The Climate Scam: From Petrodollar to Carbon Dollar

Thursday, January 29, 2026
The Climate Scam: From Petrodollar to Carbon Dollar

In January 2026, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Pentagon began removing references to climate change from its planning documents. Bill Gates, who had for years positioned himself as the leading voice of climate philanthropy, publicly distanced himself from catastrophism and acknowledged that his previous predictions had been exaggerated.

These developments followed a July 2025 report commissioned by Energy Secretary Christopher Wright, authored by climate scientists John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer, which concluded that U.S. climate policy measures “are expected to have an imperceptibly small direct impact on the global climate, with any effects likely to emerge only over a long period of time.” In the report’s foreword, Secretary Wright bluntly stated: “Climate change is a challenge, not a catastrophe. But misguided policies based on fear rather than facts could truly jeopardize humanity’s well-being.” He called “global energy poverty,” not climate change, “the greatest threat to humanity,” writes Unbekoming .

The report documented what it called a systematic shift between science and public reporting. “Media reporting often distorts the science,” Wright wrote. “Many people arrive at an exaggerated or incomplete picture of climate change.” The scientists he enlisted found that climate models consistently overestimate warming compared to observations, that carbon dioxide delivers measurable benefits, including increased agricultural productivity and global greening, and that the extreme scenarios driving policy—particularly the RCP8.5 pathway—rest on implausible assumptions about future emissions.

Thirty years of institutional consensus began to crumble within a few months. The question this raises isn’t primarily about the validity of climate science. The question is: what was this apparatus actually for ?

Denis Rancourt , a former professor of physics at the University of Ottawa and a researcher at the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, offers an answer that reframes the entire debate. In his 2019 report, “ Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering,” and in a follow-up analysis extending to 2026 , Rancourt argues that climate policy functions as a protection racket—a system in which the state defines or exaggerates a threat and then demands payment for “protection” against that threat, with the money flowing to connected actors while the threat is never resolved because resolving it would end the extortion.

This approach shifts the focus from temperature records and climate models to institutional history, financial flows, and geopolitical timing. It asks who built this apparatus, when, and why. Swedish researcher Jacob Nordangård explored these questions using decades of founding documents in his book “Rockefeller: Controlling the Game ,” which describes what he calls the institutional genealogy of climate governance. Paul Cudenec, through the Winter Oak platform, has documented the connections between banking dynasties and the climate finance architecture, tracing specific institutional connections using primary sources. The answers these researchers document are not speculation—they are based on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s own program evaluations, publicly disclosed foundation strategies, and the correspondence of key participants. What emerges is not a conspiracy theory, but a traceable institutional history, largely hidden from view.

The protection scam

A protection scam operates on a simple mechanism. An organization defines a threat, positions itself as the sole provider of protection against that threat, and demands an ongoing fee. The threat can be real, exaggerated, or completely fabricated—the point is that the target audience believes it, and that the threat never completely disappears. If it did, the revenue stream would dry up.

The Club of Rome, a globalist think tank founded in 1968, made what Kerry Bolton, writing in Revolution From Above, considers a revealing admission in its 1991 report, The First Global Revolution , published just before the 1992 Earth Summit: “In seeking a common enemy against which to unite, we arrived at the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water scarcity, famine, and the like, would be appropriate.” The threat was chosen for its usefulness in justifying global governance—a “common enemy” requiring a coordinated international response.

Rancourt argues that climate policy fits perfectly into the pattern of a protection scam. The threat is defined by institutions aligned with the state: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assesses the science, the UNFCCC establishes the policy framework, and national governments implement the extraction. Carbon taxes, emissions trading systems, green bonds, and public “investments” in renewable energy transfer wealth from the general population to specific beneficiaries: green finance institutions, affiliated companies, and the bureaucracy itself. The threat is structured to be irrefutable and perpetual. Regardless of what the climate does, the models can be adjusted, the targets revised, and the timeline extended. Those who question the scheme are treated not as scientific opponents worthy of discussion, but as heretics to be suppressed.

The religious nature of climate discourse is no coincidence. Rancourt characterizes it as a “powerful state religion that has shielded individual concern and emotional engagement from the violence of globalization and class exploitation.” Climate guilt serves to “soothe the conscience of the professional class of collaborators and middle-class individuals vulnerable to privilege-guilt.” The framework diverts attention from immediate, tangible harm—deindustrialization, wage stagnation, community destruction—to a diffuse global danger for which everyone, and therefore no one, is responsible. Individual action becomes a ritual of absolution: recycling, carbon offsets, electric vehicles. Collective action becomes impossible because the threat is everywhere and nowhere, caused by existence itself rather than by identifiable actors making identifiable choices.

The timing of climate concerns’ emergence as a dominant policy framework is the first anomaly. The physics of carbon dioxide’s radiative properties was already understood in the nineteenth century. Climate models predicting warming due to rising CO2 levels existed as early as the 1960s. In 1967, the leading theoretical climatologists Manabe and Wetherald calculated a 2-degree Celsius rise resulting from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations—and, as Rancourt notes, “no one batted an eye. The media were silent.” James Hansen’s famous Congressional testimony occurred in 1988. Yet, the institutional explosion—the creation of the UNFCCC, the regulation of IPCC assessments, the reorientation of scientific funding, the transformation of environmental NGOs into climate advocacy groups—occurred in 1991 and 1992.

