rests on oil.
But now, in the 21st century, it seems that the old order, the oil order, is finally coming to an end.
The masses, having identified the oiligarchs and their destructive grip on the planet, see Big Oil waning and have begun to celebrate. To them, the promise of a post-carbon future represents the end of the oiligarchy.
What many do not realize, however, is that the oil order was never about oil.
The oiligarchs did not care about oil but control. And, having long outgrown their financial dependence on the commodity that brought them their power and riches, they are at the forefront of this push for the post-carbon era.
Now, the oiligarchs are seeking to bring in a new international order.
This is the story of what the oiligarchs really desire, and how they plan to achieve it.
PART ONE: THE RISE OF EUGENICS
DHAKA, 1963 It's a day much like any other in Dhaka.
The streets are crowded, dirty, squalid, smelly, and absolutely swarming with people. Lying in the streets. Coiled in the gutters. Into that swarm of people steps a most unlikely figure. Wearing his drip-dry suit and hugging his briefcase, he sticks out from the crowd.
Surveying the scene, he shakes his head ever so slightly before remarking, half to himself and half to his traveling companion,
It's a scene that has played itself out many times:
But this was no mere tourist passing time on his holiday.
This was John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of oil baron John D. Rockefeller. And, armed with the unimaginable wealth, power and influence that his family name bestowed on him, he was on a mission to do something about the "problem" of overpopulation.
Rockefeller approached that mission as a representative of the Population Council, a group that he himself had founded to address the "problem" in Dhaka and elsewhere. On its surface, the Population Council was a straightforward organization with a straightforward task: to support medical and scientific research into the question of the growing human population.
But the dark history of the Council and its guiding philosophy reveal Rockefeller's true interest in this "problem" and its ultimate "solution."
John D. Rockefeller III - or JDR3, as he was known to the constellation of researchers, businessmen, politicians, diplomats and royals in the orbit of the Rockefeller family - had decided early on how to make proper use of the formidable money and power at his disposal: by controlling the population of the planet.
In 1934, the then-28-year-old JDR3 had written a letter to his father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., about the Rockefeller Foundation's research into,
JDR3 was nothing if not a man of his word.
After commissioning a Rockefeller Foundation fact-finding mission to Asia to report on the threat of the growing Third World population, he organized a conference of the top medical and demographic researchers of the era to discuss - as the very title of the meeting termed it - "population problems."
From that meeting emerged the idea for an organization, the Population Council, to guide the development of the burgeoning field of population and fertility research. JDR3 personally donated $1.35 million of his own money to found the Council and provide its initial operating expenses.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Rockefeller had learned to use philanthropy and largesse as a mask for his true intention:
But that mask slipped when he penned a draft of the Council's charter revealing the organization's true purpose.
The Council, according to JDR3, would,
Thomas Parran, the former Surgeon General of the United States and Council co-founder, warned against including such a blunt admission in the Council's mission statement.
The line was dropped from the final version of the charter.
In truth, however, that sentence had not been written by JDR3 himself. Instead, it had been copied word for word from the back cover of Eugenical News, the central publication of the American eugenics movement. This was no mere accident.
Frederick Osborne, one of the co-founders of the Council and its first president after Rockefeller stepped down in 1957, was also the president of the American Eugenics Society.
When the Population Council was founded, both Osborne and the American Eugenics Society he directed formally moved its operations into the Council's New York office, with the eugenics society now taking its funding directly from Rockefeller's Population Council grant.
The Population Council was the Eugenics Society under another name.
Eugenics, this was the guiding vision of JDR3 and the Rockefeller family's "philanthropy." A vision that cast the Rockefellers and their fellow oiligarchs as superior families, fit, by very virtue of their wealth and success, to guide the course of world events.
The power to determine who was fit to breed and who was too poor to pass on their genes.
Obsessed with breeding and family heredity, the eugenicists believed that it was not merely physical characteristics like weight or height that were determined by one's family line, but social characteristics, like intelligence or conscientiousness or even criminality.
If you are poor, it's because you come from poor stock. If you're criminal, it's because your family line is criminal. And if you're a Rockefeller or a Rothschild or a royal, you are rich and successful because your family was destined for fortune and success.
The pseudoscientific trappings of the 19th century eugenic philosophy may have been new, but in fact the idea is as old as human civilization itself.
