Hayek’s description fits today’s radical environmentalists to a T. Obsessed by their conviction that the planet is coming to an end, they insist that all nations, states, localities, communities, families, and people submit to a discipline they would impose on every aspect of their lives in order to save us from destruction. But what they end up doing is canceling out both free will for the individual and democratic determination of policies for the nation. Only their fetish has priority. Nothing else matters. All must fall in line behind their plan for the world.
Our modern-day globalists/socialists/radical environmentalists have laid out a program of worldwide change to achieve “sustainability.” By that they mean an end to the man-made causes of global climate change on the one hand and a transfer of wealth from developed to developing nations on the other. By linking the two causes, they try to enlist the support of the green enthusiasts in rich countries and the backing of the autocracies and dictatorships that dominate the third world.
The organizing path that followed was revealed in 1991 in The First Global Revolution, published by the Club of Rome. Among the Club’s notable members are many of the world’s foremost leaders, including David Rockefeller, former president Jimmy Carter, former vice president Al Gore, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the king of Spain Juan Carlos, former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, former Brazilian president Fernando Enrique Cardozo, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, and Maurice Strong.20
The Club, founded in 1968, describes itself as “an informal association of independent leading personalities from politics, business and science… [who] share a common concern for the future of humanity and the planet.”21 That’s an understatement.
In 1972, the Club published The Limits of Growth, a provocative book that painted a drastic picture of the inability of the planet to sustain itself unless the world population was seriously curtailed and natural resources preserved. Based on computer models of the future, the book caught the attention of the world, selling more than 12 million copies, and marked the beginning of the international focus on the need to protect the environment.
It also scared people to death with its message of gloom and doom and the end of the planet. In retrospect, that was the plan—to frighten people about the need for population control and the shepherding of resources so that global governance could emerge.
In The First Global Revolution, the authors presented a clear, unabashed outline of the globalist/socialist/radical environmentalist game plan to end free markets and replace democracy by hyping—and inventing—environmental concerns. It was in this book that the authors articulated the strategic need to create a common enemy to unite diverse peoples behind a worldwide cause.
They concluded that we need common enemies to motivate us to make big changes: “a common adversary, to organize and act together… such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy….”22
This enemy need not be real, the authors postulate. It can be “either a real one or else one invented for the purpose…. This is the way we are setting the scene for mankind’s encounter with the planet. New enemies therefore have to be identified. New strategies imagined, new weapons devised.”23
Then they report—as if a lightbulb went off in their minds—that they have reached a consensus on what the new enemy is to be: “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.”24
This was the beginning of the use of the movement for climate change to achieve global governance.
It’s worth noting that the character of the Club of Rome, its members, and its work on global governance practically invites speculation about conspiracy theories. It presents all the elements of a Robert Ludlum book or a James Bond movie. All that’s missing is the white cat from the James Bond movies. Consider this: The Club was founded at a villa outside Rome, purportedly owned by David Rockefeller, one of its original members. His father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., donated the land where the United Nations sits in New York City. David, the billionaire banker, philanthropist, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and founder of the Trilateral Commission, was a longtime advocate of global governance, as he discloses in his memoirs:
For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack 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.25
Rockefeller’s friendship with Henry Kissinger, Gorbachev, Maurice Strong, and other globalists, as well as his well-documented support for a one-world order, led to rampant conspiracy theories about the group and its work.
Because the Club of Rome was certainly proposing global governance. Alas, according to The First Global Revolution, the requisites of the moment will force us to discard the old-fashioned notion of democracy and consent of the governed: “The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation.”
Our new would-be rulers note that “democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely.”
These people are serious. They do not want a United States of America and its democratic form of government. To them, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people fails their test: “Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”26
Fundamental to this worldview is the elevation of the bureaucrat, the planner, and the expert over the free market entrepreneur in search of profit. The expert who never sees, never speaks to, and doesn’t care about the electorate. Hayek notes that this hierarchy has characterized European thinking for centuries. He writes of the
deliberate disparagement of all activities involving economic risk and the moral opprobrium cast on the gains which make risks worth taking but which only few can win. We cannot blame our young men when they prefer the safe, salaried position to the risk of enterprise after they have heard from their earliest youth the former described as the superior, more unselfish and disinterested occupation. The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number is honorable.27
Elsewhere in The Global Revolution, the Club makes explicit its manipulation of environmentalism to achieve its purposes: “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 fill the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.”