Rancourt documents this timing using data from Google Scholar. The number of research articles using the terms “global warming” or “climate change” remained virtually constant throughout the 1980s, but increased dramatically from 1991 onward. This increase was not caused by an atmospheric event. Carbon dioxide concentrations rose steadily throughout the century, without sudden spikes. The temperature data showed no discontinuity. The graph of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from the Mauna Loa Observatory shows a smooth curve with no inflection point around 1991. The trigger was not atmospheric, but geopolitical: the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

The post-Soviet vacuum

The Cold War offered Western governance structures a comprehensive framework for social organization. The Soviet threat justified military expenditures, the expansion of intelligence agencies, domestic surveillance, and ideological conformity. It explained sacrifices, motivated obedience, and provided a coherent sense of purpose. The enemy was identifiable, the stakes were clear, and the required response was institutionally expedient: continued arms purchases, the maintenance of alliances, and population management through a shared goal.

In December 1991, this framework vanished overnight. Western elites were faced with a structural problem: how could they maintain the extractive systems and population management mechanisms without the enemy who had justified them for forty-five years?

The scale of the post-Soviet transformation is visible in financial data. The Bank for International Settlements documented that external financial assets and liabilities “rose from about 36% of GDP in 1960 to about 400% ($293 trillion) in 2015.” This expansion was concentrated in the mid-1990s, immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The United States, which had maintained a positive net international investment position during the Cold War, found itself in a massive negative position, becoming the world’s largest debtor just as it was establishing itself as the sole superpower. Merger activity exploded in what financial historians call the “fifth merger wave (1993-2000),” which saw the creation of “enterprises of unprecedented size and global reach.”

Rancourt interprets this pattern as predatory globalization—“a euphemism for Western- and US-led economic predation”—unleashed by the loss of the Soviet Union’s counterweight. Conditions that should have led to international cooperation and shared development instead led to “an American frenzy for unfettered exploitation and dominance over previously protected regions.” Wars increased: the Gulf War, wars to “prevent genocide,” NATO expansion, the war on terror, wars to bring “democracy” and “human rights.” The common thread was not the declared humanitarian goal, but the maintenance of the dollar’s hegemony and access to resources.

Rancourt identifies three generic ideologies that were sown almost immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union through the framework of the United Nations: climate change, gender equality, and anti-racism as language control. All three possess structural characteristics that make them useful for governance. They are irrefutable—no feasible condition would meet the requirement. They induce guilt among target groups, particularly the professional and middle classes, who are most susceptible to ideological conformity. They require permanent institutional management, ensuring employment for a bureaucratic administrative class. They justify surveillance and control as necessary responses to the identified threat. And they can be flexibly deployed against geopolitical adversaries—by vilifying countries for “allegedly polluting, having large populations, rejecting gender fluidity, having their own state religions, and so on.”

Climate change has other functions besides these general properties. It enables direct monetary extraction through mechanisms that can be presented as market-based rather than taxation. Carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, and green bonds all transfer wealth while maintaining the appearance of voluntary or market-mediated exchange. Climate concern justifies surveillance—tracking carbon footprints requires monitoring consumption, travel, and behavior. Framing emissions as the problem implicitly frames populations as a threat, providing ideological cover for population management policies. And when disasters occur—floods, droughts, fires—climate attribution offers a ready-made explanation that diverts attention from infrastructure failures, policy choices, and corporate negligence. Rancourt points to the pattern of “dismantling or disabling water management facilities, ostensibly for environmental conservation, and then blaming the resulting floods on climate change.”

The shift in climate concern in the mid-2000s—evident in academic publications, media coverage, and legislative initiatives—was, according to Rancourt, driven by “global financiers, based in the US and aligned with the Democratic Party.” These financial leaders wield “considerable influence, directly and indirectly, on the editorial policies of major news media outlets.” Academics followed the trend in funding and popularity. Wall Street investment banks, such as Lehman Brothers, established divisions specifically dedicated to climate. As Newsweek noted in 2007, “The way to go green is to go green.” A new global commodity—carbon—traded in US dollars under US control by global financial institutions, became, alongside oil, military equipment, and debt, an additional tool for securing the dollar’s position as the world’s currency.

The 1992 Rio Earth Summit formalized the institutional architecture within months of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The UNFCCC established the treaty framework. Agenda 21 outlined the implementation structure. The apparatus that would grow over the next three decades was sown in this concentrated moment of post-Cold War reorganization. The timing was no coincidence. The apparatus filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Who built it

The institutional apparatus deployed in 1991-1992 was not improvised. Its components had been built over decades by identifiable actors, whose data are available in their own archives.

Jacob Nordangård, a Swedish researcher, has traced what he calls the “Rockefeller climate game” using foundation documents, grant applications, and the correspondence of key participants. The pattern he documents begins in the 1950s, accelerates in the 1970s and 1980s, and culminates in the apparatus that emerged in Rio.

The Rockefeller Foundation began funding climate research in the 1950s at institutions that would later become central hubs in the network. Nordangård’s research shows that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which would later become infamous for the “Climategate” emails, received Rockefeller funding. The Beijer Institute in Stockholm, which served as a key hub between scientific research and policymaking, operated within Rockefeller’s orbit. These early investments created institutional relationships and shaped research agendas long before climate became a concern for government policy.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund launched its environmental program in 1974 and began systematically providing grants for climate research in 1984. The fund’s subsequent published evaluations describe what they call “phase one” of their climate strategy, which ran from 1984 to 1992. The explicit objectives, as stated in their own documents, were “to establish permanent mechanisms for achieving scientific consensus on climate change” and “to move the discussion of global warming from the scientific community to the broader policy arena.”