People have always been taught to believe that their rulers are special, a class apart, members of a family specially chosen to rule over the masses.
Whether literal descendants of the gods, like the Pharoahs of Egypt or the Emperors of Japan, or members of families specially chosen by god to reign over their kingdoms, like the monarchs of Europe, the right to rule over others was something passed down through family trees.
The commoners, meanwhile, knew their place; not being born of royal blood, they entered the world as serfs, worked the land for the benefit of the noble class, and, if they were lucky, had children of their own to repeat the cycle for another generation.
But the breakdown of medieval feudalism gave rise to a newly-wealthy merchant class.
The development of the scientific method challenged centuries of religious dogma. The spread of Enlightenment philosophy to the toppling of monarchs and the rise of democracy. And the industrial revolution paved the way for the rise of the robber barons and the creation of vast new family fortunes.
By the late 19th century, as the oiligarchs in America and Europe began to consolidate their wealth, a new justification for elite rule of society was needed. One that discarded outdated appeals to supernatural order and seemed to rest on a bedrock of science.
An idea that could explain how nouveau riche upstarts like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds had risen to positions of prominence in society alongside the old royal dynasties of Europe.
Eugenics fit the bill perfectly... the answer was in their genes.
Eugenics, of course, was pseudoscience.
When Galton and his fellow travelers began developing the theory, the identification of the actual mechanism of heredity, including genes and DNA, was nearly 100 years away.
Instead, they used catch-all terms with no definition - like "feeble-mindedness" to diagnose poverty or criminality, claiming it was caused by "defective germ plasm." They used phrenology to try to determine the physical expression of alcoholism or low intelligence.
Even the most famous works of the eugenics era, like Henry Goddard's study of the Kallikak family, were roundly discredited and even repudiated by their authors.
But the idea was an infectious one. Like all the most enticing pseudoscience, it explained so much with so little effort.
It appealed to the vanity of the researchers, usually hailing from successful and wealthy families themselves. And it gave an excuse for social engineering on a scale never before dreamed of.
When eugenics crossed the Atlantic, spreading from the rarefied British countryside of Galton and his cohorts to the rocky shores of America, it hit ambitious young researchers like Charles Davenport with hurricane force.
A Harvard-trained zoologist who had grown up in a strict, puritanical family of New England Congregationalists, Davenport's authoritarian father was obsessed with genealogy, tracing the family tree all the way back to his Anglo-Saxon forebears in 1086.
When the younger Davenport discovered Galton's writing while working at a biological laboratory on Long Island, he found his purpose in life.
As he later told the American Breeders Association, which became an important ally in his eugenicist cause:
With the proselytizing fervour of a religious convert, Davenport concocted an ambitious idea for furthering the eugenic cause:
Once completed, those with the lowest eugenic value could be eliminated from the gene pool.
The Rockefeller Foundation's initial contribution to the Eugenics Record Office, a mere $21,650, was a small sum, but it came with clear benefits: not only the institutional infrastructure and the personnel of the Foundation and the prestige of the Rockefeller name itself, but the promise of increased support as the work advanced.
And as always, the Rockefellers were true to their word.
Rockefeller Foundation researchers like William Welch, the founding director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, sat on the ERO's board and helped direct its activities.
The Rockefellers also provided funds for specific research, like a $10,000 grant to survey New York's Nassau County for the eugenically unfit.
And it created sister organizations like the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which cross-pollinated research and researchers with Davenport's own laboratory.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. especially showed an interest in Davenport's work right from the start. They kept up a regular correspondence on a number of eugenics issues.
In January 1912, when a plan to institutionalize "mentally deficient" female convicts to stop them from having children was floated, the young Rockefeller heir wrote to Davenport for his thoughts on the scheme. For his part, Junior declared that,
After Davenport responded that the plan would only work if it included a eugenical screening of the convicts, Junior contributed $200,000 to found just such an institute.
The Institute of Criminology in New York was administered by Rockefeller's own Bureau of Social Hygiene and staffed by workers trained at the Eugenics Record Office.
Fueled by the support of America's rich and powerful, the field of eugenics transformed from the quaint hobbyhorse of a few mad scientists into the social cause of an entire generation.
Economists, politicians, authors, activists - by the 1920s, everyone who was anyone was extolling the need to eradicate the germ-plasm of the lower stock.
