The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has divested from fossil fuels. We know this because it has been splashed all over the media – it got much prominence, for example, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme – for all the world as if we ought to find the news interesting or surprising or momentous.

But it is none of these things.

“Rockefeller Brothers Fund divests from fossil fuels” is a story right up there with “dentist removes teeth” or “shark cruises ocean menacingly with fin poking above the water” or “masseuse cancels appointment on discovering that identity of mystery client is Al Gore.”

That’s because the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has for years been at the forefront of the green, anti-capitalist, anti-fossil-fuels movement.

For some perspective, here’s a report from CFACT:

First, the public hasn’t a clue how ferociously RBF has been wrecking fossil fuel industries by funding politically ambitious climate advocates. Maybe RBF doesn’t want the public to know, given crumbling climate science and vanishing world concern about global warming. But beginning when the Fund was established in 1940 by the six grandchildren of Standard Oil mogul John D. Rockefeller, RBF has poured billions into the broad environmental movement, becoming its biggest single donor from the 1950s into the 1990s.

In 1984, under its program titled “One World: Sustainable Resource Use,” RBF began campaigning specifically against fossil fuel industries with huge grants to promote climate change ideology. RBF sponsored climate scientists’ workshops in Europe in 1985 and 1987; it co-funded the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, donated to the IPCC trust fund and kept very busy giving grants for the 1992 Earth Summit to push an anti-fossil fuel treaty package.

In 2008, RBF launched an incredible $7 million per year death-blow campaign against Alberta oil sands (“tar sands”) with the strategy, “Raise the Negatives, Raise the Costs, Slow Down and Stop Infrastructure, and Enroll Key Decision-Makers,” as shown in a leaked PowerPoint presentation by Fund program manager Michael Northrop, posted here as an easy-to-view pdf.

The sheer malice and unconcern about the economic impact of the anti-oil sands campaign is breathtaking, and has shocked many viewers.
RBF also funded the launch and growth of Bill McKibben’s 350.org, leader of the divestment campaign, with $800,000, including a 2012 gift of $225,000.

And let’s not forget that the Club of Rome – the shadowy one world government organisation whose misanthropic, neo-Malthusian bestseller Limits To Growth and its successors gave us the phrase “the common enemy of humanity is man” – was founded at the Italian estate of John D Rockefeller’s youngest son David (now 99 and still a major donor towards environmentalist causes).

None of this is a secret; it’s all thoroughly documented and fully in the public domain. Which does, rather, raise some awkward questions about the way organisations like the BBC chose to cover this story.

The liberal media narrative went something like this: “Ooh look! Isn’t this amazing? Even the heirs of John D Rockefeller, the man who built his fortune on oil, are now canny enough to realise that fossil fuels are old hat and that renewables are the future.” It then went on to speculate – at least the BBC did – as to whether if John D Rockefeller were alive today he too wouldn’t have made up his mind that renewables, not fossil fuels, were the place to make his money.

But this is eyewash. John D Rockefeller was a capitalist, not a crony capitalist. He made his money from oil because there was a genuine market for it, not – as in the renewables “industry” – a fake market which depends entirely on special government favours and hefty public subsidy.

The fact that his children have chosen to take a different route – to reject and undermine the capitalist system on which their handsome trust fund was built – signifies nothing. It is, indeed, a commonplace that the children of very wealthy industrialists all too frequently reject the values that made their father rich, either out of misplaced guilt or because they’ve had the luxury of never having to work for a living and have therefore been free to spend their time hanging out with liberal-leaning celebrities and being indoctrinated by lefty professors at their Ivy League colleges.

You can’t blame the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for putting out its “fossil fuel divestment” press release: what else would you expect of an ideologically committed organisation that wants to make waves to coincide with the recent spate of climate summits and protest marches?

What is less forgiveable, though, is the mainstream media’s useful idiocy in running the press release without any regard to the underlying facts or background. This is where we are: when it comes to reporting on environment issues, the MSM persists in treating us as if we were complete fools.