Making A Wilderness: The Rockefeller Legacy, Chapter V

Chapter V - And, It Isn’t Just Land They Want

Make no mistake; it isn’t just about the land for the Rockefellers. It’s also about prestige, virtue signaling, power, political influence and, lastly, very special financial interests that are the subject of this chapter.

It’s no secret, for those who monitor such things how the Rockefellers and other gentry class special interests are manipulating government. They do so through their foundation investments in politics. It is a scam of major proportions but is, nonetheless, largely unknown by the general public.

Still, bits and pieces keep coming out, though. Among those are the results of some work by the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, which put out a report entitled The Rockefeller Way: The Family’s Covert ‘Climate Change’ Plan. It is quite revealing of some of the special interest investments made by the Rockefellers. Those investments are a window into the swampy world of corporatist special interests regarding  supposedly green energy.

What especially got my attention was this tidbit:

Not surprisingly, the Rockefellers are heavily invested in renewable energy. In July 2016, RBF provided $10 million to Mainstream Renewable Power Ltd., a company that expands renewable energy in Africa. “Of the fund’s $816 million under management, about $97.5 million have gone to so-called “Impact Investments” including its stake in Mainstream as well as positions in vehicles like the New Energy Capital Infrastructure Credit Fund.”

I decided to check it out and quickly found the company website and a news release about the African investment. I also found this 2009 news release about wind projects the same Rockefeller-backed company was planning in Illinois. It briefly mentions a 200 MW Boone County project that was then “at earlier development stages.” More searching, though, unearthed another news story indicating the following:

A plan to bring wind farms to Boone County has been shelved indefinitely, according to the renewable energy company behind the project.

In a letter sent to residents who agreed to lease farmland for wind turbines, Chicago-based Mainstream Renewable Power says a more-restrictive county ordinance approved last year makes it too difficult to move forward with the six-year project.

Spurred by the concerns of some residents, the Boone County Board in November approved a change in the ordinance, which now requires wind turbines to be located at least 2,640 feet – or 5.5 times the height of the turbine tower – from a property line. Previously, the setback was 1,000 feet from a residence.

This is the real story with renewables. Believers in renewable energy too often don’t want them in their backyards. I know what it’s like to stand before 200 people angry about a wind project. I’ve been there. How well I remember the academic from the Columbia University staff who motored up to Delaware County, New York to launch into one frantic tirade after another about the evils of “industrial” wind towers in his second-home neighborhood. Yes, that Columbia, the one funded by the Rockefellers to attack oil and gas and promote renewables.

The truth is that renewables projects, however good they might be, invariably run into buzzsaws of opposition. The hearings consist of one true believer after another marching to the front of the room to proclaim they’re absolutely committed to clean energy but not this project. Instead, we are led to believe this one would be worse than a plague of locusts consuming everything in their path.

It happens over and over, which puts the lie to the contention we can easily go 100% renewable energy. This is why New York State, as an example, has already given wind projects special protection from local laws like Boone County’s. Home rule is thrown to the wind, you see, when it comes to government-picked winners.

Renewables projects in which folks such as the Rockefellers are invested (and it’s hard not to imagine the family itself isn’t invested in the same things as it foundations) demand that sort of cronyism and favoritism. Renewables only compete in places where they’re handed subsidies, edicts to use them and special protections from regulation. That’s why the Rockefellers spend so much money advocating for these and against oil and gas. “Home rule for you but not for me” is the companion program for “your backyard and not mine” and “natural gas for me but windmills for you.”

It’s just a matter of “political will,” some say – make them do it, if the carrots aren’t enough. This is how the swamp works; once you’ve stepped in it, you have to keep moving or you’ll sink into the mud and the suction will trap you. The Rockefellers love mud and pay for an awful lot of it. They’re determined not to let what happened in Boone County, Illinois, happen in New York. They’ve got investments to protect, after all, and one of them is Mainstream Renewable Power.

Significantly, Mainstream Renewable Power is also partnered with two other private companies called Mitsui and Aker Horizons. An internet search on Mitsui comes up with a news release from the Rockefeller Foundation bragging about other investments made by Mitsui and Rockefeller in a private company called OMC Power Private Limited located in Gurgaon, Haryana that is pushing renewable energy in India. What we see, in other words, is spiderweb of public/private connections, where it’s virtually impossible to separate them or determine who benefits.

We do know the Rockefeller Foundation staff benefits. The top three officers made a combined $4.5 million in 2021. Did members of the family also benefit? We can only speculate.

