This article appears in the December 17, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Green New Deal:
Spear Point of the World War Danger
[Print version of this article]
Dec. 11—The economic failure of the so-called Green New Deal in those trans-Atlantic nations where it is being imposed—including energy hyperinflation and severely lowered economic productivity—is driving the leading Green Dealers to stoke rage against China and Russia and escalate military tensions to pre-war levels.
The grandiose, thirteen-day “world climate summit” in Glasgow, Scotland in November, COP26, was publicly acknowledged by its British and U.S. leaders to have broken down—a failure which U.S. President Joe Biden and others angrily blamed on Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Within three weeks of that “FLOP26,” London ministers and U.S. intelligence agencies had ratcheted up a U.S.-Russia confrontation over Ukraine to the point that a Russian invasion was claimed throughout NATO circles to be virtually certain and imminent, with warnings of a second, inadvertent “Cuban Missiles Crisis.”
Consider the feature of the new German government causing the greatest concern among European elected officials and businesses, namely that its two most drastic Green Party environmental extremists are also its two leading warmongers: Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Energy-Economics-Environment “super-minister” Robert Habeck. Baerbock campaigned for, and lost the Chancellorship on a program led by confrontations with Russia, shutdowns of its pipelines, etc. Habeck put on army fatigues to go to the “front lines” in the deconfliction zone in Eastern Ukraine and urge the Ukrainian troops on as they shelled the two Russian-speaking semi-autonomous districts of the Donbas region.
A strange deployment from someone who is effectively a “super-minister for climate affairs”? With one hand these ministers are anti-carbon climate extremists, who demand sacrifice of populations and economies—reliable power, heat, livestock growing, farming, industry—to “the planet.” With the other hand, they demand war preparations and diplomatic and military confrontations with Russia and China, two of the major nations that refuse to sacrifice their economies to “the planet.” And if this military confrontation means—at best—that Germany itself and other West European populations are deprived of natural gas for heat and power, having already been deprived of nuclear power and on track to give up coal, that doubly meets the Greens’ objectives. They want low energy use, among other green policies, and the lowering of population that goes with them.
In other words, these extreme greens are the most imperialist of European groups and parties. They follow the policy tradition of Henry Kissinger’s 1974 National Security memo NSSM 200 with its stricture that developing countries could not be allowed to use their resources, especially not in cooperation with the then Soviet Union.
British-led imperialists, using NATO’s power and civilian offshoots, have been demanding zero growth and world population reduction since promoting the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth book in 1972. But the last few years’ mobilization of the major central banks, and the biggest London and Wall Street financial firms, to “shift the trillions” out of energy-dense technologies and into “green finance,” is causing economic upheavals in trans-Atlantic countries and confrontation with major powers China and Russia and others which will not accept this policy.
London Zero-Carbon, NATO Offensive
This warlike antagonism against anti-Malthusian nations, is widespread at a higher trans-Atlantic level than these two new German ministers. The Atlantic Council, which is the think-tank side of the NATO military alliance that has advanced 600 miles to the borders of Russia since 1990, was also webcasting from the Glasgow climate summit throughout its two weeks and down to its bitter end. The British Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), or Chatham House, took the lead at the World Economic Forum “Great Reset” conference in January 2021. Chatham House rolled out policies to compel low-carbon steel production, low-carbon cement, low-carbon farming, etc., which raise production costs and lower quality, productivity, and production throughout the most basic industries. In June, the RIIA co-sponsored with the International Energy Agency (IEA) a conference on “The implications of net-zero 2050 for emerging economies”: Clearly, they were issuing zero-carbon directives from the British elite to developing countries.
And what, in this crisis, is Chatham House? The platform from which RIIA Ukraine affairs director Orysia Lutsevych and British Foreign Affairs Minister Liz Truss issue threats and calls for British troops to deploy to the front lines in Ukraine.
This IEA, the “energy agency” constantly projecting zero-carbon energy production worldwide, is now headed by an official of the Davos World Economic Forum, Fatih Birol. It was formed on the December 1973 initiative of Henry Kissinger, to “advise nations on policies related to their energy mix.” Kissinger hatched the IEA plan at a meeting of the Pilgrims Society of London, full of the likes of Lord Carrington, George Shultz, Alexander Haig, Paul Volcker, Margaret Thatcher, Caspar Weinberger, and Henry Luce, and of which the U.S. Secretary of State is always an ex officio member. Just the place to launch a global energy policy body—rather, an imperialist energy resources dictator.
