In a May 15 speech to an EU-sponsored event appropriately titled “The Beyond Growth Conference,” European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen said out loud what the climate alarm movement has been trying to keep under wraps for a decade: That economic de-growth enforced by authoritarian governments is a fundamental element of its agenda.
Von Der Leyen didn’t blurt it right out, of course: It was all couched in carefully written code words and phrases, but a close reading of her speech leaves no real room for doubt about the message. In her view — and apparently the view of the European Parliament — the time for economic de-growth has come.
“I today want to concentrate on one point, and that is a point that the report got right beyond any doubt: That is the clear message that a growth model centred on fossil fuels is simply obsolete,” Von Der Leyen told her rapt audience, before moving onto a reference to the Club of Rome, and its famous 1972 report titled “Limits to Growth.” That report has served as a basic handbook for the de-growth movement ever since.
“50 years ago,” she continues, “the Club of Rome could not completely envisage, for example, the potential of green hydrogen. It could not envisage that we might drive today’s electric cars. It might not be able to see the future we would have, for example with batteries from which we can recycle 95% of lithium, nickel and cobalt. It is not the daily procedure today, but we are able to do it. But already 50 years ago, the ‘Limits to Growth’ report acknowledged that while fossil-based growth was unbearable for the planet, humanity could devise a different growth model ‘that is sustainable far into the future.’“
Having laid that groundwork, Von Der Leyen then moved into a code-word filled admission that the movement is all about promoting an authoritarian form of socialism, repeatedly referring to what she dubs Europe’s “social market economy,” i.e., an economy that is centrally planned. So intent is she on embedding this terminology into the EU collective’s hive mind that she deploys it five times across roughly 150 words:
“Our compass in this endeavour are the long-standing values – the true values, if you get it right – of the European social market economy. Our social market economy was never exclusively about economic growth. It was always about human development. It never had the sole goal of market efficiency and liberalisation. To the contrary: The social market economy functions in the interest of the worker and the community. It opens opportunities, also to set very clear limits. It rewards performance but also guarantees protection for the big risks in life. Beyond growth, it focuses on public goods such as healthcare, education and skills, workers’ rights, personal security, civic engagement and governance – good governance. Our social market economy, if you get it right, encourages everyone to excel, but it also takes care of our fragility as human beings. The values of the social market economy have driven us since the beginning of this Commission’s mandate.”
But this gets better.
In almost her next breath, she goes onto frankly admit that her government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was not about public health, but about what the World Economic Forum refers to as “The Great Reset,” an effort to transform economies based in free markets to controlled systems managed by authoritarian governments.
“First, when the pandemic hit us. Our Recovery Plan, NextGenerationEU, has focused not only on restarting our economic activities after the lockdowns but also on transforming our economic model. With a push to decarbonising industries, energy and transport. With an emphasis on digital skills and digital infrastructure. With new investments for schools and hospitals. Beyond growth, NextGenerationEU takes care of the next generation’s future.”
See? It isn’t just about an authoritarian group of government central planners managing every facet of your daily lives, it’s about their desire to “take care” of you.
Though couched in carefully-coded language, this speech is a pretty frank admission that what these western governments have put their populations through since 2020 has been about one thing: control, and forcing all of us to live smaller and less prosperous lives under the yoke of an authoritarian system of government. In 2020, the rationale for all of it was COVID-19; today, the rationale is climate change.
Before Monday, de-growth had been the quiet part of the energy transition movement. After Von Der Leyen’s speech, it seems about to become the centerpiece.
What an extraordinary speech it was.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
According to von der Leyen:
“We also accelerated massively the transition to clean energy and for the very first time in history in 2022 we generated more electricity from sun and wind than we ever did from gas and oil.”
I would certainly like to see the evidence that in 2022 the EU allegedly “generated more electricity from sun and wind than they ever did from oil and gas.”
You can watch her read her introductory riff to the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference on the Malthusian Limits to Growth, in the video below.
Please note that the Club of Rome’s website states that it “is an organising partner of the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference which brings together top-level EU decision-makers and experts from different backgrounds to provide feasible options for a society based on resilience, meaning, fairness and sustainability. The event will focus on the interlinkages between environmental, social and economic challenges, rather than considering them separately.”
In this context, the following excellent article by F. William Engdahl’s bears repeating.
Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab. Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.
In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Creating the new paradigm
At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included The Club of Rome; the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference; the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth; and David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission.
Club of Rome
In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family. Fiat's Gianni Agnelli was an intimate friend of David Rockefeller and a member of the International Advisory Committee of Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank. Agnelli and David Rockefeller had been close friends since 1957. Agnelli became a founding member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission in 1973. Alexander King, head of the OECD Science Program was also a consultant to NATO. That was the beginning of what would become the neo-Malthusian “people pollute” movement.
In 1971 the Club of Rome published a deeply-flawed report, Limits to Growth, which predicted an end to civilization as we knew it because of rapid population growth, combined with fixed resources such as oil. The report concluded that without substantial changes in resource consumption, "the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity." It was based on bogus computer simulations by a group of MIT computer scientists. It stated the bold prediction, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.” That was 1971. In 1973 Klaus Schwab in his third annual Davos business leader meeting invited Peccei to Davos to present Limits to Growth to assembled corporate CEOs.
In 1974, the Club of Rome declared boldly, "The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man." Then: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over-population, food shortages, non-renewable resource [oil-w.e.] depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.” They argued that,
'horizontal' restructuring of the world system is needed…drastic changes in the norm stratum - that is, in the value system and the goals of man - are necessary in order to solve energy, food, and other crises, i.e., social changes and changes in individual attitudes are needed if the transition to organic growth is to take place.
Increasing interdependence between nations and regions must then translate as a decrease in independence. Nations cannot be interdependent without each of them giving up some of, or at least acknowledging limits to, its own independence. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system.
That was the early formulation of the UN Agenda 21, Agenda2030 and the 2020 Davos Great Reset.
David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong
By far the most influential organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller's longtime friend, a billionaire oilman named Maurice Strong. Canadian Maurice Strong was one of the key early propagators of the scientifically fraudulent theory that man-made CO2 emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens “the planet”, so-called Global Warming.
As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to "save the environment." Strong stated his radical ecologist agenda: "Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” This is what is now taking place under cover of a hyped global pandemic.
Strong was a curious choice to head a major UN initiative to mobilize action on the environment, as his career and his considerable fortune had been built on exploitation of oil, like an unusual number of the new advocates of ‘ecological purity,’ such as David Rockefeller or Robert O. Anderson of Aspen Institute or Shell's John Loudon.
Strong had met David Rockefeller in 1947 as a young Canadian high school dropout of eighteen and from that point, his career became tied to the network of the Rockefeller family. Through his new friendship with David Rockefeller, Strong, at age 18, was given a key UN position under UN Treasurer, Noah Monod. The UN’s funds were conveniently enough handled by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. This was typical of the model of “public-private partnership” to be deployed by Strong—private gain from public government.
In the 1960s Strong had become president of the huge Montreal energy conglomerate and oil company known as Power Corporation, then owned by the influential Paul Desmarais. Power Corporation was reportedly also used as a political slush fund to finance campaigns of select Canadian politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, father of Davos protégé Justin Trudeau, according to Canadian investigative researcher, Elaine Dewar (Elaine Dewar, op cit. p. 269-271. )
Earth Summit I and Rio Earth Summit
By 1971 Strong was named Undersecretary of the United Nations in New York and Secretary General of the upcoming Earth Day conference, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Earth Summit I) in Stockholm, Sweden. He was also named that year as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation – who financed his launch of the Stockholm Earth Day project (Elaine Dewar, op cit. p.277). In Stockholm the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was created with Strong as its head.
By 1989 Strong was named by the UN Secretary General to head the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development or UNCED (“Rio Earth Summit II”). He oversaw the drafting of the UN “Sustainable Environment” goals there, the Agenda 21 for Sustainable Development that forms the basis of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, as well as creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN. Strong, who was also a board member of Davos WEF, had arranged for Schwab to serve as a key adviser to the Rio Earth Summit.
As Secretary General of the UN Rio Conference, Strong also commissioned a report from the Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, authored by Alexander King which admitted that the CO2 global warming claim was merely an invented ruse to force change:
“The common enemy of humanity is man. 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.”