Marie Stopes, the celebrated family planning pioneer who founded Britain's first birth control clinic in North London in 1921, railed against "hordes of defectives," calling for the compulsory sterilization of those she deemed "unfit for parenthood."
Tommy Douglas, now venerated as a hero in Canada for his role in founding the nation's health care system, submitted a Master's thesis to McMaster University advocating that,
John Maynard Keynes, the economist who gave us the Keynesian economic school that is still popular among central planners today, was himself president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944.
Alexander Graham Bell is still revered as the inventor of the telephone but was in fact an early supporter of Charles Davenport and a founding member of the Eugenic Records Office Board of Scientific Directors.
He openly campaigned for the "eradication of the deaf race" by governments intervening to stop deaf people from marrying.
Nobel Prize-winning playwright and author George Bernard Shaw advocated for the creation of a government panel that would require everyone to justify their existence before it.
If they failed to do so, Shaw thought those people should be killed by the state.
Eventually, with foundation funding and promotion, this eugenicist mindset filtered down into the popular culture.
The American Eugenics Society sponsored "fitter family contests" at state fairs, awarding prizes to families scoring the highest on "eugenic health" tests. The Society also sponsored contests to award prizes to clergy who fit the message of eugenics into their sermons.
Eugenics even found its way to the silver screen:
But merely popularizing their ideas was not the goal of the eugenicists.
They wanted action. And in this case, that meant concrete steps toward eliminating the defective germ-plasm from the human population.
Government-sanctioned murder of those deemed unfit was always one option on the table. And it wasn't just playwrights like Bernard Shaw advocating for government death panels.
Eugenicists of all stripes discussed and debated the idea of "murdering degenerates" as the quickest way of achieving their goals.
But mainstream eugenicists realized that this approach was not possible in the political and judicial climate of the day.
As Henry Goddard noted in his infamous study on The Kallikak Family:
Instead, they would have to turn to the other option, the more politically acceptable solution for stopping the undesirables from breeding: forced sterilization.
Indiana passed America's first eugenic sterilization law in 1907, and within only a few years there were a dozen states where those deemed "unfit" were being legally sterilized against their will. But still, this was not enough for the eugenicists.
The approach was too scattershot: only a few thousand sterilizations had taken place under these laws, and Indiana's own forced sterilization act was overturned by the state's Supreme Court in 1921.
Once again, Harry Laughlin, Davenport's right-hand man at the Rockefeller-funded Eugenics Records Office, stepped in to solve the problem. He drafted a "Model Eugenic Sterilization" law in 1922 that became the basis for Virginia's 1924 sterilization act.
To confront the issues head on, the eugenicists decided to challenge the law's constitutionality themselves and take the lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court. All they needed was the right test case to bring to trial.
And they found that case in Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old ward of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, who was neither epileptic nor feeble-minded.
The case was a sham, concocted merely to get the Supreme Court's stamp of approval on the issue of forced sterilization.
Buck's "independent counsel" was, in fact, Irving Whitehead, one of the founding directors of the colony that was pushing to sterilize her and the man who appointed the director that was pushing for her sterilization.
Buck herself was not feeble-minded, nor was her mother, nor was her daughter, Vivian Buck, who Carrie bore as a result of being raped and who was declared "feeble-minded" as a baby, because, as a social worker testified during the trial,
None of these facts mattered to the Supreme Court.
Presided over by former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the Court voted 8-to-1 in favor of upholding Buck's forced sterilization and the constitutionality of the Virginia eugenics sterilization law itself.
Writing the decision was one of the most famous and venerated Justices in the history of the court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., himself a eugenicist from the so-called "Boston Brahmin" sect of the hereditary East Coast establishment.
In his decision, Holmes justified the forced sterilization of those like Buck by calling on the government's right to vaccinate its citizens against their will:
And with that, the floodgates were opened.
New laws were enacted and old laws revised to comport with the Supreme Court's decision. Forcible sterilizations, taking place in a covert and low-key manner before, were now reported with pride. A few thousand individuals sterilized against their will became tens of thousands.
The eugenics era, brought into being by the immense fortunes of the Rockefellers and their ilk, had arrived. And, with the aid of a very dramatic push by the Rockefellers, it was about to go international.