Their strategy, as documented in these evaluations, operated through several channels. Direct grants supported research at key institutions. Money was channeled to “like-minded voices” in the business community, religious organizations, and youth organizations to create the impression of widespread concern. “Well-placed NGOs” were cultivated to play what the fund’s advisors called a “behind-the-scenes role” in shaping policy. Grant data show that specific amounts went to specific organizations to achieve specific objectives. In 2001 alone, RBF funded ten environmental groups engaged in climate-related projects. The Greenpeace Fund received $75,000 for its Global Warming Campaign, which aimed to lobby the 100 largest corporations to cooperate “in the fight against climate change.”

The Rio Summit and the establishment of the IPCC—presented to the public as responses to an emerging scientific consensus—were outcomes that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund explicitly claims credit for facilitating. Michael Oppenheimer, who would become one of the lead authors of the IPCC reports, was funded as a scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund through grants from the RBF. The fund’s retrospective notes that the investment of less than a million dollars in phase one “raised awareness of global warming,” shaped the process of scientific consensus, and brought the issue “to the highest levels of government.”

Personal ties strengthen institutional ties. Bert Bolin, the Swedish meteorologist who became the first chairman of the IPCC, was active in networks that received Rockefeller funding. Gordon Goodman of the Beijer Institute advised the RBF on strategy and personnel. George H.W. Bush, who chaired US participation in the Rio Summit and the initial signing of the UNFCCC, was a member of the Trilateral Commission and maintained what David Rockefeller describes in his memoirs as a “friend and advisor relationship” with the family.

The coordinating institution that connects these networks is the Council on Foreign Relations. Richard Cook, drawing on Carroll Quigley’s research into elite archives, documents the origins of the CFR: joint meetings between British and American diplomats at the Hotel Majestic in Paris in May 1919, shortly before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The British established the Royal Institute of International Affairs, closely linked to Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Movement and its goal of tying American power to British strategic objectives. The Americans established a parallel institution: the Council on Foreign Relations, legally recognized in 1921 and funded by “the thousand richest Americans,” with the Rockefeller fortune playing a significant role in its operation throughout history. The CFR functions as what Cook calls “the principal instrument of American international financial control,” articulating elite consensus on foreign policy and providing personnel to successive administrations, regardless of party affiliation. Within two weeks of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, representatives of the Council met with the State Department to plan for American dominance after the war. Their War and Peace Studies project—fully funded by the Rockefeller Foundation—sent 682 memoranda to government policymakers, concluding that the war presented a “great opportunity” for the United States to become “the preeminent power in the world.” Future CIA Director Allen Dulles led the project’s Armaments Group. This private organization, with no official government status, determined America’s war aims and its global position after the war. This pattern has continued in climate policy: Council members hold foreign policy positions in every administration, thus ensuring continuity in the globalist agenda.

After the turn of the millennium, the network expanded further. In 2004, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in London established The Climate Group, which began engaging large corporations and local governments in implementing climate measures “beneficial to sustained economic growth.” The fund’s strategy documents describe this as essential: “Business is a crucial voice in countering the common argument that carbon dioxide regulation policies are harmful to the U.S. economy. Progressive business leaders have spoken out about the opportunities presented by the new energy economy.”

The environmental movement itself needed to be transformed to serve the climate agenda. Environmental organizations in the 1970s and early 1980s were often skeptical of the CO2 warming theory, which was promoted by nuclear proponents as an argument against fossil fuels. The movement’s base was concerned with pollution, wilderness preservation, and corporate responsibility—not with atmospheric chemistry. Funding from the Rockefeller, Ford, and MacArthur foundations changed this orientation. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Climate Action Network, and dozens of smaller organizations received grants tied to climate work. The RBF documents describe an explicit strategy for funding these groups to build support for climate policy.

The contrived nature of recent climate activism is also documented in research compiled by Paul Cudenec. Canadian investigative journalist Cory Morningstar traced Greta Thunberg’s rise to power and found that on the first day of her Stockholm sidewalk protest in August 2018, communications specialist Callum Grieve—who had worked for The Climate Group for five years—tweeted her: “We’re with you.” Ingmar Rentzhog, the PR professional who photographed Thunberg and tweeted about her protest, later admitted that he had done PR work for her mother and had been “briefed” about the protest in advance. Extinction Rebellion’s XR Business was launched with a letter signed by, among others, Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. In Italy, Ultima Generazione is funded by the A22 network, which in turn is funded by the Climate Emergency Fund in the US, co-founded by billionaire Aileen Getty of the Getty oil dynasty.

The institutional architecture had been established in advance. The scientific networks had been funded and formed. The NGO landscape had been prepared. The policy frameworks had been established. The activism had been staged. What was still needed was a moment of activation—a geopolitical opening that would allow this machinery to be deployed on a large scale. The collapse of the Soviet Union provided that.

The bank foundation

To understand why such elaborate institutional structures are established, one must examine the monetary system within which they operate. As Justin Ptak recently noted in an analysis for Mises Wire: “Money is the hidden constitution of every political order. It determines what actions are possible, what institutions survive, what risks are rewarded, and what failures are forgiven.” Stephen Mitford Goodson, former director of the South African Reserve Bank, chronicled this history in A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind , documenting how the structure of modern money creation imposes demands on political arrangements.

The central mechanism, as Goodson documented, is as follows: in contemporary monetary systems, money is primarily created by private banks as interest-bearing debt. When a bank makes a loan, it creates new money: the borrowed amount is credited to the borrower’s account, increasing the money supply. But the borrower must repay the principal plus interest. Since the interest is never created, the total debt in the system is always greater than the money available to repay it. The system requires a constant expansion of the debt simply to meet existing obligations. If the debt stops growing, the mathematics of interest payments leads to defaults, contraction, and crises.

This structure reverses the logic of market discipline. Ptak’s analysis is striking: “Under central banking, profits remain private during credit-driven expansions, while losses during contractions are classified as systemic and transferred to the public through bailouts, inflation, and monetary devaluation.” Risk-taking is rewarded precisely because it is guaranteed; prudence is punished by negative real interest rates and competitive disadvantages. What masquerades as capitalism is, in practice, state-backed financing supported by political necessity rather than economic viability.

This structure has characterized Western banking since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 and was institutionalized in the United States by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Richard Cook, a former Treasury analyst, documented how this institution emerged from a deliberate conspiracy rather than legislative deliberation. In November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich—whose daughter was married to John D. Rockefeller Jr.—convened representatives of the Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn Loeb banking interests for a secret meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia. The participants traveled under assumed names and kept the meeting secret for years. Present were Aldrich, Assistant Treasury Secretary A. Piatt Andrew, Morgan bankers Henry Davison and Arthur Shelton, Frank Vanderlip, president of Rockefeller’s National City Bank, and German émigré Paul Warburg of Kuhn Loeb, who had powerful connections to the Rothschild family. Their product gave private bankers control over money creation and simultaneously provided a “lender of last resort” when speculation led to crashes. The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress in December 1913, a relinquishment of constitutional authority over the nation’s monetary system. Congress had the power to “mint money and regulate its value,” but delegated that authority to a system of regional banks controlled by private banking interests.

The consequences are measurable. Since the Federal Reserve’s inception, the US dollar has lost approximately 97 percent of its purchasing power.

The national debt has risen from $2.65 trillion to over $20 trillion. These are not policy errors, but structural consequences of creating debt money.

The manipulation of interest rates is at the heart of this system. In classical theory, interest rates coordinate society’s time preferences and balance current consumption with future uncertainty. They are prices resulting from the interaction between savers and borrowers. In modern fiat systems, interest rates are no longer prices at all. They are policy signals, imposed to achieve macroeconomic objectives set by central planners. This replacement of market coordination with administrative discretion creates what Ptak calls a “monetary hierarchy”: those closest to the source of money creation enjoy the lowest borrowing costs, while costs rise the further away one is from the point of issue. Proximity to money creation becomes a determining factor for survival. Access replaces productivity as the primary economic advantage.

The Bank for International Settlements, established in 1930 and acting as a coordinating body for central banks worldwide, manages this system internationally. Carroll Quigley, the Georgetown historian with access to the archives of major financial institutions, wrote in ” Tragedy and Hope” that the BIS was part of a plan to “create a global system of privately held financial control capable of dominating the political system of every country and the global economy as a whole.”

The consequences extend beyond national borders. Because the US dollar serves as the global reserve currency, the Federal Reserve’s policy automatically becomes global monetary policy. Foreign states must hold dollars to stabilize trade, borrow in dollars to access capital, and absorb the consequences of US monetary decisions over which they have no control. When the Fed eases monetary policy, capital flows into emerging markets, creating asset bubbles and encouraging dollar-denominated debt. When the Fed tightens monetary policy, currencies collapse, debts become unpayable, and crises erupt. What appears to be domestic stabilization at the center manifests as devastation at the periphery. Ptak describes this arrangement as “seigniorage imperialism”: the issuing state acquires real goods, labor, and assets in exchange for liabilities it can expand at will.

The growth imperative inherent in debt money creates specific political imperatives. New debt instruments must be continually developed to accommodate the growing money supply. New justifications must be provided for government borrowing, as government debt is a primary asset class. New markets for financial speculation must be opened to generate returns on accumulated capital. Climate policy meets all three of these requirements.

Green bonds represent a new category of debt instruments that has grown from negligible issuance to hundreds of billions annually. Carbon credits create tradable assets from regulatory frameworks, creating new markets denominated in dollars and subject to financial engineering. The “climate emergency” provides unlimited justification for government spending—infrastructure transformation, energy system replacement, adaptation measures, international transfers—all financed by debt that enters the system as money and exits as interest payments to financial institutions.

The institutional connections between banking dynasties and climate finance architecture are documented in research compiled from primary sources. Paul Cudenec has mapped specific connections through the Winter Oak platform. Edmond de Rothschild was the key figure behind the World Conservation Bank, proposed in 1987 and established in 1991 under the auspices of the World Bank as the Global Environment Facility. The GEF has since disbursed tens of billions of dollars and serves as the financing mechanism for five UN treaties, including the UNFCCC. The timing of its creation—coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Rio Summit—places it precisely within the infrastructure expansion documented by Nordangård.

The architecture was made explicit in a 2008 policy paper by Simon Linnett, Executive Vice Chairman of NM Rothschild London. In ” Trading Emissions: Full Global Potential ,” published by The Social Market Foundation, Linnett proposed that carbon trading should function as “a new form of social market,” with carbon credits acting as a speculative global reserve currency. An “international institution” with a constitution would be needed to regulate global CO2 emissions. Linnett proposed calling this institution the “World Environment Authority,” based in a global city like London. His conclusion: “Countries must be prepared to subordinate some portion of their sovereignty to this global initiative… If such a roadmap could be found, we might be at the dawn of a new world constitution and a new world order.” A Rothschild executive, publishing through a policy foundation, explicitly outlined how climate governance would function as the architecture for sovereignty transfer.