President Clinton’s delegate to Rio, Tim Wirth, admitted the same, stating, “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." (Elaine Dewar, Cloak of Green: The Links between key environmental groups, government and big business, Toronto, James Lorimer & Co., 1995, pp. 259-265. )
At Rio Strong first introduced the manipulative idea of “sustainable society” defined in relation this arbitrary goal of eliminating CO2 and other so-called Greenhouse Gases. Agenda 21 became Agenda 2030 in Sept 2015 in Rome, with the Pope’s blessing, with 17 “sustainable” goals. It declared among other items,
“Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlement, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership also is a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice…Social justice, urban renewal, and development, the provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only 'be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole."
In short private land ownership must become socialized for “society as a whole,” an idea well-known in Soviet Union days, and a key part of the Davos Great Reset.
At Rio in 1992 where he was chairman and General Secretary, Strong declared:
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class— involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.” (emphasis added)
Strong did not heed his own call. What Strong did not tell his environmentalist allies at Rio was that he had also made a huge purchase of the Colorado Land and Cattle Company, from Saudi arms dealer and CIA asset, Adnan Khashoggi.
By that time Strong was at the very center of the transformation of the UN into the vehicle for imposing a new global technocratic fascism by stealth, using dire warnings of planet extinction and global warming, merging government agencies with corporate power in an unelected control of pretty much everything, under the fraudulent cover of “sustainability.” In 1997 Strong oversaw creation of the action plan following the Earth Summit, The Global Diversity Assessment, a blueprint for the roll out of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, an inventory of every resource on the planet, how it would be controlled , and how this revolution would be achieved.
At this time Strong was co-chairman of Klaus Schwab’s Davos World Economic Forum. In 2015 on Strong’s death, Davos founder Klaus Schwab wrote, “He was my mentor since the creation of the Forum: a great friend; an indispensable advisor; and, for many years, a member of our Foundation Board.”
Before he was forced to leave the UN in disgrace over an Iraq Food-for-Oil corruption scandal, Strong was member of the Club of Rome, Trustee of the Aspen Institute, Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rothschild Foundation. Strong was also a director of the occult Temple of Understanding of the Lucifer Trust (aka Lucis Trust) housed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, “where pagan rituals include escorting sheep and cattle to the alter for blessing. Here, Vice President Al Gore delivered a sermon, as worshippers marched to the altar with bowls of compost and worms…” xvi
This is the dark origin of Schwab’s Great Reset agenda where we should eat worms and have no private property in order to “save the planet.” The agenda is dark, dystopian and meant to eliminate billions of us “ordinary humans.”
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine Global Research Centre for Research on Globalization
Last year the Club of Rome celebrated The Limits to Growth+50for which Jeffrey D. Sachs wrote his ode, From The Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030which includes a lot of climate emergency rhetoric as it promotes adherence to the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Sachs has spoken the truth about the CIA led regime change Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria to overthrow President Assad on many occasions over the last 8 years or so however, he is a globalist at heart.
May all that has been hidden continue to be revealed.
H Azra, thanks for this. It's important to remember, or rather never to forget these things. Speaking of which, there was a chilling moment, I believe it was sometime in 2022, where von der Leyen, while speaking at a podium in a formal capacity spoke about EU plans for regular recurring boosters for EU citizens, along the lines of every 3 months or something. That plan seems to have fizzled out for the time being, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind she said these things. I saw it with my own eyes. Of course, the major search engines won't let me find the footage now, and the minor more trustworthy ones aren't up to the job. If you or anyone reading this happen to have access to a link with this footage, I'd be grateful if you could share it. Atb.
H Azra, thanks for this. It's important to remember, or rather never to forget these things. Speaking of which, there was a chilling moment, I believe it was sometime in 2022, where von der Leyen, while speaking at a podium in a formal capacity spoke about EU plans for regular recurring boosters for EU citizens, along the lines of every 3 months or something. That plan seems to have fizzled out for the time being, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind she said these things. I saw it with my own eyes. Of course, the major search engines won't let me find the footage now, and the minor more trustworthy ones aren't up to the job. If you or anyone reading this happen to have access to a link with this footage, I'd be grateful if you could share it. Atb.
I was warning about this in May 2020.
https://cliscep.com/2020/04/19/modelling-catastrophe-in-a-climate-of-fear/#comment-51707
https://cliscep.com/2020/04/19/modelling-catastrophe-in-a-climate-of-fear/#comment-51728