Who is Afraid of CO2

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Who’s Afraid of CO2?

Week

Atmospheric CO2 promotes plant growth.

WHO’S AFRAID OF CO2?

3 EDITORIAL

Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires or Start of a New Era? by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

I. Conference: ‘For the Common Good of All People’

7 CONFERENCE PROGRAM For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!

II. Panel 2—The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy

10 Introduction: Is Climate Science ‘Settled’? by Jason Ross

12 Why the Universe Needs More People by Megan Dobrodt

17 An Engineer’s Approach to Power and ‘Renewables’ by Dr. Kelvin Kemm

20 The Swiss Vote ‘No’ to the New CO2 Law by Emanuel Höhener

21 The Good News About CO2 by Prof. Augustinus Berkhout

24 Climate Cycles and Global Warming by Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

29 Why the Climate Models Don’t Work by Prof. Nicola Scafetta

34 Greetings to the Schiller Institute Conference by John Shanahan

35 Introduction to Nuclear Medicine by Dr. Bennett S. Greenspan

39 Greetings to the Conference by Florencia Renteria

40 Biden/Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal Fraud: Unsustainable, Unaffordable, Eco-Destructive, Carbon-Colonialist by Paul Driessen

III. Resist the Green New Deal

45 Discussion Session: Panel 2, Schiller Institute Conference

58 Stopping the Swiss-EU Negotiations and Voting Down the CO2 Tax Law by Reinhard Greter

IV. International News

61 Xi Jinping to the ‘Summit of the CPC and World Political Parties’

66 Economics Briefs

68 Africa Report

V. Self-Evident Truths

70 Frederick Douglass: A Constitutionalist Speaks the Fourth of July by Dennis Speed

77 Eulogy for Thomas H. Wysmuller (May 10, 1944 to June 29, 2021) by Rick Sanders

NOTE: EIR skipped the issue that would have been dated July 9. Subscriptions will not be affected.

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EDITORIAL

Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires or Start of a New Era?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

July 10—After the hasty withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan—U.S. troops, except for a few security forces, were flown out in the dark of night without informing Afghan allies—this country has become, for the moment but likely not for long, the theater of world history. The news keeps pouring in: On the ground, the Taliban forces are making rapid territorial gains in the north and northeast of the country, which has already caused considerable tension and concern in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and they have captured the western border town Islam Qala, which handles significant trade flows with Iran. At the same time, intense diplomatic activity is ongoing among all those countries whose security interests are affected by the events in Afghanistan: Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, to name only the most important.

Can an intra-Afghan solution be found? Can a civil war between the Afghan government and the Taliban be prevented? Can terrorist groups, such as ISIS, which is beginning to regain a hold in the north, and Al-Qaeda, be disbanded? Or will the war between Afghan factions continue, and with it the expansion of opium growing and export, and the global threat of Islamic terrorism? Will Afghanistan once again sink into violence and chaos, and become a threat not only to Russia and China, but even to the United States and Europe?

If these questions are to be answered in a positive sense, it is crucial that the United States and Europe first answer the question, with brutal honesty, of how

the war in Afghanistan became such a catastrophic failure, a war waged for a total of 20 years by the United States, the strongest military power in the world, together with military forces from 50 other nations. More than 3,000 soldiers of NATO and allied forces, including 59 German soldiers, and a total of 180,000 people, including 43,000 civilians, lost their lives. This was at a financial cost for the U.S. of more than $2 trillion, and of €47 billion for Germany. Twenty years of horror in which, as is customary in war, all sides were involved in atrocities with destructive effects on their own lives, including the many soldiers who came home with posttraumatic stress disorders and have not been able to cope with life since. The Afghan civilian population, after ten years of war with the Soviets in the 1980s followed by a small break, then had to suffer another 20 years of war with an almost unimaginable series of torments.

It was clear from the start that this war could not be won. Implementation of NATO’s mutual defense clause under Article 5 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was based on the assumption that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime were behind those attacks, which would thus justify the war in Afghanistan.

But as U.S. Senator Bob Graham, the Chairman of the Congressional “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” repeatedly pointed out in 2014, the then-last two U.S. presidents, Bush and Obama, suppressed the truth about who had commissioned 9/11. And it was only because of that sup-

Who’s Afraid of CO₂?

pression that the threat to the world from ISIS then became possible. Graham said at a November 11, 2014 meeting in Florida:

There continue to be some untold stories, some unanswered questions about 9/11. Maybe the most fundamental question is: Was 9/11 carried out by 19 individuals, operating in isolation, who, over a period of 20 months, were able to take the rough outlines of a plan that had been developed by Osama bin Laden, and convert it into a detailed working plan; to then practice that plan; and finally, to execute an extremely complex set of assignments? Let’s think about those 19 people. Very few of them could speak English. Very few of them had even been in the United States before. The two chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, have said that they think it is highly improbable that those 19 people could have done what they did, without some external support during the period that they were living in the United States. I strongly concur…. Where did they get their support?

This question has still not been answered in a satisfactory manner. The passing of the JASTA Act (Justice Against State Sponsors of Terrorism) in the U.S., the disclosure of the 28 previously classified pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry report into 9/11 that were kept secret for so long, and the lawsuit that the families of the 9/11 victims filed against the Saudi government delivered sufficient evidence of the actual financial support for the attacks. But the investigation of all these leads was delayed with bureaucratic means.

The only reason the inconsistencies around 9/11 are mentioned here, is to point to the fact that the entire definition of the enemy in this war was, in fact, wrong from the start. In a white paper on Afghanistan published by the BüSo (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity in Germany) in 2010, we pointed out that a war in which the goal has not been correctly defined, can hardly be won, and we demanded, at the time, the immediate withdrawal of the German Army.

Once the Washington Post published the 2,000page “Afghanistan Papers” in 2019 first under the title “At War with the Truth,” at the latest, this war should have ended. They revealed that this war had been an

absolute disaster from the start, and that all the statements made by the U.S. military about the alleged progress made were deliberate lies. The investigative journalist Craig Whitlock, who published the results of his three years of research, including the use of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and statements from 400 insiders, demonstrated the absolute incompetence with which this war was waged.

Then, there were the stunning statements of Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Afghanistan czar under the Bush and Obama administrations, who in an internal hearing before the “Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction” in 2014 had said:

We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing.… What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking…. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … who would say that it was all in vain?

After these documents were published, nothing happened. The war continued. President Trump attempted to bring the troops home, but his attempt was essentially undermined by the U.S. military. It’s only now, that the priority has shifted to the Indo-Pacific and to the containment of China and the encirclement of Russia that this absolutely pointless war was ended, at least as far as the participation of foreign forces is concerned.

September 11th brought the world not only the Afghanistan War but also the Patriot Act a few weeks later, and with it the pretext for the surveillance state that Edward Snowden has shed light on. The Patriot Act revoked a significant part of the civil rights that were among the most outstanding achievements of the American Revolution, and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it undermined the nature of the United States as a republic.

At the same time, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, which are the essence of international law and of the UN Charter, were replaced by an increasing emphasis on the “rules-based order,” which reflects the interests and the defense of the privileges of the transAtlantic establishment. Tony Blair had already set the tone for such a rejection of the principles of the Peace

of Westphalia and international law two years earlier in his infamous speech in Chicago, which provided the theoretical justification for the “endless wars”—i.e., the interventionist wars carried out under the pretext of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), a new kind of crusade, in which “Western values,” “democracy” and “human rights” are supposed to be transferred—with swords or with drones and bombs—to cultures and nations that come from completely different civilizational traditions.

Therefore, the disastrous failure of the Afghanistan war—after the failure of the previous ones, the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, the Libya war, the Syria war, the Yemen war—must urgently become the turning point for a complete shift in direction from the past 20 years.

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic at the very latest, an outbreak that was absolutely foreseeable and that Lyndon LaRouche had forecast in principle as early as 1973, a fundamental debate should have been launched on the flawed axiomatics of the Western liberal model. The privatization of all aspects of healthcare systems has certainly brought lucrative profits to investors, but the economic damage inflicted, and the number of deaths and long-term health problems have brutally exposed the weak points of these systems.

The strategic turbulence caused by the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, offers an excellent opportunity for a reassessment of the situation, for a correction of political direction and a new solution-oriented policy. The long tradition of geopolitical manipulation of this region, in which Afghanistan represents in a certain sense the interface, from the 19th Century “Great Game” of the British Empire to the “arc of crisis” of Bernard Lewis and Zbigniew Brzezinski, must be buried once and for all, never to be revived. Instead, all the neighbors in the region—Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey—must be integrated into an economic development strategy that represents a common interest among these countries, one that is defined by a higher order, and is more attractive than the continuation of the respective supposed national interests.

This higher level represents the development of a trans-national infrastructure, large-scale industrialization and modern agriculture for the whole of Southwest Asia, as it was presented in 1997 by EIR and the Schil-

ler Institute in special reports and then in the study The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. There is also a comprehensive Russian study from 2014, which Russia intended to present at a summit as a member of the G8, before it was excluded from that group.

