EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2021

British Green New Deal: A Powerful, All-Out War Mobilization That’s Failing Disastrously

Nov. 4, 2021 (EIRNS)—It is clear from the remarks of Prince Charles’s central banker Mark Carney, Sir Michael Bloomberg, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the Glasgow “Suicide Summit” called COP26, that they have a) great financial momentum in organizing the worldwide 1% to cut off new fossil fuel investment, and b) a great problem—the “green finance” investments are failures.

New, greenfield investment in fossil fuel energy for power and heat has essentially stopped worldwide, outside of two great Asian national powers. A horrifying 90% of all new electric power capacity additions in the world in 2020-21 were wind and solar power installations, according to the heavily biased International Energy Agency. But this worldwide anti-productivity energy transition, together with its inseparable companion, trillions in money-printing by major central banks, has unleashed disastrous power failures from Texas to Northern Europe to the Asian Subcontinent and even to China, and triggered waves of hyperinflation.

Faced with this failure, the biggest honchos of the global Green New Deal promised a “war-like” mobilization, in Prince Charles’s words. This mobilization, he and Mark Carney made clear, is of the 1%—what they are pleased to call “the private sector” but is really the trans-Atlantic world’s biggest banks, money-managers, and billionaires—to cut off fossil fuel heat and power, nitrogen fertilizer, carbonized steel, cement and construction materials, and industrialization from the billions of the 99%, and greatly reduce their numbers.

The director of the British government/City of London’s Green Finance Institute, Rhian-Mari Thomas, informed Bloomberg, “This is the finance COP”; and the political leaders there are all imploring the “private sector”—i.e., the City of London and Wall Street—to take over. Carney, in his presentation Nov. 3, said that $130 trillion in investment capital has been promised, under certain rules to ensure cut-off of new fossil fuel investments, including by 35 of the 50 biggest banks in the world. Carney signed the banks up to his and Sir Michael’s Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). All the big City of London, Wall Street, and Frankfurt banks have joined GFANZ.

Results? Sure. About 90% of all electric power additions in 2020-21 have been wind parks and solar farms. Disasters, not profits, have followed.

The Prince of Wales’ one-percenters have two problems. The first is that those 35 megabanks in GFANZ do not include any Asian giants, from China, Japan, India, or South Korea; nor, of course, any Russian financial institutions. Like their governments, these banks refuse to commit to Carney. China, in an extraordinary blast in the Global Times CPC paper yesterday, accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of betraying the poor of India by making any kind of zero-carbon pledges at Glasgow. That made it crystal clear where China stands: Economic development and fighting poverty, not “climate,” come first.

And second, the new “green finance” investments look good only on glossy paper. Already on Nov. 2 at Glasgow, Fink said that “deploying that capital is going to be far harder than securing the commitments.” On Nov. 3, Carney acknowledged it. “There needs to be some—only some, limited—financing for a transition,” Carney said—meaning a transition by energy companies from fossil fuels to so-called renewable power sources, battery storage schemes, green farming schemes, etc. “And there have been problems with the transition.” And again today, when Carney claimed in his speech that the pot behind him had $130 trillion in it: “The money is here—but that money needs net zero-aligned projects.”

Carney told Bloomberg News in a Nov. 1 interview that the banks in GFANZ want “a wholesale rewiring of the global financial system so that every financial decision takes climate into account.” Dreams of Schachtian control as in the Nazi economy of the 1930s. That takes the power of central bankers. And Carney has that, in the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System.

What he doesn’t have, is new technologies for “green finance” that are productive, energy-dense, reliable, and which alert populations will tolerate.

And he doesn’t have real banks! Instead he has immense “zombie banks” which are loaded by their central banks with trillions in deposits, speculate with half of them, and don’t lend the other half.

The best way to make the wheels fall off Prince Charles’ and Mark Carney’s $130 trillion green finance mobilization to hurry us to our deaths, is to break up those banks with Glass-Steagall Acts in every major nation.