Rejecting Nuclear Power Is 'Incomprehensible, Irrational'
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This article was translated from German. [PDF version of this article]
Wiesbaden, May 7—The earthquakes hitting the international financial system are rising higher and higher on the Richter scale: an impending breakup of the Eurozone, the new threat of a financial super-crisis, the collapse of the dollar, disintegration of the United States, rapidly rising inflation. In view of the impending catastrophe, demand for a two-tier banking system is growing louder in many countries; only in Germany are the established parties continuing to afford themselves the luxury of a special German option: the ruinous phase-out of nuclear energy. On the contrary, other states, such as France, China, Poland, and many others, are accelerating their expansion of fission power and development of nuclear fusion.
Since citizens of this country are truly living in the Valley of the Clueless, thanks to the lock-step media coverage and the almost unanimous chorus of the politicians, it is useful to take a look at the debate on this subject in other countries. During his visit to a nuclear power plant in Gravelines on May 3, French President Nicolas Sarkozy affirmed in no uncertain terms France's "strategic decision" in favor of nuclear energy: "I want to make things clear, when responding to the anxiety of so many observers who know nothing about nuclear power, and who mix everything up and say things that are disrespectful of our engineers and technicians: As head of state, I have full trust in the French nuclear park.... I would like to say to those who say that we need a moratorium in the future, that their position is incomprehensible.... And some say that because there was a tsunami in Japan, we should give up what makes France strong, France's pride, France's nuclear independence. That would be irrational and unreasonable." Without nuclear power, the price of energy would quadruple, Sarkozy stressed.
In China, Duan Xuru, the head of a 200-member team of scientists at the National Center for Fusion Research at the South-West Institute of Physics, said that the prospects for the development of advanced nuclear power plants as well as nuclear fusion have greatly improved since the accident in Fukushima, Japan because now the whole world is looking at China, which has already invested on a large scale in these new technologies, and which will now expand the funding for them even more. Because of the problems in Japan, the government hopes that nuclear fusion can be achieved in the near future, said Duan.
In our eastern neighbor, Poland, the media is making fun of the hysteria in Germany, saying that Germans, unlike Poles, are dominated by Angst. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk categorically refused to agree to the demand of Brandenburg Minister President Matthias Platzeck to cancel the planned nuclear power plant near Gdansk, saying that this is not in an earthquake zone and furthermore is 300 km east of the German border. Teresa Kaminska, technical director of the project, expressed her incredulity about the reaction in Germany, because the events in Fukushima demonstrated, contrary to the hysteria, that "even in such an emergency situation, no major radioactive fallout occurred in Japan."
This list of reactions in other countries that intend, now more than ever, to invest rationally in research on more advanced fission power reactors and in the exploration of nuclear fusion, could be extended with many more examples.
The German Exception
How, then, is the unprecedented hysteria and irrationality in Germany to be understood? One very important reason for it is that the uniform media coverage has, for decades, but especially since March 11, allowed almost no serious scientist to get a word in edgewise; instead, the media publicizes a barrage of claims by Greenpeace activists, enviromentalist "experts," and green "physicists."
Thus, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on May 4 made its pages available to the outrageous high priest of a religious-fundamentalist sect associated with the British monarchy, a self-confessed member of the Gaia cult, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. [See Feature, and this article, elsewhere in this issue.] Under the headline "Forward to Nature," Schellnhuber manages to compress an astonishing amount of pathological distortion of history into a confined space. He actually blames the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries for the colonial policies of the imperial powers of Europe, while in truth, the British Empire, for example, used well-known methods to try to suppress any industrialization in its colonies. The American Revolution occurred precisely for this reason. But, of course, when it comes to Schellnhuber, he who pays the piper, calls the tune. And, by the way, George III lost his mind because he lost the American colonies.
Schellnhuber goes on with an indigestible cocktail of prejudices, tendentious claims, and manipulative and specious arguments about the United States, and mud-slinging against German scientists, finally making the ludicrous claim that the fact that "humanity has grown to become the determining planetary force" reaches its triumphant climax "in the globalization frenzy of the late 20th Century, which came about primarily through the removal of barriers and restrictions on international financial, raw materials, and capital goods markets."
Probably the glasses through which Mr. Schellnhuber views the world are so plastered over with dollar bills and pound notes that he can only perceive the activities of the financial sector, but not man's creative reason as the basis of his role not only on the planet, but in the universe.
He further asserts that "with the Fukushima explosion on March 11, 2011, the underlying trust which a technology-worshipping comfort society used to place in nuclear energy production, has now melted into so much residual waste." Obviously, he is hoping that his readers do not know the difference between a nuclear explosion and the burning of mixtures of explosive gas, and that they are not interested in the nuclear policies of China, France, Poland, and many other countries. He seems to be unaware that the future "roughly 5 billion" cars he is so worried about could be avoided, if we built a modern infrastructure program, for example, one based on the Transrapid and other maglev train techniques for underground transport. But he admits that he is living in a half-wit society.
And of course, he again touts his WBGU[1] report on a "social contract for a Great Transformation," which contains a detailed proposal for a social contract of global eco-dictatorship. The proposed full transfer of national sovereignty to a world imperium violates the German Constitution, and certainly the so-called Lisbon decision of the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. The proposal made by one of his WBGU colleagues, Claus Leggewie, for so-called "future chambers" as the third pillar of parliamentary democracy, which would take precedence over Parliament, and would approve or disapprove laws based on their "sustainability," is also not provided for in the Constitution. Maybe all these proposals should be scrutinized by the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungschutz).
The WBGU'S unscientific views are nothing more than the desperate and malicious expression of a delphic, oligarchical tradition that goes back to Cambridge System Analysis and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). What is being proposed, namely the so-called "decarbonization" of the world energy economy—i.e., its full conversion to exclusively renewable energies—would sustain a potential population of no more than 1-2 billion people. The Swedish climate realist Pierre Gosselin called the WBGU study a green Mein Kampf, which is now lying on the desk of every Environment Minister of the EU countries. It is highly questionable whether a German Chancellor can afford to be associated with a "scientific" advisor like Schellnhuber.
So why has there not been a single challenge to the content of this monstrous document in Germany, aside from this author's Appeal [published in last week's EIR]? Do we really want to put our freedom and potentially the lives of billions of people at risk?
The Real Alternative
It is extremely doubtful at this time that the troika of the EU Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF will be able to force Greece to accept even greater austerity, because that policy has already reduced living standards there by 25%. The dramatic emergency summit of European finance ministers in Luxembourg yesterday only managed to force Greece not to leave the euro system or to carry out debt restructuring—but probably only for the next few days. If the deal with Greece collapses, not only will the agreement with Portugal end up as wastepaper as well, but we would then be looking at a financial crisis that could overshadow even the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, as ECB chief economist Jürgen Stark correctly observed on April 23.
In the United States, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) has introduced into the House of Representatives a bill for a two-tier banking system in the tradition of Glass-Steagall, H.R. 1489, which is supported by a growing number of Congressmen. A similar bill is going to be introduced into the Senate.
The only way that the abovementioned earthquakes in the world financial system can be overcome, is the immediate introduction of a two-tier banking system in Europe also, before it is too late—and that could even be within this month.
That is the real alternative, and not the pathological nightmare of the high priest of the very system that is right now going irreversibly bankrupt.
[1] The Scientific Advisory Council of the Federal Government on Global Environmental Changes (WBGU). See Feature in this issue—ed.