In February of this year, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan agreed on the construction of a railway line from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, via Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar in Pakistan. An application for funding from the World Bank was submitted in April. At the same time, the construction of a highway, the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor, between Peshawar, Kabul and Dushanbe was agreed to by Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will serve as a continuation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a showcase project of the Chinese BRI.

These transportation lines must be developed into effective development corridors and an east-west connection between China, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe as well as a north-south infrastructure network from Russia, Kazakhstan and China to Gwadar, Pakistan on the Arabian Sea—all need to be implemented.

All these projects pose considerable engineering challenges—just consider the totally rugged landscape of large parts of Afghanistan—but the shared vision of overcoming poverty and underdevelopment combined with the expertise and cooperation of the best engineers in China, Russia, the U.S.A., and Europe really can “move mountains” in a figurative sense. The combination of the World Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) New Development Bank, New Silk Road Fund, and national lenders could provide the necessary lines of credit.

Such a development perspective, including for agriculture, would also provide an alternative to the massive drug production plaguing this region. At this point, over 80% of global opium production comes from Afghanistan, and about 10% of the local population is currently addicted, while Russia not so long ago defined its biggest national security problem as drug exports from Afghanistan, which as of 2014 was killing 40,000 people per year in Russia. The realization of an alternative to drug cultivation is in the fundamental interest of the entire world.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the risk of further panWho’s Afraid of CO ₂?

demics have dramatically underscored the need to build modern health systems in every single country on Earth, if we are to prevent the most neglected countries from becoming breeding grounds for new mutations, which would defeat all the efforts made so far. The construction of modern hospitals, the training of doctors and nursing staff, and the necessary infrastructural prerequisites are therefore just as much in the interests of all political groups in Afghanistan and of all countries in the region, as of the so-called developed countries. For all these reasons, the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coinci-

dence of opposites. Remaining on the level of the contradictions in the supposed interests of all the nations concerned—India-Pakistan, China-U.S.A., Iran-Saudi Arabia, Turkey-Russia—there are no solutions.

If, on the other hand, one considers the common interests of all—overcoming terrorism and the drug plague, lasting victory over the dangers of pandemics, ending the refugee crises—then the solution is obvious. The most important aspect, however, is the question of the path we as humanity choose—whether we want to plunge further into a dark age, and potentially even risk our existence as a species, or whether we want to shape a truly human century together. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!

I. Conference: ‘For the Common Good of All People’

Schiller Institute International Conference June 26-27, 2021

For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few! PROGRAM

Saturday, June 26

Panel 1 Whom the Gods Would Destroy: War with Russia and China Is Worse than MAD!

Welcoming Remarks

Dennis Speed (moderator), Schiller Institute

Opening Music

Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, Schiller Institute Chamber Singers

Keynote Address: “The Emergency Measures Which Must Be Taken Now!”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President, the Schiller Institute

“Has the Geneva Summit Changed Relations between the U.S. and Russia?”

Dr. Andrey Kortunov (Russian Federation), Director General, Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC)

“Engaging Russia and China as Part of a New World Order—What Can India Bring to the Table?”

Atul Aneja (India), Editor, IndiaNarrative.com

“U.S.-China Relations: A Pathway for War Avoidance and Cooperation”

Col. Richard H. Black (USA ret.) (U.S.), former Virginia State Senator; former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division, the Pentagon

“When One Step Back Is Also One Step Forward: The Coincidence of Opposites”

Ray McGovern (U.S.), Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ret.); co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

DISCUSSION SESSION

Panel 2 The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy

Opening Remarks: Jason Ross (moderator), Science Advisor, Schiller Institute

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Panel 3

“Why the Universe Needs More People”

Megan Dobrodt, President, Schiller Institute USA

“An Engineer ’s Approach to Power and ‘Renewables’”

Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Ph.D. (South Africa), nuclear physicist; former Chairman, South African Nuclear Energy Corporation

“Swiss Vote ‘No’ to New CO2 Law”

Emanuel Höhener (Switzerland), consulting engineer in energy sector; Chairman, Carnot-Cournot Network

“The Good News About CO2”

Prof. Augustinus Berkhout, Ph.D. (Netherlands), Emeritus Professor, Geophysics, the Netherlands; President, the Climate Intelligence Group; Senior Member of the Dutch Academy of Engineering (AcTI)

“Climate Cycles and Global Warming”

Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Ph.D. (Germany), physicist (fluid mechanics); Emeritus Professor, Saarland University for Technology and Economics

“Why The Climate Models Don’t Work”

Prof. Nicola Scafetta, Ph.D. (Italy), Department of Earth, Environmental and Resources Sciences, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

“Greetings to the Conference”

John Shanahan (U.S.), civil engineer; Editor, All About Energy

“Introduction to Nuclear Medicine”

Dr. Ben Greenspan, M.D. (U.S.), Board of Directors, the American Board of Science in Nuclear Medicine; Past President, Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging

“Greetings to Conference”

Florencia de los Ángeles Rentería del Toro (Mexico), Ph.D. student in nuclear science and technology, Harbin Engineering University, China

“The Biden-AOC Green New Deal Fraud: Unsustainable, Unaffordable, Eco-Destructive, Carbon-Colonialist”

Paul Driessen (U.S.), Senior Policy Advisor, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death

DISCUSSION SESSION

Sunday, June 26

Weimar Germany 1923 Comes Again: Global Glass-Steagall To End Hyperinflation

Opening Remarks: Harley Schlanger (moderator), Schiller Institute USA

“Why the Challenge of Public Health, Education and Food Policy Are a One”

Jacques Cheminade (France), President, Solidarité & Progrès, former Presidential candidate, France

“The Central Banks’ Regime Change and the Great Reset”

Paul Gallagher (U.S.), Editorial Board, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)

“Double or Nothing: The LaRouche Program for Mankind’s Durable Survival”

Dennis Small (U.S.), Ibero-American Editor, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

“How Americans Are Herded into ‘Green’ Energy, by Weaponized, Politicized, Monetized Science”

State Senator Mike Thompson (U.S.), Chairman of the Kansas State Senate Utilities Committee

“The State of U.S. Agriculture and Solutions”

Mike Callicrate (U.S.), Kansas cattleman; founder, Ranch Foods Direct; policy advocate; operator of Mike’s “No Bull” blog

“Valuable Lessons on the Financial Crisis from Experiences in Japan”

Daisuke Kotegawa (Japan), former official, Ministry of Finance, Japan; former Director for Japan, International Monetary Fund (IMF)

“Hyperinflation: A Step of the Great Reset to Destroy Our Freedoms”

Marc Gabriel Draghi (France), economist, jurist, author

“COVID and Economic Austerity Are Devastating Colombia”

Pedro Rubio (Colombia), President, Association of Officials of the General Accounting Office of the Republic

DISCUSSION SESSION

Panel 4 The Coincidence of Opposites: The Only Truly Human Thought Process

Opening Remarks: Dennis Speed (moderator), the Schiller Institute

“The Common Good of All People Requires a Global Modern Health Care System”

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, M.D. (U.S.), 15th Surgeon General of the United States, and Dr. David Satcher, M.D. (U.S.), 16th Surgeon General of the United States; former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health; former Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

“Beyond Multipolarity: The One Humanity”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President, the Schiller Institute

“The Russian Perspective on the Global Sustainable and Sustained Recovery”

Boris Meshchanov (Russia), Counselor, Russian Federation Mission to the United Nations (New York)

“National Defense Against Germ Warfare—the Military and Healthcare” Maj. Gen. Peter Clegg (USA ret.) and Rear Adm. Marc Y.E. Pelaez (USN ret.)

DISCUSSION SESSION

“Mozambique Pilot Aid Shipment—Action Diplomacy for World Health Security”

Dr. Khadijah Lang, M.D. (U.S.), Chairman, National Medical Association (NMA) Council on International Affairs; President, Golden State Medical Association, and Marcia Merry Baker (U.S.), Editorial Board, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)

DISCUSSION SESSION

“Greeting to Conference”

David Castro (Honduras), Mayor of Cedros; President of the Association of Mayors of Honduras

“E Pluribus Unum: What We Can Learn from Beethoven”

Diane Sare (U.S.), Candidate for United States Senate; founder, Schiller Institute New York City Comunity Chorus

Readings of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Swiss Rütli Oath

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

II. Panel 2 The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy

Jason Ross

Introduction: Is Climate Science ‘Settled’?

The second panel of the Schiller Institute’s two-day conference in June heard presentations from 11 scientists, professionals and elected officials engaged in debunking climate science hysteria among their colleagues. The panel was moderated by Jason Ross of the Schiller Institute; here are his opening remarks.

Hello, welcome to Panel 2 of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” My name is Jason Ross, I’m a science advisor to the Schiller Institute and I will be moderating this second panel, the “Real Science of Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy.”

The development of electricity transformed the types of resources that were available to us, our relationship to those resources, the kinds of production that we were capable of engaging in, moving beyond motion towards new types, electron-beam welding, lasers, and so on.

In Panel 1, published in the July 2 issue of EIR, we discussed how economic development is limited in its potential by the basic infrastructure that is able to support the productivity of the economy. In Lyndon LaRouche’s view, infrastructure platforms transform the space in which productivity occurs, enabling higher forms of production, and transforming space itself through transportation networks.