The people who built this apparatus confirm these connections. Maurice Strong—described by the New York Times as “the guardian of the planet”—was secretary-general of the 1992 Earth Summit, where Agenda 21 was adopted, the first director of the UN Environment Programme, a senior adviser to the president of the World Bank, and a member of the Commission on Global Governance. He was also one of nine directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the only carbon exchange in North America. Strong told Maclean’s magazine in 1976 that he was “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology”—a formulation that, according to Bolton, captures the synthesis of state planning and financial extraction that climate governance represents. Strong’s career—from the oil industry in the 1950s to head of Petro-Canada in the 1970s and chairman of the 1992 Earth Summit—illustrates the revolving door between fossil fuels, government, and environmental management.

The contemporary expression of this connection runs through BlackRock and its ESG compliance system. Rothschild Australia Asset Management appointed BlackRock to manage its global fixed income portfolios in 2002. Rothschild & Co subsequently advised on several BlackRock deals. In 2023, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase—identified in historical research as operating within Rothschild’s financial network—partnered to help the Ukrainian government establish a reconstruction bank, channeling post-conflict development through trusted institutional channels. ESG compliance—environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores that determine access to capital—functions as what researchers call a “control mechanism,” directing investments toward compliant entities and away from those that resist. The $1.164 trillion impact investment market, coordinated by UNDP steering committees, creates what its architects describe as “monetization of future cost savings”: financial returns generated by financing mandatory solutions to defined problems.

Al Gore’s post-vice presidential ventures illustrate how climate advocacy and financial exploitation intersect at the individual level. In 2004, Gore co-founded Generation Investment Management with David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Bolton documents that the firm’s partners include seven Goldman Sachs executives, plus representatives from Morgan Stanley, Rothschild Asset Management, and other major financial institutions. The firm’s stated purpose—”sustainable capitalism”—promises investors that “these global challenges present risks and opportunities that can materially impact a company’s ability to maintain profitability and generate returns.” The climate crisis becomes an investment thesis.

Climate finance isn’t a byproduct of climate concern. Climate concern is the ideological justification for climate finance. The extraction apparatus needed the threat narrative to legitimize itself.

From petrodollar to carbon dollar

The climate finance architecture only becomes fully understandable when seen as a second pillar of dollar hegemony, designed to complement and ultimately expand the petrodollar system.

When Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971, thus ending the international convertibility of dollars into gold, the currency lost its anchor. The dollar’s value and status as a global reserve currency required a new foundation. Henry Kissinger negotiated a solution with Saudi Arabia: oil would be priced exclusively in dollars, and Saudi oil revenues would be recycled into U.S. Treasuries. Other OPEC countries followed suit. Any country wishing to buy oil—the essential product of industrial civilization—had to first acquire dollars, creating a permanent global demand for U.S. currency, regardless of U.S. budget or trade deficits.

The petrodollar system worked for decades, but it had a structural vulnerability: it relied on a single commodity controlled by countries whose interests would not forever align with US objectives. A second system to anchor the dollar—one based on a commodity that could be created through regulation rather than extracted from foreign territory—would provide redundancy and extend the dollar’s hegemony into areas that oil could not reach.

Carbon fulfills this function. Rancourt directly states this: carbon is “another commodity (alongside oil, opium, military equipment, and debt) to secure the US dollar as the world currency.” Linnett’s document reveals that this wasn’t a coincidence, but a design objective. A Rothschild executive explicitly proposed that carbon credits would function as a “global reserve currency”—not figuratively, but literally, as a second commodity system denominated in dollars alongside oil.

The parallels are structural:

The petrodollar requires countries to hold dollar reserves to participate in energy markets. Carbon trading requires countries to hold dollar-denominated carbon credits to participate in the global economy sanction-free. The petrodollar is enforced through military force – Saddam Hussein announced that Iraq would accept euros for oil and was overthrown; Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency and was assassinated. Compliance with carbon regulations is enforced through regulatory and financial mechanisms – ESG ratings, access to capital markets, trade sanctions, reputational sanctions. The stick is softer, but the compliance architecture is more comprehensive, reaching into corporate governance, investment decisions, and individual behavior in a way that military enforcement never could.

The timing reinforces the connection. The petrodollar emerged in the early 1970s, after the collapse of the gold standard left the dollar unbacked. The carbon architecture emerged in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union created both the geopolitical opening and the need for a new enemy to justify continued extraction. Two decades apart, two pillars of the same system: dollar hegemony maintained by control over essential raw materials, one extracted from the earth, the other created by regulation.

The carbon system offers advantages that the petrodollar does not. Oil reserves are finite and concentrated in regions outside the US’s control. Carbon credits are unlimited—governments can create them by decree, and the supply increases with each new regulation. Oil extraction requires cooperation from producing countries that pursue independent policies. Compliance with carbon regulations can be enforced unilaterally through access to the financial system, trade policies, and regulatory harmonization. Oil links the dollar to energy; carbon links it to economic activity itself, as all production involves emissions.

The carbon dollar requires an enforcement infrastructure that the petrodollar never needed. Oil is physical—it’s transported via pipelines and tankers that can be monitored and stopped. Carbon is abstract—compliance requires tracking emissions embedded in every product and supply chain, and then reconciling transactions with that data. This isn’t a technical problem to be solved later. It’s being solved now.

