To the Editor:

The media drumbeat for the Green New Deal agenda and the many cries for government to reduce the carbon footprint to save the planet make you wonder where all this is coming from and why.

Some commentators fear that this is less a grassroots initiative and more a Power Elite agenda for reducing and eventually eliminating national sovereignty and creating their long-stated goal of a collectivist One World Government.

One answer lies largely in the 1968 creation and agenda of the “Club of Rome” some 50 years ago. It was founded during a meeting at David Rockefeller’s private estate in Bellagio, Italy.

Club members, including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Soros, Bill Gates, Queen Beatrix of the Netherland,s and Mikhail Gorbachev, believe humanity requires “a common motivation, namely a common adversary” in order to realize their goal of world government. They choose the threat of environmental catastrophe. (Listen to: “The Club of Rome, Originators of the Global Warming/Climate Change Scam.”)

Ever since, the Club of Rome has been establishing a network of 33 national associations. and their many tentacles of influence have been systematically propagating their catastrophic future vision into the mainstream of global public opinion.

They have been doing this through their controlled mass media cartel as well as their philanthropic foundations and corporations to fund research grants to approved “scientists” to advance their hypotheses, including man-made global warming and the dying off of the polar bears, as being “settled science.”

Today their theories and proposed action plans have entered the educational establishment, think tanks, and activist organizations, the mass media,  political action committees, and Capitol Hill.

Leading advocates include many public figures and such prominent Beltway representatives as Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) on the Senate Committee on Appropriations and Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY) the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change.

What is veiled from the inattentive majority is the role of elitists, who are leaders in finance, corporations, foundations, think tanks, universities, and mass news and entertainment media, as well as in civil government.

Sociologist G. William Domhoff’s book, “Who Rules America,” demonstrates that public policy agenda-setting, “begins informally in corporate boardrooms, social clubs, and discussion groups, where problems are identified as ‘issues’ to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where their policies are enacted and implemented.”

The initial impetus for policy change and initial resources for research, planning, and formulation come from corporate and personal wealth channeled into tax-free foundations, universities,  policy-oriented think tanks, and non-governmental organizations in the form of endowments, grants, and contracts.

Moreover, corporate presidents, directors, top wealth holders, key advisors, and their lawyers also sit on the governing boards of many such institutions to guide and monitor the progress of their plans.

Some observers say that what appears to be an organic, grassroots, bottom-up movement is actually a well-oiled, top-down machine. They point out that funding is selectively provided by their philanthropic foundations and charities. One of the many Council on Foundations’ Affinity Groups, namely the Environmental Grantmakers Association, is the funding epicenter of the environmental movement.

This has been documented by a report from the Congressional Committee on Environment and Public Works on how a club of billionaires and their foundations control the environmental movement.

According to its own website, the Club of Rome is composed of “scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies.”

The Club of Rome is advancing the agenda of Thomas Malthus who argued that population was held within resource limits by two types of checks: 1) positive ones, which raised the death rate, and 2) preventative ones, which lowered the birth rate. The positive checks included hunger, disease and war; the preventative checks, abortion, birth control, prostitution, homosexuality, postponement of marriage, and celibacy.

Their vision, as stated in their 1991 publication, “The First Global Revolution: A Report to the Club of Rome,” reads “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. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

In his memoirs, David Rockefeller (1915-2017), the founder-funder, wrote: “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have ... attacked the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions.

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

And that is why the well-funded Green Socialism’s drumbeat continues to intensify.

Victor Porlier

East Berne

Editor’s note: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. These findings are not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing.