EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 2021

June Summitry Remains Focused on Confrontation with Russia and China

June 2, 2021 (EIRNS)—On June 11-13, the G7 heads of state will meet in Cornwall under British chairmanship. On June 14, there will be a NATO summit in Brussels. On June 16, Presidents Biden and Putin will hold their first summit in Geneva, Switzerland. The first two summits are being geared up to push green Malthusianism and confrontation with Russia and China, to make sure that the third, Presidential summit is stillborn. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented in her weekly webcast today, the G7 and the NATO summits “can be expected to have a lot of rhetoric against Russia and China ‘dictatorship.’ I can’t see how anything can come from these two bodies to address the many real problems in the world,” such as the pandemic and the breakdown crisis of the trans-Atlantic financial system.

Nor are the Russians mincing their words in response. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday stated that the situation between the EU and Russia is nothing short of alarming. He declared that it could in fact be reversed, but it would have to be on the basis of completely different principles than the current regime of aggressive sanctions, justified under the rubric of the “rules-based order.” Today Sergey Chemezov, the CEO of Rostec, a Russian state-owned technology conglomerate, told an interviewer that the sanctions “can certainly not be called soft.... Very tough sanctions are, in fact, war. And we must, of course, be prepared for war.”

The policy of the G7 on the economic front is, if anything, worse. According to Bloomberg, the upcoming G7 summit plans to launch a green alternative to China’s Belt and Road initiative. “The strategy, expected to be called the ‘Clean Green Initiative,’ would provide a framework to support sustainable development and the green transition in developing countries, the people [familiar with the planning] said. The initiative will also be on the summit agenda for the leaders.”

However, it is not clear whether the G7 will decide to put some money behind the initiative, as the initial purpose was “a pledge toward creating a strategic framework.”

G7 member countries are also quarreling over where to focus their efforts: The U.S. wants to focus on Central and South America, whereas France, Germany and Italy want to focus on Africa, and Japan on Asia. They apparently believe that developing nations are so stupid as to accept CO2 tradeoffs instead of development.

In a related development, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney is struggling to get his Global CO2 Trading scheme ready by the end of this year. The group set up by Carney, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, is divided on major issues that have to do with the price of CO2, whereas some members push for a global regulating agency, Carney wants prices to be determined by “the markets,” which means they can be manipulated at will. Carney insists with the target of a $100 billion market by the end of the decade—a difficult target to achieve from the supply side.