EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2021

Nuclear War, Green New Deal—Two Interconnected Threats to Mankind

Feb. 16 , 2021 (EIRNS)—This news service, together with the Schiller Institute headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, have mounted a global mobilization to identify two existential threats to humanity being openly advocated by governments in the trans-Atlantic region—the Green New Deal and the drive for nuclear confrontation against Russia and China. Over the past 24 hours, major responses to those dangers from leading figures in the United States have been issued, which must be given mass circulation among people of good will internationally.

First, just days after the release of the EIR Special Report, “The Great Leap Backward—LaRouche Exposes the Green New Deal,” the warning in that report concerning the deadly result of dependence on the primitive energy forms of solar and wind was demonstrated in the form of the devastation in Texas and other states due to a polar vortex, a phenomenon which is to be expected by anyone thinking long term about the conditions of life. With wind turbines frozen and the solar panels buried in snow, more than 4 million people have been left without power in freezing temperatures.

The former Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who also served as President Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary, provided a first-hand account of the disaster on the Fox News “Tucker Carlson” show Feb. 15, Monday night, in terms very similar to that of the EIR Special Report. “We started taking down the coal plants, then the nuclear plants,” Perry said. “We’ve got to have a diverse energy supply which will be there when you call on it. That means fossil fuels, LNG, compact nuclear reactors. We have to look at fusion reactors—there’s great progress being made in that field right now. I don’t hear the new administration, the Green New Deal, talking about anything other than solar and wind.” He forecast ten years ahead, if we were to have an “AOC world” with only solar and wind, when the next polar vortex hits:

“If you don’t have power to keep warm, you’re going to die! There are countless lives that can be lost with the kind of reckless adhering to a philosophy like that. It’s not scientific. We heard all the time during the campaign, ‘You have to stick with the science.’ Well, the science tells us, if you have just wind and solar, it’s going to get awfully cold in the winter, and awfully hot in the summer.”

Secondly, on Saturday Feb. 13, the Schiller Institute sponsored a roundtable forum: “Worsening U.S.-Russian Relations—Reverse Them with New Paradigm, or Face Nuclear War,” featuring a former CIA analyst, a former U.S. Senator, and the head of the American University in Moscow, as well as Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Harley Schlanger of the Schiller Institute. This warning of the extreme danger of a war from these experts was also addressed by Professor Lyle J. Goldstein from the U.S. Naval War College, an expert on both Russia and China. In an op-ed in the Washington Times on Feb. 3, Goldstein addressed the “smoldering train wreck of the U.S.-Russia relationship,” that the U.S. and Russia were “practically on a war footing.” He wrote: “The Western press is now fixated on the fate of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and related protests.” He observes that there are those in the West who would welcome a “Maidan” in Moscow, but “a Russia consumed by chaos and violence would actually not accord at all with U.S. interests.” He concludes:

“Americans need to know that Russia’s massive nuclear forces are under singular, stable, and rational control—not in the grips of a fracturing state facing the possibility of civil war. Moreover, a stable and prosperous Russia will also be critical to the world’s recovery from an economic crisis wrought by the global pandemic.”

This mobilization must be escalated everywhere. On Feb. 27, another Schiller Institute roundtable forum will focus on both fronts of the Anglo-American war drive against China and Russia, and the urgency that the LaRouche solution—ending the British Imperial division of the world into geopolitical blocs through a new global financial system among sovereign states to finance the development of the world and beyond—peace through development. There is no partial solution.