Famous Diagram from Limits to Growth

(This is the second of four blogs about the Club of Rome, which along with Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, is an important think tank in the Round Table network of world elites. Bill Clinton’s mentor Carroll Quigley describes their history and function in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope.)

An Internet search reveals there are four main sources of information about the Club of Rome (COR): the Club of Rome website; Lyndon LaRouche’s prolific attacks against the Club of Rome; Illuminati and New World Order sites drawing on LaRouche’s work; and various climate change denial sites, which portray the entire sustainability movement as an anti-growth conspiracy originating with the COR. The climate change denial movement receives major financial support from billionaire oil barons David and Charles Koch (http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/03/koch-brothers-funding-climate-change-denial-machine/), as well as the Big Coal lobby ( http://www.care2.com/causes/climate-change-denial-research-funded-by-big-oil.html). I suspect many of the New World Order websites also receive a significant chunk of corporate funding, though this is more difficult to trace.

The Club of Rome grew out of a 1965 international conference called “The Conditions of World Order.” It was held on oil magnate David Rockefeller’s private estate in Bellagio Italy. It was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a well-known CIA front – see http://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited), the Ford Foundation (another well-known conduit for CIA funding – see The Ford Foundation and the CIA), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Twenty-one “scholars, writers, and scientists” attended this preliminary conference. They issued a report stating that the risk of “nuclear conflagration” made it “incumbent upon intellectuals of the world to play a decisive role in the formation of pressure groups in favor of world order.”

Italian industrialist Aurelie Pecei (major shareholder in Fiat and Italian telecom giant Olivetti), called a follow-up conference, again at Bellegio, in 1968. This second conference, attended by financiers, scientists, economists and heads of state of ten countries, resulted in the creation of a “think tank” of global elites called the Club of Rome. At its founding, the COR consisted of 75 scientists, industrialists, government officials and four token liberals: peace activist Norman Cousins; co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Betty Friedan; Jean Houston, author and pioneer in the “human potential” movement, and Amory Lovins, the environmental scientist who went on to found the Rocky Mountain Institute (dedicated to fostering sustainable business development models).

Limits to Growth

According to the Club of Rome website, their mission is to “maintain a thorough interest” (a classic euphemism if I ever saw one – COR’s purpose is to pressure national governments to enact legislation) in environment and resources, globalization, world development, social transformation (i.e. using propaganda to influence popular thinking), and peace and security. They are best known for their 1972 book Limits to Growth, the basis for the film I saw in 1973. The COR commissioned a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens III) to write Limits to Growth (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3551). Using a mathematical model based on “system dynamics,” they examine the future evolution of the global economy. Computer modeling enables them to track a number of variables across a variety of possible future scenarios. Their conclusion: unless specific measures were taken, the world’s economy would likely collapse some time in 21st century. This collapse would be caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution.

Attacked Across the Political Spectrum

Limits to Growth raised enormous interest, selling at least twelve million copies in thirty languages. The 1973 oil crisis, a year after its publication, seemed to confirm the authors’ predictions about the global economy’s vulnerability to resource scarcity. The book, seriously received by the Carter administration, was totally repudiated by the neoliberal leaders (e.g. Reagan and Thatcher) who succeeded him. They came to power promoting the far more optimistic agenda of unlimited growth. The Catholic Church attacked Limits to Growth for the emphasis it placed on controlling overpopulation. Likewise the John Birch Society and other extreme right groups attacked it for being part of a liberal Rockefeller-initiated conspiracy to create a world government. Even the political left attacked it as a scam to convince workers into believe a proletarian paradise was impossible.

The most vicious attacks against the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth originated from former leftist turned right wing fascist and would be FBI/CIA collaborator Lyndon LaRouche (the feds rebuffed him – see http://lyndonlarouche.org/fascism26.htm and http://lyndonlarouche.org/fager.htm). LaRouche, a prolific researcher and conspiracy theorist, brags about the letter he received from Club of Rome attorneys, threatening him with legal action (see Club of Rome Complaint).

To be continued.