It’s not speculation when it comes to China, though. Story after story has appeared in the press over the last several years about the Rockefeller family divesting their oil and gas investments, as if this was some sudden shift in the family’s position, some moral awakening about the horrors of their founders’ achievements, the source of their wealth. The truth is that the Rockefeller divestment is limited to the assets of the tax-exempt family foundations they control and use to push their own special interest agendas. Meanwhile, as they self-righteously preach divestment and engage in an orgy of virtue signaling, they are investing in the same industry that gave them the power to do so and in China no less.

Steven Clark Rockefeller, the son of Nelson Rockefeller, the former Governor of New York and Vice-President, is one of the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which funds all sorts of fractivist groups, including the Sierra Club, the Sustainable Markets Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters and 350.org. The last of these, of course, is the radical divestment group headed by that oracle of environmental doom, Bill McKibben. McKibben, not so coincidentally, is stationed at Middlebury College where Steven Clark Rockefeller is a professor emeritus of religion and previously served as college dean and chairman of the religion department.

Rockefeller has served as a trustee of the Asian Cultural Council and was the architect of the “Earth Charter,” his experiment in developing a “global ethical consciousness.” He says the Rockefeller divestment story has “a moral and economic dimension.” What he doesn’t say, though, is that it’s not his money or his family’s he’s talking about but, rather, the fortunes his father and other earlier generation Rockefellers socked away as tax-exempt donations into a host of foundations that pursue the family’s special interest political agenda.

That agenda includes everything from making a family wilderness of the Catskills-Delaware region to creating the networks of relationships permitting the family itself to invest in foreign markets, including oil and gas investments they would have us believe they are divesting.

This brings us to Steven Clark Rockefeller, Jr., the elder Steven’s son and well connected fifth-generation member of the famous family. Junior, like his father, is a big Asian fan. He is the principal behind Rose Rock Group headquartered at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan) which was investing billions in China as this story from 2011 revealed:

Orlando, FL – based Merletti Partners International has formed a strategic alliance with Hong Kong firm Rose Rock Infrastructure, Ltd.  Rose Rock, through its joint venture with Hongfa Investment Group, will construct and manage a new petrochemical import terminal in Tianjin.  Merletti will handle all project-related security and will manage ongoing security needs once the terminal becomes operational.

The Joint Venture represents the first time in history that a Western company has a stake in a Chinese petrochemical port. Tianjin port is the 5th busiest port in the world and 3rd busiest in China in terms of tons of cargo handled. Tianjin Port is a key logistics center in Northern China and has relations with over 600 ports across 180 countries and regions in the world.

The project in Tianjin is expected to take 24 months to complete and will consist of two 10,000 ton chemical berths. Projected terminal storage for products will be 800,000m(3) (approx. 211 Million US Gallons). The terminal will mainly be used for fuel oil, marine oil, gasoline, diesel, and benzene.   Total projected cost for the terminal project is 1.688 Billion Yuan (approx. $256M).

Well…how about that? Junior wasn’t just investing in infrastructure, but, specifically, oil and gas infrastructure and in a major way. The family, in other words was investing, not divesting, in oil and gas in China. It’s nothing less than startling chutzpah and hypocrisy for the Rockefeller family, and their henchman McKibben, to be lecturing us all about their superior virtues and “good examples” – the Rockefeller divestment story – when, in fact, they were putting major bucks into the industry abroad despite their self-serving narrative.

But, that isn’t all. Check out this story from 2018 when Congress was investigating NRDC  connections with China. Note this, in particular:

New York-based Rockefeller Capital Management, formed through the acquisition of family office Rockefeller & Co. by its management team as well as an investment fund from Viking Global Investors and a Rockefeller family trust, officially launched last week, with $18.5 billion in assets under advisement in its existing asset management and wealth management businesses….

Viking owns a majority stake in the firm, while the trust representing the family owns about 10 percent. The firm’s board also includes Rockefeller family members David Rockefeller Jr., son of the family patriarch who died in 2017, and Peter M. O’Neill, a Rockefeller heir who has long overseen the family’s investments.

And, where is Rockefeller Capital Management focused? Well, perhaps this title block for an article on its website by Chief Investment Strategist Jimmy C. Chang provides a clue:

The article, to be fair, is much more fair and balanced than the subtitle, but the point remains; Rockefeller Capital Management is focused on China. And, the NRDC being a Rockefeller project, this is the real NRDC China connection ought to have been investigating at the time when it was focusing only on the NRDC itself. It’s also the one Congress ought to be investigating as it properly digs into the way 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations are being misused to advance private special interests. It’s the same with everything the supposedly “charitable” Rockefeller family does. The time for busting up this cartel is long overdue.