A great-great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, he steered one of his family’s philanthropies to a feisty stance on the oil giant’s role in climate change.
David Kaiser, a scion of the Rockefeller family who steered one of its philanthropies into a pitched confrontation with the company that provided the family’s prodigious wealth, died on Wednesday at a family home on Mount Desert Island, Maine. He was 50.
The cause was glioblastoma multiforme, a cancer of the brain, his wife, Rosemary Corbett, said.
As president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, and as an official of Just Detention International, a group dedicated to fighting sexual abuse in prisons, Mr. Kaiser pursued twin passions: combating climate change and reforming the criminal justice system.
His climate work took one of the family’s most prominent charitable organizations in a highly unusual direction for any philanthropy: scrappiness. It was all the more unusual for a great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, to confront Exxon Mobil, a successor company to the Rockefeller oil monopoly.
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