Beginning in November 1922 and increasingly throughout the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation began a series of grants and fellowships to German scientists.
Equivalent to millions of dollars in today's money, these fellowships transformed the German scientific establishment, devastated in the wake of World War I. The Foundation's money found its way into the coffers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, a series of scientific organizations that included an Institute for Psychiatry and an Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics.
One of the main beneficiaries of this Rockefeller largesse was Ernst Rüdin, a head researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and a key architect of Germany's eugenics program under the Third Reich.
Rüdin co-edited the official rules and commentary on the Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny, which was passed on July 14, 1933, less than six months after Hitler was appointed interim chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg.
The law, like the Virginia law that the Supreme Court upheld and that led to the sterilization of Carrie Buck and tens of thousands of other Americans, was modeled on Harry Laughlin's Model Eugenic Sterilization legislation.
It formed "Genetic Health Courts" which could mandate sterilization of "defectives" in eight different categories:
Alcoholics, a ninth category, were to be optionally added to the list, with a caution against inclusion of ordinary drunkards.
By the end of the year, 62,400 Germans were found unfit to breed and sterilized against the will. By 1945, that number had reached 400,000.
In the 1940s, that eugenics program was to expand into euthanasia under the Aktion T4 program, resulting in over 70,000 children, senior citizens, and psychiatric patients being murdered by the Nazi regime.
As the dust settled on World War II, the name of "eugenics" became synonymous with the Nazis in the minds of the general public. The eugenicists, outraged, knew that their work could not continue any longer under the name of eugenics.
But that didn't mean that it couldn't continue.
As American Eugenics Society co-founder Frederick Osborne wrote:
Thus, he moved the American Eugenics Society into the offices of John D. Rockefeller III's Population Council, becoming president in 1957.
The Rockefellers and their fellow oiligarchs had for generations felt themselves to be stewards of the planet, protecting it from the rising tide of the genetically inferior.
They were not about to give up that quest. They would simply have to package it under a different name.
PART TWO: OILIGARCHS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
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:
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.
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:
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,
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:
Yes, the "cure" for the "disease" of mankind, according to Rockefeller-funded propaganda featuring John D. Rockefeller III as an expert commentator, 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?
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 Program (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.
Eastern Canada was hit particularly hard by the OPEC oil embargo, and as a result then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau created PetroCanada, Canada's national oil company. And who did he tap as the company's first president? None other than that crusading Rockefeller-backed "environmentalist," Maurice Strong.
Leaving that post in 1978, Strong continued with a scarcely believable series of governmental, private sector and international appointments, from Chairman of the Canada Development Investment Corporation to Chairman of AZL Resources Incorporated to leading the UN's famine relief program in Africa.
In 1987, Strong helped to organize another environmental conference, much less known but no less remarkable than the Stockholm summit.
Dubbed the 4th World Wilderness Congress, the meeting took place in Denver, Colorado, and brought together,
...and a gaggle of other oiligarchs, bankers, Washington power players and globalists, ostensibly to talk about the environment.
What they actually discussed was altogether more incredible:
Those were the words of David Lang, a banker from Montreal who spoke during the conference.
And to Lang, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds and the other bankers and oiligarchs assembled at the meeting, the general population are "cannon fodder" that "unfortunately […] populates the earth."
This candid admission, a perfect encapsulation of the eugenical ideas at the heart of the global conservation movement funded into existence by the oiligarchs themselves, was caught on tape by George Hunt, a businessman in Boulder, Colorado, who had volunteered to help the conference as a concerned citizen and came away horrified by what he had witnessed there.
He released his own recordings of the proceedings in the early 1990s to warn the public about this group and its ultimate aims.
Hunt's recording captured the moment when Maurice Strong introduced Baron Edmond de Rothschild - whose father's cousin had sold the Rothschild's Azerbaijani oil fields to Royal Dutch Shell in 1911 - as a pioneer of the environmental movement and a founder of the concept of "conservation banking."
The meeting accomplished some important goals for the oiligarchs.
It led to the creation of "Wilderness Areas," vast expanses of natural terrain from which the public could be largely excluded.
These areas were to be designated and overseen by the IUCN, the same body that British Eugenics Society president Julian Huxley used as a springboard to creating the World Wildlife Fund.