Consider U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who rushed out to brief the media after the Dec. 7 Biden-Putin videoconference with a much more warlike version of its results than subsequently came from President Biden himself. The London Financial Times headlined its interview with Blinken earlier this year, “Blinken says U.S. must lead green energy revolution to combat China.”
A Flop, Then a Flight Forward
The Glasgow world climate summit was an admitted failure, unexpected as recently as President Biden’s supposedly successful “pre-climate summit” in April. Why? The refusal of Russia and China to entertain economy-wrecking “zero-carbon pledges” stiffened the anti-Malthusian resistance of the developing countries, particularly India, to the “climate colonialism” (Bolivian President Arce’s epithet) or “climate imperialism” of Prince Charles, Mark Carney, Sir Michael Bloomberg, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, et al.
Biden angrily called out Putin and Xi, saying they “would have to answer to the world for not showing up” at Glasgow. And he announced a “steel deal” with von der Leyen, explicitly to keep Chinese steel out of Europe because it is “dirty”—that is, it has high carbon content, which is a mark of high quality in steel. The European Union abruptly put off licensing of the completed Russia-Germany Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline for a year, despite Winter gas shortages and prices in Europe already sky-high.
Prince Charles, keynoting the Glasgow summit, demanded “a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector … to achieve fundamental [green] economic transition.” Then the Ukraine and Taiwan tensions were geared up hard and fast—but this was not the only major shift by the London and Wall Street banks, billionaires, and British royals driving the “green reset.”
Green Deal demands have suddenly become far more extreme despite their defeat. The IEA, in its latest World Energy Outlook 2021, made the incredible claim that 95% of all additions to electric power capacity in the world in the next five years will be wind, solar, and biomass (wood chips). And that 4,800,000 MW in these interruptible and unreliable power sources is to be added in the world in ten years. The new German government set a target of power capacity in Germany to be 80% in wind and solar by 2040, and is now shutting down its last six nuclear reactors. Economist and former minister Heiner Flassbeck responded: Germany will be 100,000 megawatts short of power every day at midday if it does that, and 80,000 MW short every day already by 2030.
If this economic return to the 17th Century which the IEA was “forecasting,” were actually to be imposed in the next five years, undeveloped nations which buckled to it would be in total turmoil, starvation and poverty; China would of course be leading the Belt and Road member nations in the opposite, nuclear power-led direction; the opposition of Russia would be implacable and its nuclear power strengths available to other nations. That is not to speak of space exploration and other central scientific frontiers.
Therefore, this Green Deal “flight forward” demands domination, including military, over national forces that oppose it, just as surely as British and European colonial policy in Africa and the slave trade did in the 17th–19th Centuries.
Shortages and Breakdowns Already
But we don’t even have to look at the IEA’s caricature. The mere first approximations of it so far have caused economic chaos and rampant inflation driven by energy and other commodity prices.
Spending on fossil fuel extraction investment worldwide, which averaged roughly $700 billion/year for the first half of the last decade, suddenly fell to $450 billion/year from 2016–19, and to $300 billion/year in 2020–21. World liquid fuels production has dropped from 102 million barrels/day in 2018–19 to 91 million now, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Global coal power generation dropped by 14% in the past five years, by 10% in the past two years alone. Labor shortages have resulted from the impact of “zero-carbon” propaganda on young workers, who are avoiding these industries, as Reuters reported Nov. 30. Fossil fuels are now in global shortage.
This ricochets. Because of the huge increases in the prices of natural gas around the world, fertilizers have become unaffordable, or in some cases unavailable, to farmers. World wheat output is set to drop by 10 million tons, according to the French agriculture analysis firm Agritel. Corn production costs are rising by 15-20% in the major producers America and Ukraine. One of the world’s top fertilizer firms, CF Industries, projects lower yields of many foods and agricultural products around the world in 2022. Amid widespread famines already in 2020–21, and loss of informal agricultural work in the developing countries, food is entering global shortage in 2022. Electric power reserve margins are clearly in global shortage, as blackouts and grid emergencies in the United States and Germany have already shown.
