BY NIALL McCRAE
The founding fathers of the Green revolution are not well-known. Despite their instrumental role in environmental catastrophism and the Net Zero imperative, mention their names on the Clapham Omnibus and you will get a blank look. They have mostly worked off the margins of public attention to instil the structures and systems of a global coup d’état. Their project was never really about science, or nature conservation, but a technocratic power quest profoundly influenced by eugenics. These men (and a few women) were of the liberating twentieth century, but they prepared the ground for a totalitarianism in the twenty-first.
Maurice Strong (1929-2015)
Born in Manitoba in 1929, Strong had a lucrative career as an oil baron, before his appointment as head of the Canadian overseas development agency in the 1960s. Through his association with David Rockefeller, Strong was involved in creating the Club of Rome, a body that would steer the United Nations to the Green mission In 1972, with Rockefeller’s blessing, Strong was appointed as chairman of the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. In the same year Strong launched the UN Environment Programme. His work culminated in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, which preposterously claims that the science of anthropogenic global warming is settled.
Aurelio Peccei (1908-1984)
Working for Fiat in the 1930s, Peccei abhorred Mussolini, and as an anti-fascist activist he was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. After the war he moved to Argentina where he established Fiat-Concord, the largest carmaker in Latin America. In 1964 he became president of the office equipment firm Olivetti. He chaired the Committee for Atlantic Economic Cooperation, and through his work on collaboration between governments and corporations he met Alexander King, his partner in founding the Club of Rome.
Alexander King (1909-2007)
When he met Peccei, King was head of scientific affairs for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international trade agency A research chemist born in Glasgow, King had promoted DDT to protect allied soldiers in the war, but later regretted his involvement, noting in his memoirs: ‘my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem’. King and Peccei presented themselves as industrialists who had seen the light, but these ungodly men had darkness in their soul.
Paul Ehrlich (1932-)
Professor emeritus of population studies at Stanford, Ehrlich is perhaps the best known of those featured here, due to his notorious book The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne in 1968, which predicted that billions of people would perish by the 1980s from war, disease and famine. Ehrlich criticised policies that perpetuated overpopulation. Malaria kills hundreds of thousands in underdeveloped regions every year, but Ehrlich lamented the reduction in death toll achieved by US exports of DDT. With lawyer Richard Bowers and Yale professor Charles Remington, Ehrlich founded the campaigning body Zero Population Growth. In 1977 he and wife wrote Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment with Stanford physicist John Holdren (who was later appointed as President Barack Obama’s scientific advisor). The authors’ recommendations included taking children from single mothers, involuntary sterilisation through chemical additives to food and water, and a two-child limit.
Robert Anderson (1914-2007)
This Stetson-wearing oil tycoon, born in Chicago, was head of Arco, one of the biggest petroleum producers in the USA. Famously he struck oil in Alaska, after other prospectors had abandoned the search. Prudhoe Bay was the largest oilfield in North America. He is also known for buying the struggling Observer newspaper in 1977. An early proponent of global action to avert ecological disaster, Anderson led the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Aspen was founded in 1949 by Walter Paepcke, inspired by German romanticism, but when he died in 1960, Anderson changed the focus to climate, food supply and population growth. In 1970 at a two-day workshop at Aspen, experts came to the ‘melancholy conclusion’ that humanity was facing existential crisis. Contributing to the birth of Friends of the Earth in San Francisco in 1969, Anderson initiated the first Earth Day in 1970.
Barbara Ward (1914-1981)
A British economist, Ward was an advocate of sustainable development and redistribution of wealth. Her book Spaceship Earth (1966) described the planet as a closed system of finite resources that must be recycled. A professor at Columbia University, she founded the International Institute for Environment & Development. Her report Only One Earth the Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, written with microbiologist René Dubos in 1971, was commissioned by Strong as a primer for Stockholm.
Garrett Hardin (1915-2003)
A member of the American Eugenics Society since 1956, Hardin became a director in 1971 (in 1973 the name was changed to the Society for the Study of Social Biology). In 1968 he gave a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science on ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Individualism, to Hardin, was a destructive force. He was particularly concerned about the freedom to procreate, and neo-Malthusian ideology was expressed in his textbooks for students. Unlike most clarions of the climate cult, Hardin was a social conservative.
Jay Forrester (1918-2016)
Taking a stance against consumerism and free-market economics, the Club of Rome claimed that the challenges of the post-industrial world were too complex for conventional institutions and political process. Its first report The Limits to Growth (1972) was written by a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates, who urged ‘a totally new form of human society’. The report was led by Forrester, a systems theorist who persuaded the Club of Rome to adopt his dynamic model correlating population, food production, industry, energy and pollution, as described in his book World Dynamics (1971). Limits to Growth highlighted computer modelling to measure and predict climate change.
Mihajlo Mesarovic (1928-)
Serbian scientist Mesarovic was an expert on systems theory who had worked at MIT. In the second Club of Rome report, Mankind at its Turning Point, Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel described humanity as a malignant tumour on the planet: ‘the world has cancer and the cancer is Man’. The report urged identification with future generations, whose survival was in peril.
Roland Wiederkehr (1943-)
As a young journalist, Wiederkehr was hired by the World Wildlife Fund in 1968. This organisation was a foot in the door for climate alarmism, founded in 1961 by UNESCO chief Julian Huxley and Bilderberg Group leaders Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Prince Philip of Great Britain and Godfrey Rockefeller. Wiederkehr opposed nuclear power and promoted bird-massacring wind turbines. In 1992, as a national parliamentarian, Wiederkehr launched the Green Cross, like the Red Cross based in his native Switzerland.
This selected ‘nihilistic ten’ were catalysts of a dehumanising agenda that would politicise science, capture academe, manipulate politicians and divert global corporations from market competition to instruments of control. Instead of evidence-based policy, the Orwellian Green dictatorship applies policy-based evidence. Every ‘fact’ on the climate emergency is a fabrication to build a totalitarian, neo-feudal regime.
Niall McCrae is the author of ‘Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm’ (2024).