Another important goal of the conference was Rothschild's proposal for the creation of a so-called "World Conservation Bank" that would operate at a supra-national level and coordinate finance for development projects around the world.
This world conservation bank was forwarded and eventually realized at Maurice Strong's next major conference, the one which was to serve as the crowning achievement of his unlikely career as environmental crusader, and which still remains one of the touchstones of the environmental movement: the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
As useful as the 4th World Wilderness Congress had been in advancing the agenda of Maurice Strong and the oiligarchs, that was only setting the stage for the Earth Summit in Rio.
At the Earth Summit, Edmond de Rothschild got his "World Conservation Bank."
Dubbed the "Global Environment Facility" and launched at the summit itself, it serves as the funding mechanism for five different UN conventions and provides billions of dollars worth of financing to environmental and development projects around the world.
Its 18 "implementing partners" include,
One of the Global Environment Facility's specialties is "debt-for-nature swaps," where Third World countries are given debt relief in return for opening their land up for environmental development projects.
The projects come with transaction costs of up to 5%, paid to the contractors who manage and direct the investments, not to the locals who, like the aborigines of Palawan island, are kicked off their land and effectively wiped off the face of the map.
The Earth Summit also gave rise to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body to which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivers its reports. Generally thought to be neutral, non-governmental bodies relying only on science and evidence, the UNFCCC and the IPCC are handcuffed by the terms that Strong set out for them to deliver only one conclusion:
Another product of the Earth Summit in Rio was the Earth Charter, a quasi-religious document that Mikhail Gorbachev, who helped draft the text along with Maurice Strong, referred to as a replacement for the Ten Commandments, and which sought to usher in an era of Gaia worship and global responsibility.
Declaring that,
What the oiligarchs had been working toward for decades, and what they achieved in Rio in 1992, was the completion of the transformation of the eugenics philosophy, from talk of "sterilization" of the "feeble-minded" to a popular understanding of humanity as a cancer that must be removed for the Earth to live.
Now the duty was to "reduce carbon footprints" and reduce the population in the name of "saving the planet."
But, wrapped in this new vocabulary and coming with a trendy, pervasive, and well-funded advertising campaign, the end result sounded remarkably similar to the eugenics of old.
And, without the public even noticing it, the oiligarchs were able to wrap themselves in this new flag to appear not as the billionaire scions of the oil industry who made their vast fortunes by plundering the earth and monopolizing its wealth, but as crusading environmentalists who are going to save the planet from the "cannon fodder" that "unfortunately populates the earth."
And even today, the masses, outraged over the carnage that Big Oil has wrought, are content to have that outrage directed by the very oiligarchs they seek to oppose, the same oiligarchs who are quietly funding and supporting their environmental movement from behind the scenes - and even leading it from the front.
The Rockefeller family made headlines by divesting from oil completely in 2016.
David de Rothschild is one of the photogenic leading lights of the environmental movement.
Dubbed "Plastic Jesus" for his publicity stunts and photo opportunities masquerading as a concerned environmentalist, David de Rothschild - a scion of the billionaire banking family that added to its fortune with its Azerbaijani oil field holdings and still invests in oil through ventures like Genie Energy - now spends his time lecturing the public about how their lifestyles are killing the polar bears.
Prince Charles is outspoken on the subject of global warming, warning his loyal subjects that unless they tighten their belts and live more humble lives, they will bring about the end of the world.
The groundwork has been laid for what these oiligarchs call the post-carbon era. It is no longer about oil. It never was. It is about control.
PART THREE: AGENDA: TECHNOCRACY
Today, Marion King Hubbert is best known as the Shell Oil researcher who gained notoriety in the 1950s for predicting that the US would achieve its peak production of petroleum by 1970, and that almost all of the planet's oil supplies would be exhausted by 2020.
This "Peak Oil" theory, still sometimes referred to as "Hubbert's Peak," was, like everything else generated by Big Oil, a conveniently crafted lie, designed to habituate the market to artificial scarcity and thus keep oil prices high.
Hubbert's "prediction" was not based on any empirical data from any oil field, but instead relied on Hubbert's incorrect guesses about remaining oil reserves and employed a heuristic tool to model production.
