Developing the Anglo-American green agenda

nuclear companies, with the full support of their governments, entered in this period into negotiations with select developing sector countries, fully in the spirit of Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace declaration. Clearly, the Anglo-American energy grip, based on their tight control of the world’s major energy source, petroleum, was threatened if these quite feasible programs went ahead.

In the postwar period, nuclear energy represented precisely the same technological improvement over oil which oil had represented over coal when Lord Fisher and Winston Churchill argued at the end of the nineteenth century that Britain’s navy should convert to oil from coal. The major difference in the 1970s was that Britain and her cousins in the United States were fi rmly in control of world oil supplies. World nuclear technology threatened to open unbounded energy possibilities, especially if plans for commercial nuclear fast breeder reactors were realized, as well as for thermonuclear fusion.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1974 oil shock, two organizations were established within the nuclear industry, both, signifi cantly enough, based in London. In early 1975, an informal semisecret group was established, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, or ‘London Club,’ as it was known. The group included Britain, the United States and Canada, together with France, Germany, Japan and the USSR. This was an initial Anglo-American effort to secure self-restraint on nuclear export. This group was complemented in May 1975 by the formation of another secretive organization, the London ‘Uranium Institute,’ which brought together the world’s major suppliers of uranium. This was dominated by the traditional British territories, including Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. These ‘inside’ organizations were necessary, but by no means suffi cient, for the Anglo-American interests to contain the nuclear ‘threat’ of the early 1970s. As one prominent antinuclear American from the Aspen Institute put it, ‘We must take the bloom off the “nuclear rose.”’ And take it off they did.

DEVELOPING THE ANGLO-AMERICAN GREEN AGENDA

It was no accident that, following the oil shock recession of 1974–75, a growing part of the population of western Europe, especially in Germany, began talking for the fi rst time in the postwar period about ‘limits to growth,’ or threats to the environment, and began to question their faith in the principle of industrial growth and technological progress. Very few people realized the extent to which

their new ‘opinions’ were being carefully manipulated from the top by a network established by the same Anglo-American fi nance and industry circles that lay behind the Saltsjöbaden oil strategy.

Beginning in the 1970s, an awesome propaganda offensive was launched from select Anglo-American think tanks and journals, intended to shape a new ‘limits to growth’ agenda, which would ensure the ‘success’ of the dramatic oil shock strategy. The American oilman present at the May 1973 Saltsjöbaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, Robert O. Anderson, was a central fi gure in the implementation of the ensuing Anglo-American ecology agenda. It was to become one of the most successful frauds in history.

Anderson and his Atlantic Richfi eld Oil Co. funneled millions of dollars through their Atlantic Richfi eld Foundation into select organizations to target nuclear energy. One of the prime benefi ciaries of Anderson’s largesse was a group called Friends of the Earth, which was organized in this time with a $200,000 grant from Anderson. One of the earliest actions of Anderson’s Friends of the Earth was an assault on the German nuclear industry, through such antinuclear actions as the anti-Brockdorf demonstrations in 1976, led by Friends of the Earth leader Holger Strohm. The director of Friends of the Earth in France, Brice Lalonde, was the Paris partner of the Rockefeller family law firm Coudert Brothers, and became Mitterrand’s environment minister in 1989. It was Friends of the Earth which was used to block a major Japanese–Australian uranium supply agreement. In November 1974, Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka went to Canberra to meet Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The two made a commitment, potentially worth billions of dollars, for Australia to supply Japan’s needs for future uranium ore and enter a joint project to develop uranium enrichment technology. British uranium mining giant Rio Tinto Zinc secretly deployed Friends of the Earth in Australia to mobilize opposition to the pending Japanese agreement, resulting some months later in the fall of Whitlam’s government. Friends of the Earth had ‘friends’ in very high places in London and Washington.

But Robert O. Anderson’s major vehicle for spreading the new ‘limits to growth’ ideology among American and European establishment circles was his Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. With Anderson as chairman and Atlantic Richfi eld head Thornton Bradshaw as vice-chairman, the Aspen Institute in the early 1970s

was a major fi nancial conduit for the creation of the establishment’s new antinuclear agenda.

