This article appears in the May 28, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
To Develop Africa, We Must Reject Green New Deal Dictates
[Print version of this article]
Kelvin Kemm, a nuclear physicist in South Africa, who is the CEO of Stratek Business Strategy Consultants, and former Board Chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation, made the following comments on The LaRouche Organization webcast on Saturday, May 15.
It’s just not reasonable to come along and say we’ve got a morality that is being determined by these First World people. They say, “You’ve got too many people already,” or something like that. “But now you’ve got to use the wind and solar because we tell you to.” That’s not fair.
We’ve found for a while now that banks are starting to say they won’t lend money to coal operations and they won’t lend money to nuclear. I said that some time ago in front of the chief executive of one of the biggest banks in South Africa, talking to him about nuclear development. He plain and simply said to me, “We wouldn’t want to do anything with the word ‘nuclear’ because it doesn’t look good for us.” To my mind, that was just so wrong.
You’re finding this is happening now with this Green New Deal in the United States. Banks and other institutions like that are being either bullied, or they’re doing it willfully, wanting to not fund carbon developments like coal and so on. I think that’s wrong. What is the welfare of the people at the end of that line? You can’t have a bank where these people are trained only in finance and are effectively making technological decisions on behalf of mankind; because that’s what it boils down to.
So, when you say, “bringing wealth,” one mustn’t just think of loads of cash; one must think of what are the items there; how do they develop? As Lyndon LaRouche said, development leads to peace. And you say, “What do they need?” And if they need to burn coal or they need to eat meat, or whatever the case, I’d have a look at that and say, “How can we maintain the state of peaceful development while allowing them to develop?” Not saying, “Well, you must do it our way,” and that thinking the wealth is only money and that they can be denied meat and denied the railway line, and denied this and denied that as long as they have some cash to go and buy a new TV set or something. These things have to be thought out on a global scale, and not just from people sitting in the big cities of the leading edge of the world.
But we must be able to decide if we want to build big dams, because the water cycle here, we have five-year droughts; so we have to build dams that will hold water for five years. We’ve got these long distances. South Africa and Zimbabwe, and Zambia, and Rwanda, and Senegal, and each country like this must be able to, with its own self-confidence, look at its own conditions and say, “What must we do to develop our people, so we can stay in a peaceful frame of mind with others?” We mustn’t be doing electricity developments—wind and solar—because we’ve been instructed to do so by some foreign country that’s using a bank to put an armlock on you that they won’t give you money if you don’t do as they say, because it’s in their moral interest. That’s the sort of thing that one has to really carefully think about.