The researcher known as ESC has documented the construction in real time. The Bank for International Settlements—the central bank of central banks—has launched a series of innovation projects that are building the conditional payment architecture needed for carbon compliance. Project Rosalind, conducted in partnership with the Bank of England, demonstrated retail implementation using what the technology provider calls a “three-party lock”: identity (who are you?), assets (what are you buying?), and permission (do you have the allowance?). Funds are locked; the system evaluates the conditions across multiple dimensions; if the conditions are met, the funds are released; if the conditions are not met, the transaction is reversed. Project Mandala encodes jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements into a protocol and generates cryptographic proof of compliance before settlement. Project Agorá, launched in 2024 with seven central banks and 41 major financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Visa, and Swift, is taking the unified ledger from blueprint to implementation. The findings are expected in the first half of 2026. Agustín Carstens, director general of the BIS, who co-authored this paper with the architect of India’s mandatory biometric ID system, called this infrastructure a “Neil Armstrong moment”: the transition from money as a bearer asset to conditional bookings that are released only when parameters are met.

The timeline is concrete: the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism became fully operational in early 2026. Digital product passports—QR codes or chips containing a product’s complete carbon history—will become mandatory for batteries in 2027. The EU’s digital identity wallet will become mandatory for banks and large platforms in 2027. The digital euro is targeted for possible issuance in 2029. The ESC identifies the convergence: “identity wallet + product passport + programmable payment = conditional trade.”

Officials claim the digital euro will not be “programmable money.” These are just word games. The currency itself will have no built-in rules, but the wallets and payment applications that work with it will. The result is identical: if you don’t meet the conditions, the money won’t be transferred. In 2008, a Rothschild executive proposed introducing carbon as a global reserve currency. By 2029, the infrastructure to enforce this proposal at the point of sale will be operational. ESC describes what this means at checkout: “The system will soon know exactly how much carbon is in your shopping cart, and for the first time, it will have the power to say ‘no’ at checkout.” No decree is needed. The transaction simply won’t be executed.

ESC poses the question its architects avoid: “What happens to those who don’t meet the requirements?” India’s Aadhaar system sets a precedent. When biometric authentication fails—fingerprints worn down by manual labor, iris scans tainted by cataract surgery—the system returns “no match” and denies benefits. Santhoshi Kumari was 11 when her family’s ration card was canceled because it wasn’t linked to Aadhaar. She starved to death. The database is never wrong. The child simply wasn’t in the system. The architecture enables a future where every purchase is verified based on your status, where economic freedom depends on meeting centrally determined requirements, and where algorithms you never voted on determine whether your transactions are approved. The passenger sees it again—a declined card, a routing error, additional verification required. The operator sees a successful API callback. The cockpit sees a cleared dashboard.

Both systems are now under pressure from the same source: dedollarization. Russia, China, and the BRICS countries are building alternative payment systems, trading oil in rubles and yuan, and rejecting climate compliance frameworks that would subordinate their development to Western financial institutions. The resistance to these countries’ climate policies is not climate skepticism—it is a refusal to accept a second dollar anchoring mechanism after decades of suffering under the first. When Western officials denounce Chinese coal-fired power plants or Russian emissions, they demand participation in a system designed to maintain the dollar’s hegemony. The targets understand this, even if the Western public does not.

The rupture of the climate consensus and the acceleration of dedollarization are the same phenomenon, viewed from different perspectives. The system that linked the dollar to oil is losing its grip as alternative payment systems emerge.

The system designed to link the dollar to carbon is being rejected before it could be fully consolidated. US financial hegemony—the foundation upon which the entire extraction architecture rests—is being challenged simultaneously on both fronts.

The scientific question

The Department of Energy’s July 2025 report exposes the gap between what climate science supports and what policymakers claim.

The report’s authors—John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer—are renowned climate scientists with extensive publication records. In his foreword, Minister Wright emphasizes that he “had no influence on their conclusions” and that the writing team “worked completely independently.” The report represents an internal challenge to climate orthodoxy from within the scientific community, commissioned by a cabinet member.

The main findings are stark. US policy measures will have “undetectably small direct effects on the global climate.” The report explains the physics: “Any change in local CO2 emissions today will have only a very small global effect, and only with a long lag.” Even aggressive emissions reductions would “slow the rise in global CO2 concentration only modestly, but not prevent it.” The entire policy apparatus is geared towards achieving effects that, according to the government-commissioned analysis, are unobservable.

The report documents systematic problems in the climate models underlying policy projections. Models consistently overpredict warming compared to observations, particularly in the tropical troposphere, where greenhouse gas physics suggests the strongest warming signal should occur. The tropical troposphere is theoretically the place where the effect should be most visible. The persistent discrepancy between models and observations points to structural problems with the models, not just parameter uncertainty.

The effects of carbon dioxide are not uniformly negative. The report documents “global greening”—the increase in vegetation observed by satellites across most land areas since systematic observations began. CO2 is food for plants; elevated concentrations promote photosynthesis and improve crops’ water-use efficiency. Agricultural productivity has increased significantly during the period of rising CO2 concentrations. These documented benefits are rarely mentioned in policy discussions where CO2 is treated solely as a pollutant.

 Invented climate model used as evidence in thousands of reports

Energy Secretary Wright puts it this way: “Climate change is real and deserves attention. But it’s not the greatest threat to humanity. That honor belongs to global energy poverty.” He continues: “Climate change is a challenge, not a catastrophe. But misguided policies based on fear rather than facts can indeed jeopardize humanity’s well-being.”

A cabinet member, citing government-commissioned research, directly challenged the catastrophic approach that has justified the policy apparatus. The report calls for “a more nuanced and evidence-based approach” that “explicitly considers uncertainties” and weighs climate risks “against the costs, effectiveness, and side effects of each ‘climate measure.'”