The most central component of an infrastructure platform today, is without a doubt, energy, power. It was the steam engine’s liberation of the chemical energy in coal, transforming it into motion, that unleashed the industrialization of the world, a new era for mankind in economy overall, something that led to the expansion of life expectancies by a couple dozen years—very, very impressive, extremely powerful, absolutely essential in economic history and in mankind’s history.

The power of the atomic nucleus is still not fully developed, not by any means! But it shows us the potential to have power levels that are many orders of magnitude greater than what is achievable through chemically based electricity or wind or solar panels or that sort of thing—potentially transforming through nuclear fusion, in a very powerful way, our relationship to the world around us, in a way that would be comparable only to the development of the steam engine, in its scope and in its potential.

LaRouche: More People, More Productivity Necessary

But it is power itself that is in the crosshairs of what was discussed in Panel 1 as the MICIMATT [MilitaryIndustrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex]—as the British financial empire-oriented financial intelligence apparatus—where we are told that the planet is imperiled by the scourge of climate change, brought about by man’s wicked and unchecked use of fossil fuels, churning enormous amounts (we’re told) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that these fossil fuels, which were absolutely essential for expanding the life of human beings by decades, must be phased out, essentially, immediately. And if you don’t agree, well, “How dare you!”

Schiller Institute

Jason Ross

Afraid of CO ₂?

We’re told that the Science, with a capital S, is “settled,” that there’s no room for debate on this issue. And even if we don’t understand it, we better obey its strictures.

That’s not how science works. It’s process, it’s development, it’s a discovery. So, on this panel, what we’re going to be getting into is the coherence between our economic growth, and the development of the biosphere as a whole, the enormous amounts of power that the world requires, and the gaping holes of the supposed science of climate change catastrophism.

Let’s start with a short quotation from Lyndon LaRouche about what the goal of society is. This is from a speech he made in 2012, “No to the Green Policy; Revive Our Credit System”:

So the point is, we need every human being. We need them to live longer and better. We need them to become more creative. We need to have their children better educated, and developed. We need an increase of the potential productivity of the human force, per capita and per square kilometer; and those are the missions that we must fulfill.

There are many things we don’t know yet, but these things we do know: The increase of productivity of labor per capita, with an increasing population, is the absolute necessity, which has to be coupled with the fact that mankind is no longer going to be content to sit on Earth and gossip about the neighbors.

At this point, mankind is going to take an active role in taking over the Mars orbit. We are going to be inhabiting it with all kinds of instruments and so forth that we put there. We’re going to learn how to control these asteroids that threaten us. We have a very poor track on it right now. We’re going to learn how to use planets as communications devices in this process.

These are the things that we must do. And

every step we take in this matter increases the productive powers of labor, makes people smarter, makes them more capable, gives them greater incentive, makes them happier. And that’s what we must do.

And all these solutions—which are not solutions, they’re actually threats. The Green problem is not a solution to anything. It’s a

threat to humanity! Green people are a threat to humanity.

So to have the power to do all of these things, we’re going to have to do a lot of work, and we have a powerful lineup of speakers who will be addressing this today: addressing economy, addressing carbon dioxide, climate change, nuclear power, nuclear medicine, and the enormous costs and negative returns of efforts to decarbonize without nuclear power.

A video recording of Panel 2 is available here

There is a coherence between our economic growth and the development of the biosphere. “We need an increase of the potential productivity of the human force, per capita, and per square kilometer” —Lyndon LaRouche, 2012.

Megan Dobrodt

Why the Universe Needs More People

Megan Dobrodt is the President of the U.S. Schiller Institute. She worked directly with Lyndon LaRouche on scientific and economics research projects. This is an edited transcript of her keynote presentation to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy,” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Subheads have been added.

That the world, the universe needs more people for their continued existence, is an idea that was first posed to me by Lyndon LaRouche. It is not an opinion, but a conclusion derived from the rigorous study of the history of our planet, and of the science of physical economy. However, not everyone agrees with that statement. Perhaps you’ve heard this:

Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed.…We have no option.

—Prince Philip, 1981

Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too many pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide— all can be traced easily to too many people.

—Paul Ehrlich, 1968

ance.” Instead, we see a process of anti-entropic change, of intensifying transformation of the natural world which created the conditions for the appearance of cognitive life, and actually demands more people for that continuation.

To get an insight into this, we’ll look briefly at the work of, first, Vladimir Vernadsky, and then, Lyndon LaRouche.

First, take most people’s fallacies today about “nature,” the “natural world,” to which human activity is supposedly opposed. One of the big lines today that you may have heard, is that we are destroying biodiversity, and we are driving species out of existence 1,000 times faster than what is considered “natural.”

Vernadsky: The Unceasing Motion of Matter in the Biosphere

Let’s use the discoveries of Vernadsky to correct that view, starting with what a species of life is. There is no such thing as a living thing, apart from the biosphere, that

We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.

—Sir David Attenborough,

2013

The good news is that the history of our universe and of the biosphere itself, shows the opposite. There is no “stasis” that we are disrupting. There is no “Earth in the bal-

is, outside of the material and energetic environment in which it lives. You take a living thing out of the biosphere, and it dies. This interconnection is seen in the fact that the body of a living organism, from the tiniest microorganism to the largest plants and animals, is not made up of the same material as it was last year, last month, or even yesterday. A living body is in an unceasing process

Schiller Institute

Megan Dobrodt

USSR Academy of Sciences, 1934

NSIPS/Stuart Lewis

of motion—exchanging material with the surrounding environment through its nutrition and respiration. Even you: Roughly 98% of the atoms in your body will have been replaced with new ones within the next year.

This led the naturalist Georges Cuvier to call a living organism an “incessant current,” a whirlpool of atoms which come from the exterior and return there.

So, with that idea, we have a new view of living species—not as a collection of things, objects, with fur and feet, and wings, but as something akin to a living mineral. If we take the totality of all individuals of a particular species across the globe, Vernadsky found that that species can be characterized by a mean mass, but more interestingly, a very precise distribution of the chemical elements and isotopes which make up its body, a distribution which is particular to that species of life, like a chemical fingerprint or signature.

These “living minerals,” as long as they are in the process of exchanging material with the surrounding environment, they leave behind them—both in their waste products and also in their bodies when they die— they leave behind them a geochemically changed, transformed environment.

My favorite example to offer here, is the Great Oxygenation Event, which occurred somewhere between 2 and 2.4 billion years ago, which was shortly after the biosphere developed a new technology called photosynthesis. At this time, these little microorganisms, cyanobacteria, began pumping out enormous quantities of oxygen into the environment, which was toxic to most life on the planet. This resulted in a mass extinction event in which an estimated 99% of all life on Earth died!

But then, what emerged? Well, what survived, mainly, were the life forms that were able to metabolize oxygen. This revolutionized the “free energy” that was available to living matter. It allowed, eventually, the development of mitochondria and multicellular life. At the same time, the geology of the planet itself was dramatically impacted. New kinds of minerals began to appear, ones which could form in the presence of oxygen, including the banded iron formations.

Life Transforms the Earth’s Geochemistry

So, living matter has radically transformed the geochemical makeup of Earth, disrupting the non-living nature, the “stasis” around it. Because of this—this work, this activity performed by life—Vernadsky called living organisms “the bearer for, and creator of, free energy” in the biosphere.

Vernadsky’s decades of work led him to two very

important conclusions: 1) that the action of living matter to reorganize the non-living material of the environment had gone on since the first appearance of life on Earth and had never ceased; and 2) the rate at which that had been happening has increased over time. Life had sped up its process of changing nature. This was something Vernadsky noted, which had been accomplished through the changeover of the ensemble of species that had existed on the planet, at any given time. In other words, this had occurred through a process of extinction and evolution.

Let’s look briefly at one indication of that. Figure 1 shows biodiversity over time. The top one is for tetrapod animals, and the bottom one is for plants. The vertical line in the middle of both charts, indicates the time of the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction, about 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out. Before that time, the dominant classes of organisms were those with lower metabolic intensity—reptiles, in the case of animals, and gymnosperms, in the case of plants. Following the extinction event, those classes (on the left) decline, and a set of higher-energy organisms—the mammals and the angiosperms, emerge and take over.

A Direction to Evolution

Vernadsky concluded from evidence like this, that there is a definite direction to evolution, which is that of increasing the intensity of what he called “biogenic mi-

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FIGURE

Courtesy of Megan Dobrodt

The K-T extinction event brought forth the dominance of organisms of higher metabolic intensity over organisms of lower metabolic intensity.

gration of atoms.” In other words, the intensity of the transformation of Earth by the action of living matter. He said this moves, over evolutionary time, towards its maximum manifestation, so much so that were an organism to have evolved randomly, it would only survive if it could keep up with and contribute to furthering of the intensity of the biosphere.

So much for “pristine nature,” so much for “Earth in balance”—nature is constantly changing, and it’s changing in such a way that it’s becoming more capable of future change. In this way, the biosphere, living matter, has acted to improve the Earth, to maximize the work done. It concentrated materials into forms that are more usable, and of a higher power than they could ever have been, outside of the action of life. That is natural!