Among the better-known trustees of Aspen at this time was World Bank president and the man who ran the Vietnam war, Robert S. McNamara. Other carefully selected Aspen trustees included Lord Bullock of Oxford University, Richard Gardner, an Anglophile American economist who was later U.S. ambassador to Italy, Wall Street banker Russell Peterson of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb Inc., as well as Exxon board member Jack G. Clarke, Gulf Oil’s Jerry McAfee and Mobil Oil director George C. McGhee, the former State Department offi cial who was present in 1954 at the founding meeting of the Bilderberg group. Also involved with Anderson’s Aspen in this early period was Marion Countess Doenhoff, the Hamburg publisher of Die Zeit, as well as former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and high commissioner to Germany, John J. McCloy.

Robert O. Anderson brought in Joseph Slater from McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation to serve as Aspen’s president. It was indeed a close-knit family in the Anglo-American establishment of the early 1970s. The initial project Slater launched at Aspen was the preparation of an international organizational offensive against industrial growth and especially nuclear energy, using the auspices (and the money) of the United Nations. Slater secured support of Sweden’s UN ambassador, Sverker Aastrom, who, in the face of strenuous objections from developing countries, steered a proposal through the United Nations for an international conference on the environment.

From the outset, the June 1972 Stockholm UN Conference on the Environment was run by operatives of Anderson’s Aspen Institute. Aspen board member Maurice Strong, a Canadian oilman from Petro-Canada, chaired the Stockholm conference. Aspen also provided fi nancing to create an international zero-growth network under UN auspices, the International Institute for Environment and Development, whose board included Robert O. Anderson, Robert McNamara, Strong and British Labour Party’s Roy Jenkins. The new organization immediately produced a book, Only One Earth, by Rockefeller University associate Rene Dubos and British Malthusian Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson). The International Chambers of Commerce were persuaded at this time to sponsor Maurice Strong and other Aspen fi gures in seminars targeting international businessmen on the emerging new environmentalist ideology.

The 1972 Stockholm conference created the necessary international organizational and publicity infrastructure, so that by the time of the Kissinger oil shock of 1973–74, a massive antinuclear propaganda offensive could be launched, with the added assistance of millions of dollars readily available from the oil-linked channels of the Atlantic Richfi eld Company, the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund and other such elite Anglo-American establishment circles. Among the groups which were funded by these people at the time were organizations including the ultra-elitist World Wildlife Fund, then chaired by the Bilderberg’s Prince Bernhard and later by Royal Dutch Shell’s John Loudon.10

Indicative of the fi nancial establishment’s overwhelming infl uence in the American and British media is the fact that during this period no public outcry was heard about the probable confl ict of interest involved in Robert O. Anderson’s well-fi nanced antinuclear offensive, and the fact that his Atlantic Richfi eld Oil Co. was one of the major benefi ciaries from the 1974 price increase of oil. Anderson’s ARCO had invested tens of millions of dollars in high-risk oil infrastructure in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and Britain’s North Sea, together with Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell and the other Seven Sisters.

Had the 1974 oil crisis not raised the market price of oil to $11.65 per barrel or thereabouts, Anderson’s investments in the North Sea and Alaska, as well as those of British Petroleum, Exxon and the others, would have brought fi nancial ruin. To ensure a friendly press voice in Britain, Anderson at this time purchased the London Observer. Virtually no one asked if Anderson and his infl uential friends might have known in advance that Kissinger would create the conditions for a 400 per cent oil price rise.11

So as not to leave any zero-growth stone unturned, Robert O. Anderson also contributed signifi cant funds to a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at the Rockefeller’s estate at Bellagio, Italy, with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. In 1972, this Club of Rome, and the U.S. Association of the Club of Rome, gave widespread publicity to their publication of a scientifi cally fraudulent computer simulation prepared by Dennis Meadows and Jay Forrester, titled ‘Limits to Growth.’ Meadows and Forrester added modern computer graphics to the discredited essay of Malthus, insisting that the world would soon perish for lack of adequate energy, food and other resources. As did Malthus, they chose to ignore the impact of technological progress on improving the human condition. Their message was one of unmitigated gloom and cultural pessimism.