The gap between policy and science becomes understandable when policy serves goals other than climate mitigation. Trillions in spending, extensive economic restructuring, energy system transformation, and supranational governance arrangements are futile in responding to a challenge that, according to a US government-commissioned analysis, has “undetectably small” effects from US policy measures. They make perfect sense as mechanisms for financial extraction, institutional expansion, and population management—the functions of a protection racket.

The current rift

Rancourt’s analysis of 2026 interprets the Trump administration’s retreat from climate frameworks not as a scientific reassessment, but as a symptom of conflicts between elite factions. The climate apparatus served specific interests during a specific phase of US hegemonic governance. That phase is coming to an end.

The geopolitical context has changed significantly since the early 1990s, when the apparatus was put into operation. US hegemony, then at its peak, now faces structural challenges. The rise of China as a manufacturing and technological power, Russia’s resistance to post-Soviet absorption, and the emergence of BRICS as an alternative economic coordination framework have created a multipolar environment that did not exist when climate policy was institutionalized. The unipolar moment that allowed for unlimited dollar expansion and supranational governance is over.

Rancourt draws on Yanis Varoufakis’s analysis of a divide between what might be described as “Big Finance” and “Big Tech”—cloudalists versus traditional financial capital—vying for dominance within Western elite structures. Climate ideology served the globalist financial faction: it boosted the dollar through carbon markets denominated in US currency, justified supranational governance that subordinated national sovereignty to international financial institutions, provided extraction mechanisms through debt instruments and compliance systems, and managed populations by inducing guilt and justifying surveillance.

But ideologies can outlive their usefulness to the factions that deployed them. Rancourt argues that climate ideology now “hinders empire” in several ways. It has evolved to what he calls “absurd endpoints”—policy proposals so extreme that they provoke resistance rather than compliance. Net-zero mandates, bans on combustion engines, requirements for heat pumps, and restrictions on meat consumption have sparked populist resistance in Western societies. The ideology hinders industrial development precisely at the moment when great-power competition demands productive capacity. It strengthens the position of international institutions at a time when nationalist factions are seeking to reassert American unilateralism. And it provides rhetorical weapons to geopolitical adversaries who can point to Western hypocrisy on climate policy while pursuing their own development.

The 2020-2021 “Great Reset” moment, when the integration of climate and finance reached its peak through pandemic-related “Build Back Better” frameworks, represents a culmination rather than a new beginning. The convergence of climate emergencies, pandemic emergencies, and digital currency proposals into a single policy framework went too far. The clear retreat from these frameworks—evident in the US Department of Energy report, the withdrawal from the UNFCCC, the Pentagon purge, and the broader political realignment—points more to a repositioning of factions than a victory of the people.

Rancourt predicts that “the ideologically driven exploitative practices most at risk today appear to be climate change and universal childhood vaccination, which generate enormous profits for the Western public economy.” Other control mechanisms “will suffer the same fate as the empire retreats further, national sovereignty is restored in many countries, and the real economy of production and distribution gains ascendancy across most of the world.” This is not optimism about liberation, but recognition of imperial decline.

The collapse of the climate consensus should not be confused with liberation from elite governance. Different factions will deploy different extraction mechanisms. The infrastructure for digital currencies, AI-mediated governance, and biosurveillance is already under construction. These systems will prove to be more extensive than the climate apparatus they partially replace. The protection scam will not end, but will evolve.

Conclusion

The climate scam isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s documented institutional history.

The Rockefeller Foundations’ own program evaluations detail their strategy for raising the issue of global warming and elevating it to the highest levels of government. The funding flows from foundations to scientific institutions, NGOs, and policy agencies are traceable through grant data. The timing aligns precisely with geopolitical events—not atmospheric ones. The policy outcomes serve financial interests that can be named: debt markets, carbon trading systems, green bond issuance, and compliance bureaucracies. The scientific justification is now officially challenged by a government-commissioned analysis that claims the US policy will have “undetectably small” climate effects.

This architecture is important beyond the climate debate.

The same institutional networks that built the climate apparatus are now building the next generation of systems. Digital currency frameworks promise to complete the monitoring of economic behavior that carbon tracking has only partially achieved. Proposals for AI governance would delegate regulatory authority to systems that cannot be interrogated or held accountable. The biological surveillance infrastructure, dramatically expanded during the pandemic, creates population management opportunities that dwarf anything the climate apparatus made possible.

The ESC’s documentation on the conditional payments infrastructure reveals the deeper pattern: “What is being built is not a climate system, but a general infrastructure for adequacy, with climate as the current use case.” The three-party lock that controls carbon coefficients can control anything. Replace carbon with health status during a pandemic, information behavior during a “disinformation crisis,” or political reliability during an emergency, and the machinery works the same way. The architecture is domain-agnostic. The rails don’t care what they carry. The climate provided the moral justification for building the infrastructure; the infrastructure will outlive the justification.

The pattern is consistent: threat definition, institutional capture, extraction, population management. The specific content of the threat—Soviet aggression, climate catastrophe, pandemic, risks of artificial intelligence—is less important than the structure of the response. Each iteration builds infrastructure that persists after the specific threat narrative fades. Each iteration transfers wealth and consolidates control. Each iteration normalizes arrangements that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.

Recognizing this pattern is a prerequisite for an effective response. As long as each threat is assessed individually—Is climate change real? Was the pandemic natural? Is AI dangerous?—structural continuity remains invisible. The question is never simply whether the threat is real. The question is who defines the threat, who controls the response, who benefits from its exploitation, and what infrastructure will remain once the emergency is over.

