EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2021

Switzerland Votes Down CO2 Law—‘There Is a Limit to a Tyrant’s Power’

June 13, 2021 (EIRNS)—Today in England the leaders of the Group of Seven, at the end of their three-day confab in Cornwall, issued their “Cardis Bay G7 Summit Communiqué—Our Shared Agenda for Global Action To Build Back Better.” The B3W, as they call it—Build Back Better for the World—perspective, laid out in 25 pages, is ultra-green, devoid of anything necessary to really combat pandemics and famine, or to build a modern economy. It features outright bankster swindles based on carbon markets. Moreover, the B3W is a blatant ploy against China and the Belt and Road Initiative, which is building real infrastructure across the globe. President Biden and Secretary Blinken brag about it. Who can accept any of this?

The appropriate reaction is seen in the referendum today in Switzerland, where the people voted down the “CO2 Act.” You can hear the echoes, “No, there is a limit to a tyrant’s power...” from the Rütli Oath in Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich Schiller.

The Swiss CO2 Act, which conforms completely with the Paris Agreement and the new B3W, would have made everyday living impossible, with fuel taxes and other so-called decarbonizing measures. It was concocted under the fraud that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut, to keep the planet from overheating. The no vote came from the rural and other constituencies in 21 of the 26 Swiss cantons. Only Geneva, Basel, Zürich and other urban areas voted green.

There are other key expressions of sanity and sovereignty. In the U.S. West and farm states, lawmakers and citizens alike are mobilized against the green deal measures in the Biden Executive Orders from January. The special target for nullification is the so-called “30×30” demand in Executive Order 14008, that 30% of all land and water in the U.S. must be taken out of any productive use by 2030, in the false name of cutting CO2 emissions and favoring biodiversity. This exact 30×30 demand is also in the G7’s “2030 Nature Compact” released today.

In opposition, over 50 counties in 11 U.S. states have passed resolutions to nullify this measure. The leading state opposing “30×30” is Nebraska, which has the most irrigated agriculture of all U.S. states, and has over 97% of its land in private ownership. There is a “30×30 Termination” bill in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

But the geopolitical side of B3W ranks as much, or more, venal and stupid than even the green dogma. Biden, at his post-G7 press conference today at Cornwall Airport Newquay, on the way to chum up with the Queen, recounted, “I proposed that we have a democratic alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative: the Build Back Better. And they’ve agreed to that, and that’s underway as the details of that—we agreed that we’d put together a committee to do that and come up with that ... we are going to insist on a high standards to be—for a climate-friendly, transparent alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative.”

Biden described the B3W: “It’s a values-driven, high-standard, transparent financing mechanism we’re going to provide and support projects in four key areas: climate, health, digital technology, and gender equity. And we believe that will not only be good for the countries, but it’ll be good for the entire world and represent values that our democracies represent, and not autocratic lack of values.” Secretary of State Blinken on CNN this morning from Brussels said that the U.S. will “leverage” private finance for its B3W and take other steps, so it can “do it in a more positive way than China is doing it with its Belt and Road Initiative.”

On ABC News this morning, Blinken repeated: “We have a commitment to work together on something called Build Back Better for the World to work on pooling investments, pooling funds, bringing the private sector in to make investments in health, in infrastructure, in technology for low- and middle-income countries in a way that will produce new markets for our own products and also offer a much more attractive alternative to what China is trying to do in these countries.”

This has to stop. The anti-Malthusian resistance, from Switzerland to Nebraska and other locations, is vital to spread. The Schiller Institute’s dialogue process, both at the formal conferences and ongoing, plays the critical role of cross-firing and communicating ideas for a new paradigm.

There is no time to lose, given the terrible death toll and hardship from the pandemic, famine and economic breakdown. Both the World Health Organization and World Food Program chiefs stressed that in recent days. In Cornwall for the G7, WHO Director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that 70% of the world must be vaccinated by 2022, the time of the next G7 meeting, but, he said, that what was pledged at the G7 meeting this weekend is “insufficient.” WFP Director David Beasley on June 10 issued a special appeal for food aid to Ethiopia, where 350,000 people are in dire need, and overall 4 million people are food insecure. He said it was the most sudden and deep food crisis in a single nation in 10 years.

The Schiller Institute June 26-27 conference is titled, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!”