But, there is a limit to the biosphere. Evolution has allowed living organisms to penetrate deep into the crust of the Earth, and high into the edges of the troposphere. But biological technology has been stymied at the edge of space, where the environment of the biosphere ends. However, over the course of the past few million years, the biosphere has developed to a point at which the emergence of a different kind of living form was possible, a living form not limited in the same way. And that is cognitive life.

With humanity, we see for the first time the evolution of a species, not via its biology. And Vernadsky makes a point to note that the biological and neurological infrastructure of the human organism has not changed appreciably over the past ten thousand years. And yet, look how much our species has changed. Through the evolution of our mind, a type of biogenic migration of atoms, a type of exchange and reshaping of the Earth’s chemistry has emerged as a significant factor, and that is the biogenic migration caused by technology—due to the organized labor, social work of a species.

Let me give a couple of quick examples.

One of the most significant in our history is agriculture, which began around 10,000 years ago, when human beings began to select, cultivate, concentrate, and change plant and animal life to better meet their needs. This new reliability and also improvement of the sources of food, and also of work (in the case of livestock), opened up the possibility of larger populations, permanent settlement, urban culture—and it also

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led to an increase in the productivity of various plant and animal species, which they could not have achieved without us.

Another example is the application of fire to metallurgy—the extraction of metals from rock and the shaping of them into tools. Throughout human history, we have created new things, which could not, and would not, have existed otherwise on the surface of the Earth. We’ve turned electricity into motion; we’ve enriched uranium; we’ve superheated and contained plasmas. We’ve applied the powers of these things in new ways, thus enlarging the natural world.

This unique capability of man, has allowed us to overcome previous limits on our population. And Vernadsky noted, in the 1930s, the upper limit of the human population, he said, was probably around 3 trillion. He added that with the knowledge of the atomic nucleus then coming into technological practice, it would likely become many times higher.

So, with the application of reason in the form of technologies, over the past 100 years, the noösphere, the domain of human activity, has begun to overtake the biosphere in its intensity, just as the biosphere surpassed the rate of activity of the non-living.

And so, our little planet’s development was aimed toward, and is now being cultivated to reflect the dominance of the power of reason.

So we have, even with this small glimpse, the fact that nature is run by a creative principle. Everything participates in it, including the processes of the biosphere, which do so by instinct. Human beings participate in it consciously

Lyndon LaRouche: A Creative Principle Consciously

And it’s here that we turn to the physical economic discoveries of Lyndon LaRouche, which stand firmly

CC/CIMMYT/Thomas Lumpkin

Wikimedia Commons

CC BY 2.5/John Doebley Who’s

upon the fact that human life embodies a higher principle of existence than that of mere animals.

In his 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth, LaRouche writes:

Man is fundamentally different from the beasts. Man is not merely a creature of instinctive potentialities, a mere creature of animal-like perceptions of pleasure and pain. Man is somehow very different. Man has the potential of Reason, the power to make creative discoveries which advance his scientific knowledge, and to convert such scientific advances into advances in technology. We are able to uncover, with increasing perfection, the lawful, universal principles which order universal creation, and to master nature with increasing power, through guiding ourselves to change our ways of behavior in accordance with universal laws.

As Lyndon LaRouche said many times, no animal has ever made a discovery of principle. Only human beings have. This is part of the goodness of mankind. Our minds are able to “see,” so to speak—by the generation of a creative hypothesis within the bounds of our own thought processes, we “see” principles of the universe: universal gravitation, electromagnetism, the powers of the atomic nucleus. These things could never have been seen or perceived with the animal senses.

When we wield these ideas, these principles as ideas embodied in technology, we are rewarded with new and efficient power to change the universe. There is the secret to economy. In a 2005 writing, “Man’s Original Creations,” LaRouche says:

A foolish economist measures the performance of an economy in the financial, or monetary, or, much less foolishly, the physical wealth enjoyed by either some, or all of the members of that society. The competent economist measures the wealth of the economy in the degree of selfimprovement of the quality of the members of society as human. Making the same point more bluntly, it were said that the economic mission of society is to make the nation’s people better than they are today. This is to be done through means employing the process of developing the people to higher levels of power in and over nature per capita. Or, we might better say, “The greatest wealth which the generation of the deceased has bequeathed to its heirs, is a society of a better quality of living people.”

Transcending the Boundary of Space

So, what is the primary input to a physical economic cycle? People—the labor and supporting technologies of society. And what is the primary output? People! But a better quality of people. More people, living longer lives, better situated to make the next discoveries and contributions to humanity. This is a self-perpetuating process. The universe indicates its “approval” of that process by allowing us, and in a sense, requiring us, to do more of it.

Based on this principle, Lyndon LaRouche developed a measure of physical economic progress that he called “potential relative population-density.” How many people could be supported on a given land area, were the available technologies and technological improvements applied to that land and to the population’s labor? In a healthy economy, there is an increasing rate of increase of this metric.

So, back to the biosphere, which is stymied at the

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Malachite ore, when reduced by fire, produces copper, which can then be formed into objects of usefulness or beauty, such as the Viking ring shown here.

CC/Robert M. Lavinsky

CC/Morgan Riley

CC/Arlin Finney Nybø

edge of space. We are the only species that has the capability of transcending that boundary, and extending the biosphere to other planetary bodies. When we do that, we will bring the same anti-entropic process of development that our planet has had the privilege to undergo, deeper and deeper into the solar system, and eventually, to other star systems. Without us, life cannot do that, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the universe created us.

So, I want to leave you with two thoughts. First, the idea suggested here by LaRouche, of humanity’s potential for limitless, unending progress. He wrote in 2013:

Mankind’s physical capabilities, are, in and of themselves, limited; the bounds of the human mind’s power to imagine effectively from within the developing processes of not the human “brain,” but, contrary to popular opin-

ions, the human mind have no presently adducible bounds.

Second, the fact that unlike the biotic domain, which responds to its creative assignment automatically, by instinct, humanity must choose to do the good. For Gottfried Leibniz, the fact that this had to be a free-will choice, is what made it good.

Today, I ask you to imagine the goodness that would come to the billions of currently living human beings, and the trillions waiting to be born, if we were to root out, forever, from human culture, the scourge of Malthusianism. Can we as humanity finally grow up and bring our behavior in line with our actual species characteristic? What great good will come, when nations finally wield Lyndon LaRouche’s discoveries of the principles of physical economy as conscious policy, to shape the next 100, 1,000 years?

Thank you.

LYNDON LAROUCHE Collected Works, Volume I

This first volume of the Lyndon LaRouche Collected Works contains four of LaRouche’s most important and influential works on the subject of physical economy:

• So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics?

• There Are No Limits to Growth

• The Science of Christian Economy

• The Dialogue of Eurasian Civilizations: Earth’s Next Fifty Years

So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? was first published in 1984 and has become the single most translated of LaRouche’s books.

There Are No Limits to Growth first appeared in 1983 as a direct response to the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, thoroughly refuting the latter’s unscientific Malthusian argument, which underlies the “green” environmentalist movement today.

The Science of Christian Economy (1991) is a groundbreaking study written by Mr. LaRouche during the five-year period he was unjustly incarcerated as a political prisoner in significant measure for the arguments he sets forth in this book.

* At this time we are only able to ship to locations in the United States via our online store. Please contact us directly for inquiries about international orders: info@larouchelegacyfoundation.org

The Dialogue of Eurasian Civilizations: Earth’s Next Fifty Years (2004) follows in the footsteps of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa to establish the scientific, cultural, and theological basis for a true dialogue of civilizations, in order to successfully address the existential crises facing humanity today. $50 Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Dr. Kelvin Kemm

An Engineer’s Approach to Power and ‘Renewables’

Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Ph.D. is a nuclear physicist and former Chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA). He is currently the Director and CEO of Stratek Business Strategy Consultants. This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Subheads have been added.

Twenty years ago, the world did not seem to have any energy problem. We didn’t hear about all the snags we seem to hear about today. In fact, if we look back, we will find that currently the world is using double the amount of electricity it was using about 25 years ago. Twenty-five years, and electricity has doubled.

Now there seem to be all sorts of problems. Why is that? Is this because the scientists and engineers are not doing a good job? Why is it? Is it the case, that somebody else is involved? Henry Ford, further back than 25 years of course, was building cars, and he had a factory going. He didn’t seem to have an energy problem. When NASA was launching spacecraft into space to the Moon, we didn’t hear all the time about “there’s not going to be enough electricity to drive the economy.”

Politics Interfering with Science

We haven’t had this problem until now. So, what is going on? It appears to be that politics is interfering with the decisions that scientists and engineers would be making.

Let us imagine another topic for a moment.

Let’s take open heart surgery. Imagine now, if there was this type of involvement. Imagine if we had a G7 agenda item, deciding on open heart surgery, and the leaders of G7 are deciding how should surgeons remove hearts? How should surgeons cut arteries? Imagine if there was the equivalent of a COP26, everybody voting

on heart surgery techniques. Surely, you’d find people saying, “Wait a minute, why don’t you leave heart surgery to the cardiac surgeons, who know what they’re doing? Tell them to do a good job, and then judge them afterwards.”

