A REPLY TO PROF. BERKHOUT

The Good, the Beautiful, and the Ugly

by Rick Sanders

[Print version of this article]

I would like to start by praising the optimism of my friend, Professor Emeritus Augustinus “Guus” Berkhout, announcing that a new era of hope is dawning, a “golden century based on abundant, affordable, clean nuclear energy.”

The Ugly

Compare this vision to the miserable future envisioned for us by the champion of the green Malthusians, Prince Philip, the late consort to Queen Elizabeth II, whose mother was the last Empress of India:

• Item: Prince Philip to People magazine in 1981:

Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed—not just for the natural world, but for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they’ll consume, the more pollution they’ll create, the more fighting they’ll do…. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation, and war.

This is not a prophecy, it’s a promise. The rulers of the UK are well-known masters of creating famines—deliberately—not just in Ireland, but in Bengal, for example, in 1770 (10 million dead) and 1943 (3 million dead).

• Item: Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion?:

Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide—all can be traced easily to too many people.

• Item: The Queen’s own emissary to the UN’s Conferences of the Parties (COP) on climate, Knight Commander of the British Empire John Schellnhuber, has said that the Earth’s carrying capacity is only 1 billion people.

• Item: Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a main architect of the Holocaust, said this in an address to officials in Berlin, June 9, 1942:

It is time to break with the folly of these megalomaniacs … who speak of dominating the earth; all of that must be brought back into perspective. There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world. In the face of a good storm, he can do nothing. He cannot even predict it.

Quoted in The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi, by Johann Chapoutot, Belknap Press, 2018, p. 27.

The Ugly Green New Deal and the Great Reset

The 2007-2008 crisis—the fake mortgage values bubble—was never resolved, but in fact further inflated by trillions and quadrillions of dollars in interest-free loans and a myriad of exotic derivative financial instruments for yet even more financial speculation, so that the financial system of the trans-Atlantic sector today is completely bankrupt and about to go into a hyperinflationary blowout.

It should not be hard to guess what is in store for us from the Green New Dealers, Prince Charles, the Davos billionaires, and Mark Carney. Never mind that man-made climate change is an obvious hoax, they say. Push it through, with the help of the labile media, force it through using the central banks, and other lending institutions, under the leadership of Mark Carney—former Governor of the Bank of England. “Shift the trillions” of dollars to keep the bubble growing for one more round, by adopting the same policy as that of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Minister of Economics more than 80 years ago. Make the public pay the piper, skyrocketing gas prices, rentals and utility bills. Wring them out, turn them upside down and empty their pockets, and when they’re exhausted, recycle them as compost or soylent green.

The Green New Deal and the Great Reset are perfect for this. The financiers can kill two birds with one stone: get rid of billions of people, wreck industrial civilization, then sit back and relax, and pull in trillions (“money makes money”). The excuse for their inhumanity: imminent disaster from global warming, attributed to CO₂; the driving force: a public driven insane by green propaganda, COVID, and cold war hysteria.

The Good and the Beautiful

As Dr. Berkhout points out, however, their admission that the numbers released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate models were “insanely scary and wrong” has given us an opportunity to break the back of this monster.

From time immemorial, mankind has been evolving, not physically in the last 10,000 years, but as a species, the mind creating for us things that never existed before, and giving us a kind of exoskeleton that now includes myriads of satellites in nearby space, and has us on the point of jumping off to the Moon and Mars, after several million years stuck on this planet as sitting ducks for asteroids and other cataclysms. Now we can say with Prof. Berkhout, “a new era of hope is dawning.”

Perhaps some will object that the Professor’s optimism is too much; we seem to be in danger of a world war, ignited in the Black Sea or the South China Sea; the COVID crisis is re-emerging with apocalyptic resonance. We have some questions to ask him and ourselves, before we can say yea or nay. Berkhout himself brings up a “Plan B.”

Speaking for the Climate Intelligence Organization (CLINTEL) that he founded, consisting of almost a thousand scientists and professionals—who have publicly challenged the climate change narrative, offering to debate any climate alarmist spokesmen anywhere, anytime—Prof. Berkhout reiterates:

[A]ll countries should be allowed to use their available energy resources—such as clean coal, petroleum, natural gas, hydro power—as much as they need to, to maintain and improve their standard of living.

That is admirable, but where is the mechanism to make it happen?

And that’s where Lyndon LaRouche comes in. Almost exactly fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, LaRouche’s forecasts from the late 1960s were vindicated, but it was not a happy occasion. On that date, President Richard Nixon committed one of the most ugly and vicious crimes of economic policy in our country’s history, “the dollar float,” which took economics out of the realm of real products, hard commodities, and useful inventions, into barefaced speculation, “making money” in a manner indistinguishable from that of the gambling casinos, making trillionaires out of a handful of sociopaths and paupers of hard-working people.

Follow the Laws of Physics and
LaRouche’s Four Laws

Now, fifty years after Nixon’s debacle, the Western economies need some very stringent medicine! Fortunately, the crumbling of the climate-change narrative, combined with the all-around dismal failure of the establishment in the West in dealing with COVID, has given us a golden opportunity to administer that medicine.

• Reinstate President Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 to protect the legitimate functions of the commercial banks from speculators and vulture funds;

• Establish National Banks in every country, each bank absolutely sovereign. They will be depositories for government revenues, issuing national currencies as needed, and extending low-interest credit for any projects that promote the general welfare,

• Engage in an accelerated space exploration program, involving as many countries as are willing, and

• Provide tax breaks and write-offs to encourage R&D, especially for accelerated programs on nuclear fusion development.

More on LaRouche’s Four Laws is available here.

Fortunately, decades ago, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche designed a plan called the World Land-Bridge, reflected in China’s One Belt, One Road, also known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This is already the biggest infrastructure project in the world, building tens of thousands of kilometers and more of electrified high-speed rail lines, each of which becomes a conveyor belt within a 150-km-wide development corridor along the way. Already more than 100 countries are involved. The equivalent of dozens, scores and hundreds of “Tennessee Valleys” and thousands of agro-industrial technology cities throughout the world will be built, not for a silly playground contest for hegemony, but for a multilateral world, committed to development and progress for all mankind, a genuine win-win world. Why should there be losers?