Goodson documented that throughout history, “periods of state control of the money supply have been synonymous with eras of prosperity, peace, cultural enrichment, full employment, and zero inflation,” while control by private bankers has led to “recurring cycles of prosperity and poverty, unemployment, embedded inflation, and a massive and ever-increasing transfer of wealth and political power to this small clique.” The climate apparatus is an expression of that transfer. Breaking it doesn’t end the underlying dynamic; it opens the way for whatever extraction mechanism comes next.

The climate apparatus is breaking. The US Department of Energy’s report, the treaty withdrawals, the shifting position of the elite—this protection scam has entered its terminal phase. What replaces it will be built by the same institutional networks, using the same construction techniques, serving the same structural imperatives of debt-money systems that must grow or collapse.

The choice isn’t between climate compliance and freedom. It’s between understanding how these systems are constructed—and therefore how they can be resisted—and stumbling from one controlled crisis to the next, constantly surprised that the solutions never dissolve and the extractions never end.

How do you explain it to a 6 year old

Imagine you have a piggy bank. You put coins in, and you take coins out. The coins are yours. If you want to buy a toy, you give the shopkeeper your coins, and you get the toy. Simple.

Now imagine a few adults saying, “We’re now in charge of everyone’s piggy bank. If you want to buy something, you have to ask us first. We’ll check if you’ve been good. We’ll check if that toy is allowed. We’ll check if you’ve bought too many toys this month. If we say yes, you get your coins. If we say no, your coins stay locked away.”

You might say, “But they’re MY coins!”

And the adults would say, “Yes, but we’re protecting you. There’s a big, scary problem—the air is getting too hot—and we have to control everything to solve it.”

That is what this essay is about.

Long ago, powerful people decided that everyone in the world had to use special American currencies called dollars to buy oil—the black stuff that powers cars. This made American currency incredibly important. Everyone needed it.

Now those same powerful people want to impose a second rule: everyone must use their dollars to buy permission to produce smoke and fumes. Factories produce smoke. Cars produce smoke. Even keeping your house warm produces smoke. If everything that produces smoke requires permission, then they can monitor everything you do.

They’re building a machine that monitors what you buy. The machine checks: Who are you? What are you buying? Are you allowed to buy it? If any of the answers are wrong, your coins won’t work. The toys stay on the shelf. You don’t get an ice cream. Not because anyone said “no,” but because the machine simply isn’t working for you.

The adults building this machine say it’s to help the planet. But the essay shows that the same families and banks have been building control machines for over a hundred years. They build a machine, tell everyone it’s to solve a scary problem, and then the machine stays around forever—even after people are no longer afraid.

The scary problem changes. The machine remains.

Right now, some people are arguing about whether the air is really getting too hot. But that’s not the main question. The main question is: should someone build a machine that can lock your piggy bank if you don’t follow their rules?

Because once the machine exists, whoever controls it can change the rules as he pleases.

References

The analysis in this essay is largely based on the work of researchers I interviewed: Denis Rancourt, Jacob Nordangård, Paul Cudenec, and ESC. Their original research and documentation should be consulted directly.

Denis Rancourt

  • “Geoeconomics and geopolitics as driving forces behind successive eras of predatory globalization and social engineering: the historic rise of climate change, gender equality, and anti-racism as state doctrines” (Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2019)
  • “Climate Geopolitics and the Western Capitalist/Imperialist Elite’s Obsession with War Avoidance” (2026)
  • CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest: correlation-canada.org
  • Interview: “Interview with Dr. Denis Rancourt: Empire, Mortality, and the Multifaceted Assault on Humanity” (Lies are Unbekoming, September 2025)

Jacob Nordangård

  • Rockefeller: Controlling the Game (Skyhorse Publishing, 2024)
  • The Pharos Chronicles (Substack): drjacobnordangard.substack.com
  • Interview: “Interview with Jacob Nordangård: On Rockefeller, Climate Change, Global Governance, the Digital World Brain, Technocratic Dictatorship, and Much More” (Lies are Unbekoming, August 2024)

Paul Cudenec

  • Enemies of the People: The Rothschilds and Their Corrupt Global Empire (Winter Oak, 2022)
  • The Great Racket (Winter Oak, 2024)
  • Research compiled at winteroak.org.uk
  • Interview: “Interview with Paul Cudenec: On Organic Radicalism, Criminocracy, Rothschild, Capture, Withness, and Much More” (Lies are Unbekoming, August 2024)

ESC

  • “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” (Substack): escapekey.substack.com
  • December 2025 Conditional Payment Infrastructure Documentation, including “Velocity,” “Project Sunrise,” “A Conditional Existence,” and the December Omnibus
  • Interview: “Interview with esc” (Lies are Unbekoming, July 2025)

Stephen Mitford Goodson

  • A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind (Black House Publishing, 2014)

Richard C. Cook

  • Our country, then and now (2024)
  • Former Treasury Department analyst and NASA whistleblower; thirty-two years of federal government experience

Kerry Bolton

  • Revolution from Above: Creating ‘Dissent’ in the New World Order (Arktos Media, 2011)

Justin M. Ptak

  • “Fiat Money, Monetary Corruption, and the Architecture of Extraction” (Mises Wire, January 2026)

US Department of Energy

  • “A Critical Evaluation of the Climate Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the US” (Climate Working Group, July 2025)

Carroll Quigley

  • Tragedy and Hope

https://www.frontnieuws.com/de-klimaatzwendel-van-petrodollar-naar-koolstofdollar