EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2021

‘Green’ Financial Crisis Sharpens the Threat of War

Dec. 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—In the incoming German government there are two ‘Green’ Party ministers—Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Economics and Energy Minister Robert Habeck—who epitomize a grave threat also emanating from others in governments across the trans-Atlantic nations. With one hand they are anti-carbon climate extremists, who demand sacrifice of the economy—reliable power, heat, livestock growing, farming, industry and all—to “the planet”; with the other, they demand war preparations and diplomatic and military confrontations with Russia and China, two of the major nations that refuse to sacrifice their economies to “the planet.”

At a much higher level than these two new ministers, among the financial oligarchy whose centers are the City of London and Wall Street, there are the likes of British central banker and now UN envoy for Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney, who organizes bankers publicly to order companies—“Get out of fossil fuels and carbon or disappear.” Carney’s close “Green Deal” colleagues and friends are Prince Charles, Sir Michael Bloomberg and like billionaires, for whom President Joe Biden spoke at the “FLOP26” so-called climate summit in Glasgow, when he said that China’s President Xi and Russia’s Putin “would have to answer to the world for not showing up” at that summit. Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, along with the elites of the Atlantic Council, Chatham House/Royal Institute of International Affairs, focus their confrontations and provocations on the claim that Russia’s about to invade Ukraine, and China is about to attack Taiwan. But the more and more obvious failure of the “Green New Deal” and the threat of energy hyperinflation and financial crisis, makes them take blaming adversaries for that failure to its extreme—which may bring on war. As former Army Colonel and former Virginia State Senator Richard Black warned yesterday, either of these confrontations could become nuclear war.

Just at this crisis point, a Nov. 30-dated report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank began to acknowledge that the very strategy associated with banker Carney and Prince Charles—“shifting the trillions” of investment funds out of all carbon-related industries and into a green finance wave, or bubble—is hastening the global banking crisis they are afraid of. The report, “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” found that these disasters are not bad for larger banks at all, to put it mildly. But more seriously for the Carney-Bloomberg “shift the trillions” cabal, the report concluded that “our findings suggest that potential transition risks from climate change warrant more attention than physical disaster risks.”

We emphasize “transition risks” because “the fundamental transition” has become the underhand for Green New Deal among Prince Charles/Carney forces. Here is Charles at Glasgow: “What is needed is a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector. With trillions at its disposal ... it offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.” Now the International Energy Agency, a creation of the Davos World Economic Forum, has upped its already economically absurd “forecast” of global additions to electric power capacity in the next five years, to say that 95% of it will be wind, solar and biomass electricity.

Back in 2018 the London Guardian, writing about then-Bank of England Governor Carney, observed that “climate risk” for many companies was the risk that Carney’s carbon-disclosure bank committees would go after those companies and force them to go green or face disinvestment or bankruptcy. Now, the New York Fed admits “banks could face outsized losses” from the “transition to a low-carbon economy”—in other words, from the Green New Deal. These findings are summed up in a Dec. 2 op-ed by Michael Shellenberger, “The Real Threat to Banks Isn’t from Climate Change: It’s from Bankers,” featuring a photo of Mark Carney beneath the headline.

That is exactly the direction from which a banking crisis and financial crash are now coming. For a decade central banks have been printing money to inflate away the vast “everything bubble” of primarily corporate debt since the 2008 crash. It didn’t work until the addition of the Green New Deal, the drive to “shift the trillions” to unreliable and anti-productive zero-carbon technologies, which are unleashing hyperinflation and chaos.

So the financial elite and political leaders driven by them want to distract with anger, hatred, in some cases even hysteria against the adversaries, Russia and especially China, which continue to push for economic development in underdeveloped countries as well as at home, and which stiffen resistance in the developing world to “climate colonialism.” Now, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, we go to a Putin-Biden videoconference “summit” tomorrow midway between peace and war, “that gives you an idea how close we are actually to a brushfire which could go all the way up to nuclear war.” Insisting on development in the countries which have suffered the worst crimes from the war party—she is focused on Afghanistan—is the way to fight that threat.