Why aren’t we telling the power engineers and scientists “Provide the electricity, and we will judge you.” No, that’s not happening. There seem to be energy problems all over the place, because there’s political intrusion! Now why is there political intrusion like this?

It’s because decisions are being made on the basis of an argument that there is some climate issue involved. So, therefore there’s something else. So, you’re not saying to the scientists and engineers, “Fellows, go ahead and produce electricity in the most reliable way, at the best possible price.” That’s not happening. They’re being told: “You have to produce energy using wind turbines. You’ve got to produce it using solar power.”

But then you only get the Sun in the daytime. And what’s more, you only get the Sun in the daytime, optimally, over a couple of hours straddling lunchtime. You only get less than 50% of the solar before morning tea break and after afternoon tea break. So even during the daytime, you don’t get it all. So now what do you do at night if you’ve got a large solar investment? What do you do with wind power when the wind is not blowing?

Ah, then you come up with other solutions. You say, “Well, how about batteries? Why don’t we come along and put in hydrogen systems? Why don’t we come along and put in this “smart switching?” So, you have massive computerization, switching on and off, on and off, this turbine in, that turbine field out—this in, that out, and so on. All of the batteries, the hydrogen, the smart switching, smart grid, all this type of thing, is coming about now to fix the system, because the solar and the wind does not give adequate power.

I must emphasize, I’m not in the slightest bit antisolar and wind as technologies. If you have a use for solar, like running a woodworking factory or something where you only need to use your large machines over

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Schiller Institute

Dr. Kelvin Kemm

lunch time, and in the early morning, you’re doing your drawings and your layouts, and in the afternoon, you’re gluing and forming, and you can design a consumption that goes up at lunchtime, and down after, that’s fine. Similarly, with wind: If you want to use wind to pump water, up into water tanks and things like that, I’m not opposed to them philosophically.

But when people tell you, you can run large electric trains across the country based on solar and wind, then I say, “Wait a minute, I’m not so happy about it.”

So, what has happened? We’ve had this idea coming along, that we have to “save the planet” and “save the planet” means “from carbon dioxide.” So, the carbon dioxide issue, now, is being determined by politicians. Supposedly, the CO2 is warming the planet. And everybody seems to believe this, or very many people seem to believe it, because they read it in populist magazines, and Leonardo DiCaprio and people like that tell you that that’s what he’s fighting for as well, and so do other film stars.

Two Parameters of Electricity Production: Quantity and Availability

But is this true? So we have to say, “Why is it that we are seeing this proliferation of wind systems, solar systems, and then batteries, and then hydrogen now, and switching and computer controls, and all sorts of things now?” All to try and take a power supply that inherently looks like a range of mountains—trying to make it flat, so that it looks like the open plains. Because ideally, you want a flat energy source that you can rely on all of the time, 24 hours a day reliably—not something that may or may not be available.

I must say at this point, point out that electricity is sold in two different manners: One is the amount that you buy—that is measured in kilowatt-hours, in the case of big systems—megawatt-hours. But the other one is kilowatts, and that is how much is available, right now when you switch on. That’s the service element.

If you ever see somebody say, “Oh, there’s this new solar plant, it’ll produce so many megawatt-hours per annum.” It sounds impressive. And they say, “which will supply 20,000 houses” or something. They don’t say to you only at lunchtime, when you don’t need the lights. This is a completely false type of impression. You need to know how many kilowatt-hours can you get out of a system, but also how many kilowatts are available, when you want to turn the switch on. If you get up at midnight and you flip the switch, you expect a

service; and the service, the power must be there, now

Electricity is not just the megawatt-hours’ quantity, like buying milk. If somebody says you buy 30 liters of milk in a month—here in Africa where I am, we buy our milk in liters; you fellows no doubt, buy pints over there in the U.S. But if somebody says, do you want 30 liters of milk per month, you say, “Great,” on the assumption that that means a liter every day, not 10 liters on the fourth of the month, nothing for the next four days, five liters after that, nothing, then two liters, and so on. That is no good getting milk delivered that way. It’s no good getting electricity delivered that way.

So, what is going on? This is supposedly to save CO2 by cutting back on fossil fuel production, through coal, for example. Gas is not in the same bracket, but it’s also a fossil fuel that produces other things, so it’s an interim measure. But they want to act against the supposed problem of carbon dioxide.

Psychological Tricks of Climate Doomsayers

Now, say to yourself, you flip a coin 50 times. How many times do you expect it to be heads, and how many times do you expect it to be tails? The answer is, it’ll come out 25 heads and 25 tails, if you do it long enough.

Why is it that somebody tells you, “We’re getting global warming, and then all the results are going to be bad.” In other words, you’re going to get 50 heads in a row. We hear, “Oh, it’s going to be dryer in the dry areas. Oh, it’s going to be wetter in the wet areas. There’s going to be floods in the wet areas. All the animals will die in the dry areas. This is going to get worse; that is going to get worse.” It’s like flipping 25 heads in a row.

Why don’t we hear that if there’s global warming, it means the dry areas will get some rain and the wet areas will get less rain, therefore, there’ll be less floods; and overall, there’ll be crops growing in places that couldn’t grow crops before? That’s the first clue to tell you that the people that keep punting this, might not be right.

Let me make it quite clear: There is global warming taking place. There’s been about 1° Celsius warming in the last 150 years, which is since the time that Abraham Lincoln was President in the United States, about the same time as Queen Victoria was Queen in England, about the same time as the Crimean War. The industrial revolution starting in Europe also happened to start round about that period of time. So why is it, that every Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

time we hear that there’s been some global warming in the last 150 years, the phrase is used “since the Industrial Age.” The implication is it’s because of the Industrial Age. They don’t say it’s because of Abraham Lincoln, or because of the Crimean War. So why do that? It’s a psychological trick to imply that the Industrial Age has something to do with it.

It’s not necessarily true at all. Yes, since the Industrial Age, there has been some extra carbon dioxide. But if you look at the amount of carbon dioxide that is being produced, you will find that a while ago, the concentration in the atmosphere was 0.03% of the total atmosphere. That’s very, very little CO2. Now, it has risen to 0.04%, a minute increase.

Is that causing global warming? I have my doubts. I really don’t think so. In fact, if you look back at history, the temperature of the planet, you’ll find that around the 1300-1400s there was a period, the “Medieval Warm Period,” where grapes were grown in England. There were crops grown in Europe that can’t grow now. The temperatures appear to have been warmer then, than they are now. After that the world plunged down into what is known in Europe as the “Little Ice Age.” It went

very cold. In fact, the Thames froze over to such a degree, that they were able to have ice fairs on the Thames, and they could ride up and down the river in horse-drawn carriages. You can’t do that today.

This really is something that we need to think about. It’s affecting society—people that have got small businesses, people that are running farms, people that are doing all sorts of things. They are part of the electricity system, in that electricity is the lifeblood of any country: Like a human being, if your blood stops flowing, you stop working. If the electricity stops flowing, the country will stop working. It’s not something that you can allow the Greta Thunbergs of this world to go around, waving banners and so on, when African children are having to dig the cobalt out of the ground by hand to build the batteries that some want, because they want a power source that is seen to be politically palatable for them.

We really have to think a lot more. The so-called science is not settled, the way some of the politicians, like Al Gore and others like to stand up and say, in this superior type of manner. It’s not. There’s much more to this, than meets the eye.

New EIR Offprint Special Report Now Available

The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Exposes

the Green New Deal

Executive Intelligence Review has released this Special Report to warn of the extreme danger to mankind represented by the Green New Deal, also called “The Great Reset” by the leaders of the Davos World Economic Forum.

Already being implemented, this plan is taking over the direction of national economies from sovereign governments, using the power of central banks and the too-big-to-fail private financial institutions, cutting off credit to fossil fuel power generation and to industrial and agricultural enterprises claimed to emit too much carbon. Meanwhile it is creating a new huge bubble in the “sustainable fuel” sector, hoping to prop up the increasingly bankrupt financial system.

Stopping it by returning to a Hamiltonian American System credit policy, requires an understanding which is the purpose of this report.

The Great Leap Backward LaRouche Exposes The Green New Deal

EIR subscribers who have received this Special Report as their 68-page Feb. 12 issue: Get an Offprint edition for someone you know who should have it!

Special Report is available in soft cover printed copy for $30 plus shipping, or as a PDF for $20 (requires e-mail address). https://store.larouchepub.com/product-p/eirsp-2021-1-0-0.htm

EI R Special Report

Emanuel Höhener

The Swiss Vote ‘No’ to the New CO2 Law

Emanuel Höhener is a mechanical and marine engineer, and energy consultant. He is currently the President of the Carnot-Cournot Network. This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered via pre-recorded video to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefitting the Few.” Subheads have been added.

Emanuel Höhener

In a poll on the weekend of June 13, 2021, the Swiss population had to decide upon three proposals. All of them were in connection with environmental issues and all of them were rejected.