Labor productivity in the United States and EU economies plunged in the second and third quarters of 2021; in the United States, for example, down 1.1% in the second quarter, another 5.2% in the third quarter; down 1.6% for the year ending in September according to the U.S. Labor Department. Inflation in November “officially” reached a 5.2% annual rate in Europe, 6.8% in the United States. Real wages are falling both in Europe and the United States; in America, they have dropped by just under 2% over the past year for all employees.
The largest banks in the United States, London, and continental Europe are in “zombie” condition, due to the vast money-printing of the central banks in the past two years and the enlistment of these banks by the “great reset” elite to “shift the trillions” out of all carbon-intense economic activity. Unable or unwilling to lend, these banks now typically have 75–100% more deposits than loans outstanding, and are withdrawing credit from the industrial economies, lowering productive investment and productivity.
This is the situation in which financial elites enlist media and government to generate anger, even hatred of “adversary” nations.
A Typical Collapse Function
The inflation is what the central banks were aiming at. There is a global mass of debt approaching $280 trillion, doubled since the 2008 global financial crash, and growing much faster than gross domestic product (GDP), with money supply growing still faster through central bank printing to try to liquefy this illiquid and unpayable, largely corporate debt. They had to inflate the debt away, while creating a vast new bubble of “green finance” supplied with vast new cash flows.
The “green finance bubble” is, in fact, generating super-profits. One example is the Danish Ørsted firm, the world’s largest producer of wind turbines. Ørsted’s profits in the first half of 2021 were just a little less than triple those in the first half of 2020, at 960 million euros or $1.1 billion for the half year—while total offshore wind power generated, actually dropped. The tripling of profits resulted from government subsidies on a much larger scale; sharply rising prices charged for electricity; and the rush of hundreds of billions into the green bubble.
Or take the European Emissions Trading System, the carbon emissions trading market. It doubled in size this year from $250 billion to half a trillion dollars’ trading volume; the “price” of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide in that market went from $23 two years ago to $80 dollars this month. This is a new and super-profitable derivatives market for speculation.
The high and rising profits in this bubble come from subsidizing and “shifting the trillions” into what are called “new technologies”—essentially technological throwbacks at high prices—which are spreading like wildfire and are dragging down economic productivity throughout the trans-Atlantic nations. These nations are now being mobilized to confront pro-science, pro-growth, pro-nuclear Russia, and China with threats of war.
Meanwhile productive assets, and assets outside the hot-inflation commodities and their derivatives markets, are losing value. A tell-tale report released Nov. 30 by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, supposedly on the impact of weather disasters on major banks, concluded this: “Our findings suggest that potential transition risks from climate change warrant more attention than physical disaster risks.” That is, the risks from the Prince Charles-Carney-Bloomberg-World Economic Forum drive to “shift the trillions” threaten the banks themselves.
The New York Fed’s is not the only such warning. The article “Green Upheaval” in the January 2022 Foreign Affairs says: “Talk of a smooth transition to clean energy is fanciful: There is no way that the world can avoid major upheavals as it remakes the entire energy system.” Investment big-wig Mohamed El-Arian, chief economist of Allianz, gave a runaway inflation warning on “Fox News Sunday” Nov. 28, explaining, “We’re in an energy transition, and the platform we’re transitioning to, doesn’t really exist.” And remember economist Flassbeck’s 80-100,000 MW daily power shortage warning for Germany.
Avoiding War by Development
President John F. Kennedy refused to allow the Cuban Missiles Crisis to tip into nuclear war with the Soviet Union. A President as committed as JFK was, to scientific crash programs, technological advance, economic progress in his own country and others, will not allow strategic confrontation to continue toward war which could threaten the entire human species.
If in this crisis we don’t have such a president here, or other national leaders of that caliber on the trans-Atlantic side of an increasing confrontation, we have a clear antidote to the growing danger of world war: Stop the Green Deal, which is a driver of war, and reverse it. Stop this technological great leap backward, with a leap forward of economic development. We’ve had this solution since Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s March 2020 call for major nations’ agreement to build modern healthcare systems and public health capacities—including nutrition, clean water and sanitation—in every nation.