As Hubbert's protégé and colleague at Shell Oil, Kenneth Deffeyes, conceded years later:
Shortly before his death in 1989, Hubbert himself admitted that when he showed his Peak Oil paper to Shell's managing director before presenting it to his colleagues, the director had told him not to "go overboard" with his estimates of oil reserves, pointing specifically to L.G. Weeks, a rival geophysicist who had estimated reserves to be much higher, and thus the impending threat of undersupply and the need for high oil prices to be much weaker.
But although today Hubbert is remembered almost exclusively for his Peak Oil thesis, he was in fact involved in a much larger, lifelong project, helping to codify and incorporate a movement that, much like eugenics, was wildly popular nearly a century ago, fell out of favor in polite society, and yet continues today under other names.
That movement was called "Technocracy."
Technocracy billed itself as a social movement, a philosophy, a scientific solution to political and economic problems, and a new way of ordering the world.
But, at base, it is an idea for a new international economic order, one to be designed and managed down to the most minute detail by a select few: the "technocrats."
Drawing on Henri Saint-Simon's call for a scientifically-organized socialist system, the positivism and secular humanism of Auguste Comte, and the "Principles of Scientific Management" propounded by Frederick Taylor, the technocratic movement emerged from the same environment of progressivism, positivism and social Darwinism that birthed eugenics.
Just as the eugenicists believed the human race could be improved through selective breeding controlled and administered by a small group of scientists and their billionaire backers, so, too, did the technocrats believe that they could improve the social and economic conditions of humanity by controlling and administering society.
And, happily enough for the oiligarchs, the technocrats would improve the world by replacing money with energy certificates.
Led by the eccentric "revolutionary" economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, the technocratic movement that formed around Veblen's "New School for Social Research" and "Technical Alliance" attracted both engineers and serious researchers like King Hubbert and Buckminster Fuller and fellow eccentrics like Howard Scott.
Scott, a "mysterious man" of uncertain background, established himself in New York City at the end of World War I and came to be seen as a "bohemian engineer."
In 1920 he went to work for the Wobblies as a research director, and the following year he founded the Technical Alliance, a group of engineers and scientists centered around Columbia University, and which, as a forerunner to the technocracy movement, advocated for a society run by scientists and engineers.
In 1932, the charismatic and well-spoken Scott managed to attach himself to Walter Rautenstrauch, a professor at Columbia and the founder of the university's Department of Industrial Engineering.
With a common interest in technocracy, the two became friends and allies. It was through Rautenstrauch that Scott was able to approach the president of Columbia, Nicholas Murray Butler, for permission to use the university's facilities.
Butler, always on the lookout for the cutting edge of progressivism, was swayed by the technocratic ideas, and soon Scott's Committee on Technocracy was operating out of the basement of Hamilton Hall.
When Butler let word slip about the next big idea being cooked up in the basement of his university, technocracy became a sensation. It was lauded in the press, Scott became a sought-after speaker, and there was even a dance named after the movement.
It was at Columbia that Scott met King Hubbert, and the two, an unlikely pair of serious-minded researcher and eccentric revolutionary, immediately hit it off.
Their stint together at Columbia was about to come to an abrupt end, but their association would last for decades, and help give birth to ideas that would eventually transform the world.
Disgraced, evicted from Columbia, and with the Committee on Technocracy disbanded almost as quickly as it had come together, Scott found himself at a personal low.
Penniless and with an old debt having caught up to him, he had only one person he could rely on:
Hubbert let Scott live in his Greenwich Village apartment and paid out of his own pocket to file the articles of incorporation for Technocracy, Inc., a new membership organization that would carry on the principles of technocracy.
The first step, of course, was to define precisely what those principles were.
Hubbert got to work penning the Technocracy Study Course, the Bible of the Technocracy movement.
In it, Hubbert laid out the vision of,
The technocratic system was to be structured around a new monetary paradigm, one based not on dollars and cents but "Energy Certificates" representing the nation's net energy expenditure.
These certificates would be denominated in Joules and issued based on a net energy budget deemed appropriate by the technocratic state's governing scientists.
Citizens would be issued an equal share of the nation's certificates and make their purchases with them, and the information about these purchases would be relayed back to the central planning body for analysis.
By this method, the technocrats could, in the words of one proponent,
In the Technocracy Study Course, Hubbert, like a good technocrat, laid out the exact conditions that would need to be met for this vision to come to pass. According to him, technocracy would require:
Hubbert's vision was not just that of a totalitarian society in which every detail of every interaction was recorded and reported to a central authority, but, for the 1930s, the concept of continuously and instantaneously updated registries of every good in the economy was not just audacious, but borderline insane.