The Political Instruments of Switzerland

For your understanding of some of the political instruments of Switzerland, the following:

Switzerland, at the federal level, has the democratic instruments “referendum” and the “right of initiative.” A “referendum” gives the option to voters to reconsider and decide upon a bill, which has already passed the federal parliament, which consists of two chambers. A referendum can be imposed within a given time period by the demand of a minimum of 50,000 voters.

Furthermore, for changes of Constitutional acts as well as international agreements, a vote by referendum is mandatory.

A further political instrument is the “right of initiative.” Interested parties and circles can submit an initiative for changes in legislation if within a given time period, signatures of 100,000 voters are submitted.

Environmental Concerns and the

‘No’

Vote of June 13

The June 13th poll also received particular interest from abroad. One of the subjects to be decided upon was a most stringent new CO2 legislation, upon which

the parliament had already decided. The referendum reached [approval with] a majority of voters and cantons, which means that this new CO2 legislation was rejected.

The content of the CO2 bill was developed and governed mainly by the Leftish-Green interests and their ideology. Quickly, it would have led to cost driving measures: increase of fuel prices for vehicles, increase of fuel prices for heating purposes, taxes on flight tickets, constraints on houseowners to refurbish their properties with regard to insulations and heating technique, mainly because use of fossil fuels would no longer be allowed. As a result, rental costs would have increased drastically in a country where renting property is prevalent. With this proposed legislation, the goal was to get Switzerland 100% CO2 free by 2050, which means prohibiting the use of fossil fuels.

An interpretation of the result of the poll [to mean] that the Swiss people do not care about environmental issues, would be entirely wrong. In Switzerland, we have stringent standards concerning heat insulation for houses, operational quality of home heating, and for vehicles—including emission standards amongst others, and also standards concerning CO2. Quality standards, which are regularly checked at frequent intervals, have been in place for years.

Thus, one of the main reasons why the CO2 legislation under discussion was turned down: People lost confidence and were convinced that it would not improve anything with regard to the climate; however [it would] increase the cost of living and create an additional—useless—government administrative body.

And also important to note: The younger generation mostly rejected the CO2 legislation. The slogan of the promotors was: “We are rescuing the climate!” The absurdity of this claim, under the preconditions that Switzerland imposes such ruling, isolated and alone, may be illustrated by the following considerations. The contribution of Switzerland to the global CO2 emissions is about 0.13%. Assuming Switzerland were to reduce its

Schiller Institute

CO2 emissions from 2020 to 2050 on a linear scale to zero, the accumulated emissions [reduced] over the period of 30 years (10,950 days) would be around 770 million tons. The three dominating CO2 polluters: China, the USA, and India produce this amount of CO2 within 16 days!

A convincing policy to reduce CO2 emissions can only work under a binding international agreement, which will have to be different from the loose Paris treaty. The scientific field of climate is anything but in agreement about the triggering factors with regard to climate change. It may be that CO2 is one of them, but definitely not the only one. A possible other factor of importance is that mankind may need to learn and get used to a more careful handling of the limited resources of oil, gas and coal.

The Consequences of ‘Net Zero’

A further question needs to be raised with regard to what the claim of net zero CO2 could mean. According to the current valid energy policy in Switzerland, all of the five nuclear power plants must be taken out of operation by 2035. The missing power production is to be substituted by means of photovoltaic (PV) technology. Unfortunately, the need for construction material rises with the decrease of power concentration. Consequently, the accountable energy input for the construction of photovoltaic plants and the subsystems needed increases drastically and thus the accountable CO2

emissions as well. “Gray Energy” is the term used. According to my calculations, the substitution of photovoltaic for nuclear production, including the [then-required] mandatory sub-systems, as for instance hydro storage, means the yearly accountable CO2 emissions will increase by 8.7 million tons, which means about 20% of the current Swiss CO2 emissions.

This leads to the question, “By what means could the use of energy from fossil fuels realistically be replaced?” As said, not only in Switzerland, the prime option of current policy is photovoltaic. If Switzerland would go for 100% decarbonization—meaning to discontinue the use of fossil fuels—one would need to invest in about 220 GW of nominal photovoltaic power—about 20 times the current electric power generation capacity installed. This figure includes also the replacement of current nuclear power plants as well as to compensate for the power losses in the tremendous hydro-storage capacity needed. It would be difficult to place this capacity in Switzerland which is already “saturated” with hydro plants.

Furthermore, time is getting short to implement all this by 2050. Consequently, there is only one realistic solution to ensure a cost-efficient power supply system in the future: Nuclear power installations, according to latest state of the art.

It will be a task for all of us, to guide European energy politics back to a reasonable track. Thank you for listening.

Prof. Augustinus Berkhout

The Good News About CO2

Professor Augustinus “Guus” Berkhout is President of the Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL), and a Senior Member of the Dutch Academy of Engineering (AcTI). This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People,

Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Subheads have been added.

My name is Guus Berkhout. I am Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at the Technical University of Delft. I’m one of the co-founders of the international CLINTEL (Climate Intelligence) Group, now consisting of almost 1,000 scientists. CLINTEL has recently written a letter to EU Vice President Frans Timmermans about the many

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Schiller Institute

Prof. Augustinus Berkhout

incorrect assumptions and conclusions in European climate policy. CLINTEL received the following response:

We are already seeing the effects of climate change across Europe. Prolonged droughts and declining harvests, extreme heat waves, increasing diseases among livestock and crops. 400,000 deaths a year from air pollution, and more.

What an embarrassing answer! Why scam people with lies and deceit? Hard facts demonstrate that the real world is entirely different.

FIGURE 1

Global Death Risk from Climate and Non-Climate Catastrophes, 1920-2018

Let me show you the first factual graph, Figure 1, “Global Death Risk from Climate and non-Climate Catastrophes, 1920-2018.” You see a spectacular drop in the number of victims due to weather extremes such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, forest fires, etc. A century ago, when there were only two billion people, weather disasters killed an average of about 500,000 people a year. Last year, despite an increase in the world’s population to 7.6 billion, that number has dropped to an estimated 8,200 victims.

Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, Catholic University of Louvain

This happened at a time when CO2 emissions were rising faster than ever, despite the 25 international climate conferences to try to reduce them! Does it not show the absurdity of this climate circus?

So, a decrease of over 98%, and measured per million people, as much as 99%. This is impressive. Indeed, this is already a major achievement. But in the future, we can do even better. A further decrease of victims will be realized by increases in education, technological development, and wealth. The more knowledgeable and prosperous countries become, the better they can protect themselves from weather extremes.

[Professor Berkhout showed a second factual graph, “Global Weather Disasters as a Percentage of Global GDP”, not republished here, but viewable at the Schiller Institute conference page —ed.]

You see the global cost due to weather disasters as a percentage of GDP. Again, it shows a remarkable outcome. Even more so because the elites of the New Green Deal do tell us that the costs of climate disasters are increasing. However, in reality, the cost as a percentage of the global economy has not been rising, but it is falling.

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Let me also show you the embarrassing agreement of the G7 at the Carbis Bay Summit last week. As you see, their aim is net zero CO2 emission in 2050:

G7 Agreement at the Carbis Bay Summit

Protect our planet by supporting a green revolution that creates jobs, cuts emissions, and seeks to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees.

We commit to net zero no later than 2050, halving our collective emissions over the two decades to 2030, increasing and improving climate finance to 2025, and to conserve or protect at least 30% of our land and oceans by 2030. We acknowledge our duty to safeguard the planet for future generations.

I ask you, is this G7 plan a sign of stupidity? Or is it the sign of evilness? Ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion, the factual graphs I showed demonstrate that

there is no climate crisis at all.

The latter has become the slogan of CLINTEL: “There is no Climate Emergency.” But, ladies and gentlemen, there is more good news. In the next reality figures, I show you that more CO2 is even a blessing to nature and mankind.

Food supply has increased by more than 30% since 1960. In Figure 2 “Grain Yields in the Past 50 Years,” you see that the grain yields have been tripled. You also see that the U.S.A. and China are doing very well. But this big achievement is also true for the entire world. So, the miserable Malthusian pictures of the past are replaced by a very positive outlook.

Looking at all those positive developments, my question is, where is the climate crisis?

Finally, I will show you even more good news. We see already for decades that more CO2 in the atmosphere is greening the Earth, both being a global phenomenon.

Look at Figure 3, an interesting picture. That the Earth is greening, is not a surprise. Many experiments have shown over and over again that more CO2 favors plant growth. Dutch greenhouses are being fed with a surplus of industrial CO2 in order to increase their bio-productivity.

Is it not a sign of pure wickedness to charge fees and taxes on CO2generating activities, while this CO2 is a blessing to nature and mankind?

FIGURE 2 Grain Yields in the Past 50 Years

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

FIGURE 3 Change in Leaf Area, 1982-2015

NASA: from Boston University/R. Myneni

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Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

Climate Cycles and Global Warming

Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, PhD, is a physicist specializing in fluid mechanics. He is an Emeritus Professor at Saarland University for Technology and Economics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and is also the press director for the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) in Germany. This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Subheads have been added.

