The Rockefellers bold climate strategy

When I first started driving as a teenager, we would gas up at one of the Standard Oil stations that occupied so many street corners.

"At Standard, We Care. About You, About Your Car", was the recognizable tagline of my teen years. It wasn't all that long ago, honestly. But as I eased into my twenties, Standard Oil became synonymous with greed, power and pollution.

In college I tried to go elsewhere for gas. But it turned out all the oil companies were pretty much Standard progeny of the original monopoly, Exxon-Mobil being the largest.

The consumers of America were trapped.

Standard Oil Company was first broken up by the 1911 Supreme Court. It re-organized bigger than ever but they were ruled out of countenance by anti-trust laws again. Still, the company's off-shoots exist today as the dominant brands in the oil and petrochemical industry.

Today's dirty energy executives don't exhibit the heartfelt philanthropy practiced by some of the barons of yesteryear. Today, the giants give by political calculus and deny the consequences of their pollution. Their Common Cause can be found not in the community, but on the bottom line of the profit ledger.

That's why the recent action by the Rockefeller family to divest their holdings in dirty fuels such as coal and tar sand mining is without precedent.

Capital divestment in their own industry is the economic equivalent of the Winchester family opposing the rifle bullet industry on the grounds of safety.

Not only is the Fund trying to cut off cash to their own industry, but, astonishingly, seeks to re-direct that capital to their own competitors. So far, they have been joined by 800 other individuals and corporations who have committed to the divestment of some $50 billion in assets invested in fossil fuel production. Not a bad start.

The Rockefeller bloodlines have fundamental goodness infused into their cells.

Even in the "Guilded Age" of American industrialization, John D. Rockefeller donated over $500 million to charities, an unfathomable sum for its time. My yellow-dog Democrat dad and formerly Republican mom were fans of former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the 1960's moderate Republican Governor of New York and Gerald Ford's Vice President. I had a political acquaintance with former Senator Jay Rockefeller from Virginia and have long known and worked with his Twin Cities sister, the soft-spoken humanist Alida Rockefeller, a generous and passionate supporter of justice causes.

The Rockefeller divestment strategy is the figurative canary that returned alive from the literal coalmine of Big Pollution. Divestment signals a climate action movement with wings that dovetail nicely with a working class movement waking up to the climate threat.

Mass demonstrations reveal when a public issue is ready to tip. This was true in civil rights marches of the 50-60's, anti-war demonstrations of the 60-70's, women's rights rallies of the 70-80's and LGBT rights since.