Nevertheless, suffering through the Great Depression, the American people were willing to listen to any ideas to replace the current system that had so obviously failed them, no matter how outlandish.
Technocracy, Inc. did attract a following, swelling into the tens of thousands later in the decade.
But Scott's eccentric ways, compelling members to salute him in public and delivering rambling radio addresses, ultimately led to the movement's long, slow decline in relevance.
Hubbert never repudiated the concept of technocracy, but when he joined Shell as a researcher he resigned his position on the board of Technocracy, Inc. and avoided direct mention of the organization.
The technocrats had sketched the outlines of a completely ordered and controlled society, one in which energy is the fundamental measure of value and all consumption and production is meticulously analyzed by a central authority.
Technocracy, Inc. still exists to this day, but the language and thinking of the technocrats has, like eugenics, undergone a metamorphosis.
And, also like eugenics, the name may have faded into obscurity, but the idea lives on in the hands of the oiligarchs.
Carbon rationing. Carbon trading. Carbon taxes. Cap and trade. Just as the technocrats of old envisioned a new economic order based on energy and governed by the dictates of scientists and engineers, so, too, does this modern form of technocracy envision an economic order in which energy is budgeted, priced and traded by intergovernmental panels of scientists and the political caste that grows up around these institutions.
These measures are sold to the public as a way of penalizing the big oil interests that have spent the last century monopolizing the world's key resources and plundering the earth in the pursuit of profit. What they do not understand, because it has been deliberately obscured, is that it is these very interests that have been instrumental in creating these schemes in the first place.
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.
But using energy as the new "metric of value" for the post-carbon economy is just one element of the neo-technocratic vision. When Hubbert wrote his Technocracy Study Course, he made it clear that technocracy could not come to fruition without 24/7 surveillance of all energy usage and a continuous stream of data about all goods being produced by and consumed by society. But whereas in the 1930s such a system must have seemed like a delusional flight of fancy, today it is already being implemented.
Once again, we are being asked to believe that the vested corporate interests that are rolling these technologies out in a coordinated fashion are doing so for the benefit of the public. That this technology is to help save the earth. And once again, we are being duped. The technocratic agenda is not about saving the earth. It is not about helping the public. It is not even about making money. It is about complete control over every aspect of our daily life.
The technocrats and functionaries of this agenda, like Hubbert and his colleagues in Technocracy, Inc., pioneered this idea because they believed that they, the technocrats and engineers, would be able to solve the world's problems. But the oiligarchs and bankers who funded their ideas into existence did so because it would help them to become the rulers of a system so perfectly crafted that no resource, no commodity, no person would be beyond their control. And now, in the 21st century, that technocratic vision is coming into view. And it is being helped along by a public that believes the post-carbon future represents the end of the oiligarchy. They couldn't be more wrong. CONCLUSION Oil. It was never about oil. It was about control. Control over energy and production and consumption. Control over the world's resources. Control over the population. Control over humanity itself.
The picture is bleak, and made all that much bleaker by the fact that so many have been duped into believing that the oiligarchs' ultimate agenda, an agenda of technocratic control, micromanagement of our daily lives, and, ultimately, the elimination of the "cannon fodder" from the gene pool, is in fact in their own best interest. The oiligarchs, shielded behind their smokescreen of "sustainable development" and "post-carbon" economy, are closer than ever before to achieving their true goal of total control. But if the people perish from lack of knowledge of this agenda, then understanding is the first step toward the solution.
Big oil. Big pharma. The green revolution. Genetic engineering. Eugenics. The environmental movement. Technocracy. Not one person in a thousand can detail the historical development of these ideas, or the people and the agenda that connects them. But if you have watched this documentary, you are now that one person in a thousand.
The question is,
As the oiligarchs' quest for total control comes into view, it's difficult to remember that it all started a century and a half ago with "Devil Bill" Rockefeller, a two-bit snake oil salesman always on the run from the last group of marks he managed to con. In a way, nothing has changed but the scope of the con and the number of marks who have fallen for the routine.
But now that you know the snake oil that is being fed to the public, the only question that matters is: Are you going to drink it?
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