The best-known climate cycle is the shift from warm periods to ice ages with a period length of about

100,000 years. It is known as far back as 2 million years ago and is shown in Figure 1 from 400,000 years down to today.

The data of Figure 1 were obtained from ice cores of the Antarctic. The time axis is in units of 1,000 years (or 1k), given in years before present. At the top, the temperatures in blue are anomalies around the value 0°C. These are Antarctic temperatures. It is noticeable that the warm periods are always much shorter than the ice periods.

The cycle of ice ages and warm ages was already known approximately when researcher Milutin Milankovitch explained it at the beginning of the 20th Century in terms of long-term changes of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Modern climate research shares this

Schiller Institute

Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

Public domain

The Little Ice Age: Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, by Hendrick Avercamp, 1608.

hypothesis. Only the extreme brevity of the temperature increases after each ice age does not fit Milankovitch’s explanation and is still a mystery to Climate Science.

Temperatures over the last 10,000 years can be seen as a small stretch at the far right above. They fluctuate at most around plus or minus 2°C. If you look again at the entire temperature curve, you can see that a new ice age must begin again shortly.

In the lower part of the picture, the CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere are shown in green. Striking is the synchronization of the CO2 concentration with the temperature. But the CO2 follows the temperature with a time lag of about 800 years, which is not really visible here. The cause of this apparent synchronization effect is easy to explain: Warm seawater allows CO2 to outgas, cold seawater binds CO2. So the temperatures are leading CO2, not vice versa, as it is attempted today by the global warming crowd.

FIGURE 1

The 100,000-Year Cycle of Temperature and CO2

Years Before Present

CO2 concentration closely follows the temperature cycle. As the oceans cool, they dissolve more CO2; as they warm, they release CO2, with a time lag of about 800 years (lag not visible on the scale of this graph). Above, temperatures in blue are given as anomalies around 0°C. Below, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are shown in parts per million.

In Figure 2, only the last 10,000 years are shown. Again, the time axis is given in years before present. You can see again a cyclic temperature gradient. This time the cycles are much shorter. They are between 1,000 and 1,500 years. You can also see that 4,000 and 7,000 years ago, it was much warmer

than today.

The Little Ice Age

Before our current warm period, on the far right, a cold period can be seen in blue, called the Little Ice

Hippos

Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

FIGURE 2

Average Near-Surface Temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere During the Past 10,000 Years

Age. It began in the 15th century and ended only in the middle of the 19th cen tury. With regard to the term “cold period,” one must not forget that such times were very unfavorable for man kind, without exception. Warm periods, on the other hand, were always benefi cial.

In the strong warm period 4,000 years ago, we saw the emergence of the great civilizations on the Nile and the Euphra tes. The wheel, writing, the plow, the sun dial, and much more were invented in this warm period. Cold periods were always the causes of crop failure, famine and ep idemics.

Hendrick Avercamp’s 1608 painting, Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters [see first page] illustrates the implications of the Little Ice Age for the population, which was plagued by chilliness, poor harvests, famine and epidemics.

Recent Temperature and CO2 Concentration Data

During the severe winters of the Little Ice Age, the Baltic Sea was completely frozen. Swedish troops, who were repeatedly at war with Russia at the time, crossed the icy Baltic Sea on foot several times with heavily packed wagons and cannons. Such a thing is almost unimaginable today.

The Little Ice Age ended around 1850 as temperatures rose again quite naturally, albeit with intermittent relapses. In Figure 3 the blue curve shows the thermometer measurements from 1850 until today.

The rising CO2 concentrations in the figure, in green, are considered by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to be the sole cause of the temperature increase. However, the agreement of the CO2 curve with the temperature from 1850 to 1975 is very poor. Only from 1975 to 2020 it is good. Over the last 20 years, from 2000 to 2020, the satellite data contradict the [ground] thermometer measurements. So for the last 20 years the satellite measurements also do not show a good agreement with the increase of CO2

Is CO2 the Only Cause of Warming?

So, is CO2 the only cause of warming or not? The media and politicians agree with the IPCC’s view of CO2 being the only cause. Climate science, however, disagrees. The only undisputed fact is that the global average temperature has risen by about 1°C since 1850.

But this was to be expected, because after the Little Ice Age it had to get warmer again; otherwise we would still be living in the cold.

If we now take another look at the course of the global mean temperature from 1850 onward as shown in Figure 3, we can see that in addition to the general increase, there has been a wave-like rise and fall in temperatures. Especially the cooling around 1975 made a great stir, which is often forgotten today. At that time, U.S. climatologists feared the beginning of a great ice age and the U.S. media reported on it, as a Time magazine cover story of December 3, 1973 shows.

As a result of its firm belief in CO2 as the sole cause of the recent temperature rise, the IPCC climate models only take into account the effect of CO2, while natural cyclical climate variations are ignored in the models. The model results are correspondingly poor.

U.S. climate scientist Prof. John R. Christy [Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science] at the University of Alabama presented his findings on the poor validity of climate models in a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. [Here Prof. Lüdecke showed a graph from Prof. Christy’s March 29, 2017 testimony that compared a combination of 102 climate model runs with actual readings of tropical mid-tropospheric temperature variations from 1979 to 2016. From a common

Blue curve shows surface thermometer readings. The green shows CO2 concentration. IPCC claims that rising CO2 is the sole cause of rising temperature, but until 1975, the two curves have very poor agreement. The red shows satellitebased temperature data, which contradict the ground thermometer readings. Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

starting point in 1979, the graph shows an increasingly strong divergence thereafter of the models’ forecasts from reality. The models all show a rate of warming higher than the actual. See Figure 2 of his testimony. It can be seen in Prof. Christy’s graph that no model represents reality satisfactorily. The IPCC climate models are therefore wrong. Nevertheless, they are the basis of climate policy in the U.S.A., Europe and other Western countries.

Consider the Sun, So Unloved by the IPCC

4

The Sun Is a

Climate Driver: Temperature Tracks Sunspot Number

Now, concerning the climatic impact of the Sun and ocean cycles. In 2001, U.S. researcher Gerald Bond published one of the most famous climate studies ever, which has been cited 3,000 times to date [in the scientific literature] and has spawned countless other technical publications. In sedimentary deposits on the ocean floor, Bond discovered cycles of 1,000 to 1,500 years. Remarkably, these “Bond Cycles” are still stubbornly ignored by IPCC reports.

One of the many indications that the Sun is a climate driver: September temperatures in the Netherlands for more than a century are here compared with the number of sunspots. The Sun is four months ahead of the temperature.

In fact, climate science considers the Sun, which is so unloved by the IPCC, to be the most important clock generator of the Bond Cycles. Its four parameters of climate impact are:

1. TSI – Total solar irradiance

2. UV – Ultraviolet radiation as a fraction of TSI

3. The magnetic field of the Sun, which modulates cosmic rays and cloud formation

4. Sunspot numbers [manifesting one dimension of the solar magnetic field —ed.].

Climate forcing by the Sun is seen not only in the long Bond Cycles, but also in solar cycles down to 11 years in length. The solar cycle of 11 years, the Schwabe Cycle, is the best known of these.

As an example of the numerous evidences for the Sun as a climate driver, September temperatures in the Netherlands for more than a century are compared with the numbers of sunspots in Figure 4, which is taken from a technical study by the author. One can see a good correspondence between numbers of sunspots and temperatures. The Sun is here four months ahead of the temperature.

Besides the direct climatic influence of the Sun,

numerous other natural ocean cycles have been discovered, partly completely unknown. In some cases, they can be attributed to the influence of the Sun, but mostly their causes are still completely unknown. Among these ocean cycles—cycles in sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure at sea level— are the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Indian Ocean Dipole, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

To date, unfortunately, too little is known about how ocean cycles originate or even how they work. However, we increasingly know more about their effects on temperatures and precipitation up to several thousand kilometers away, and even worldwide distances, such as in the case of El Niño. Here are two examples:

Example 1. It has long been suspected that the sea surface temperature variations in the tropical Atlantic have an impact on rainfall in the central Amazon. A 2020 technical study by a team of researchers from German, British and Russian universities explored these impacts in more detail. Their study focused on the occurrence of droughts in the tropical Amazon. Hindcasting calculations were able to produce reliable

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Horst-Joachim Lüdecke

FIGURE

drought warnings up to 18 months in advance. [Prof. Lüdecke showed Figure 3 from the study by Catrin Ciemer et al., and explained their methodology for forecasting severe drought based on sea surface temperature variations:]

Figure 3 in Ciemer et al. shows in the upper part the Standard Drought Index (SPI) in orange. If the SPI value falls below the threshold of –1.5 (the broken red line in the figure), we have an extreme drought. The blue curve is the averaged cross correlation of the tropical Atlantic with the southern tropical Atlantic. If its value falls below –0.06, marked here with green circles, a severe drought can be successfully predicted.

Solar and Ocean Cycles Influence African Rainfall Intensity

Example 2. Precipitation in the countries of Africa is in many cases significantly influenced by the ocean cycles mentioned earlier and sunspot numbers. In a specialized study of this year, 2021, the nearly 120year rainfall series of all African countries were examined for the influences of these cycles. The results allow us to track rainfall events across Africa in time and space and to make partial predictions. Figure 5 shows this for the months September to December. One can see how the influence of different cycles and thus the rainfall intensity, is shifting in time and space from September to December.

Cycles such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) influence African rainfall intensity in patterns that shift in time and space from September to December. The maps are based on a nearly 120-year rainfall series.

examining relationships in time frequency space between two time series. —ed.]

Summary

Another spectacular result of this study is the crosswavelet of solar activity and Ethiopian rain, which shows an uninterrupted correlation between Ethiopian February rain and sunspots, over 120 years (see Figure 5 of the study). The Sun signal precedes the rain events by 52 months. [Cross-wavelet analysis is a method for

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

In conclusion, two points:

1. The Sun and natural climate cycles can explain recent global warming better than anthropogenic CO2.

2. The IPCC ignores this, and for that reason alone, it is a political and not a scientific organization. Thank you.

FIGURE 5

Horst-Joachim Lüdecke et al., Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 34 (2021)

Why the Climate Models Don’t Work

Prof. Nicola Scafetta, PhD, is a research scientist in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Resources Sciences at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Subheads have been added.

Good afternoon! Today, I would like to talk about climate change and what we face now.

The first thing we need to understand is that the climate is not constant. Climate has always changed in time. In Figure 1 you can see the historical data regarding the temperature of the Earth during the last 500 million years. During this period, the temperature of the Earth went up and down many times. So there were periods that were much hotter than now, by about 8° Centigrade, and then there were periods colder than now. And so, it is evident that the climate is not constant.

Climate Cycles and Oscillations

But the important thing is, if we analyze this long sequence of data, we see a number of cycles, natural cycles that determine climate. We observe cycles with about a 150 million-year period, others with about a 30 million-year period, and a set of cycles, known as the Milankovitch cycles, with periods of 500,000 years, 100,000 years, 41,000 years, and 21,000 years. And then we have a number of millennial cycles; a number of secular cycles, 210 years, 115 years; cycles at the multidecadal scale, like 60 years and 20 years; and then short cycles at a few years of time.

Since the climate tends to be regulated by a number of natural oscillations, it is necessary to reconstruct these oscillations to properly interpret climate change. And this is exactly what we would like to do. The black sequence, the black curve, that you see in Figure 2, is the global surface temperature of Earth since 1850. We would like to determine whether the climate models are able to properly represent these sequences of data. The climate models are shown in the colored plots; I simply shifted them down to make them easier to see. The data

Prof. Nicola Scafetta

Schiller Institute

Prof. Nicola Scafetta

Wikimedia Commons/Glen Fergus

FIGURE 1

Temperature History of Planet Earth Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Global Surface Temperature since 1850: the Data and the Models

The model results have been shifted downward to make them easier to see. They are unable to show the undulations in the actual data (in black), the real-world result of many interacting cycles.

show very complex dynamics—we have a period when the temperature went up, then down, then up, then down, then a period when the temperature goes up.

The Paris Agreement’s 1.5° Limit

In these data [Figure 2, black sequence], we have a clear warming of about 0.9°C. This is what is known as the “global warming since the pre-industrial age.” But we don’t see only a warming. We see periods of warming and cooling, warming and cooling, warming and cooling. And the way we talk about economic policy, we need to talk about many things, such as the Paris Agreement—the agreement among the countries to keep the temperature increase since the pre-industrial era below 1.5°C.

Why? Because if the temperature increases above this 1.5°C level, there is increasing risk of increasing environmental hazards such that, for example, water insecurity would cause wars, and so on. Today we are now at about 1°C above the pre-industrial era. But, according to the Paris Agreement, we need to keep the temperature below this 1.5°C level, or else we would face huge problems.

But when will we reach this 1.5°C? To be sure about

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this, we need to check the climate models—are they

Now, the argument made by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that would confirm the validity of the climate models is about carbon diox). The IPCC contends essentially that “cumulative emissions of CO2 and radiative forcing determine the probability of limiting warming to 1.5°C.” This argument is in its “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C”

Essentially the IPCC runs models using two kinds of “forcing.” “Natural forcing” considers only the effects of the Sun and volcanoes on climate. The climate models, when applied to the past, “predict” that natural forcing produced no warming from the pre-industrial period until today. To account for the warming, according to the climate models, the IPCC adds “human forcing,” anthropogenic forcing, forcing due to CO2. And what those models show is that there is agreement between the data and the models. You can see it here in the two graphs in Figure 3.SM.3, one showing natural forcing alone, and one that combines natural and human forcing.

IPCC Models Ignore Scientific Method

But there is a problem here. These pictures actually do not prove what the IPCC would like to prove. This picture suggests that 100% of the warming since the pre-industrial era is due to humans. However, the scientific method requires us to compare the simulations with the actual data relevant to the hypothesis of the simulation.

What do we need to do? To validate the climate model we need look at the past. We need to see whether or not the models are able to reproduce the climate of the past. This is the main issue. What do we see if we look at the past? We need to understand what happened.

FIGURE 2

In 2001, the IPCC alarmed the world. What happened? It published a graph of the global surface temperature of the Northern Hemisphere, and in this graph, it suggested the temperature was nearly constant for 900 years from 1000 to 1900; and then, beginning in 1900, temperatures started to increase very, very fast. So there was this unprecedented warming. The IPCC graph (see Figure 3) was presented in Figure 1 of Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, written by an IPCC working group.

The IPCC’s Figure 2 in the same report, “Indicators of the Human Influence on the Atmosphere During the Industrial Era,” showed the curves of carbon dioxide and two other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—methane and nitrous oxide—in parts per million over the preceding 1,000 years. [A greenhouse gas is one that, in the atmosphere, prevents radiated heat from escaping into space to some extent. —ed.]

The same kind of pattern was observed as in the IPCC Figure 1—a very similar “hockey stick” in all cases. The argument made by the IPCC was that CO2 was the main cause of the rise in global temperature, because there was this clear correlation between the temperature records and the records of gas concentrations pro duced by human activity. And for this, the IPCC alarmed the world.

It is not widely known that the IPCC continued to advocate the “hockey stick” temperature graph, in 2007.

IPCC’s 2001 Shock: Steep Rise in Temperature Since

1900

The IPCC’s 2001 claim of sharply rising temperatures since 1900 (the “hockey stick”) is still in circulation.

IPCC’s description: The year by year (blue curve) and 50 year average (black curve) variations of the average surface temperature of the Northern Hemisphere for the past 1000 years have been reconstructed from “proxy” data calibrated against thermometer data (see list of the main proxy data in the diagram). The 95% confidence range in the annual data is represented by the grey region. These uncertainties increase in more distant times and are always much larger than in the instrumental record due to the use of relatively sparse proxy data. Nevertheless the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries. Similarly, it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium. [Based upon Chapter 2, Figure 2.20]

But in 2013, something happened: The IPCC abandoned the hockey stick. In Figure 4 you see the book, The Hockey Stick Illusion, which had been published in 2010. The hockey stick was condemned because it was considered essentially an illusion. In stead of the hockey stick, the IPCC published a recon struction of northern hemisphere temperatures over the last 2,000 years shown in Figure 5, showing a large climate variability in the past—a very strong Medieval Warm Period [about 950-1200], and a very strong Little Ice Age [roughly 1480-1850]—that was not present in the earlier IPCC publications. So the

and there is a very strong millennial cycle in this graph, where [working backwards from the present] there is a warm period, a Little Ice Age, a Medieval Warm Period, a Dark Age Cold Period, and a Roman Warm Period. So, we have clearly a 1,000-year cycle in the climate. Why is the millennial cycle so important? Because it shows that the observed warming from the 1700s to

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

FIGURE 4

FIGURE 3

5

IPCC in 2013: No Hockey Stick in 2,000-Year

Temperature Record

In the Northern Hemisphere climate model runs superimposed here, notice the pronounced Medieval Warm Period, ca. 950-1200, and the very strong Little Ice Age, ca. 1480-1850.

IPCC’s description: Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions are shown as indicated in the legend, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extratropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (Hadley Centre/ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) gridded surface temperature-4 data set (HadCRUT4) land and sea, and CRU Gridded Dataset of Global Historical Near-Surface Air TEMperature Anomalies Over Land version 4 (CRUTEM4) land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on time scales less than about 50 years.

the present was mainly induced by natural causes, like the other ones [of similar amplitude —ed.] induced by this 1,000-year cycle.

Now, the big problem is that the models do not reproduce these cycles, do not produce any one period of the past.

And therefore we cannot say that the models are able to correctly interpret the global warming observed from 1900 to today, because that warming could be due to natural causes that the models are unable to simulate. As I said earlier, one needs to demonstrate that the models are able to reproduce the past, and if they fail to reproduce the past, they cannot be trusted for the future.

The situation is very simple, from a scientific point of view. The models are all wrong, and do not use the right climate forcing. [In 2008-2009 Prof. Scafetta developed his own forecast of global surface temperature through 2024; it was published in 2013. In one of its graphs, he brought together the IPCC’s 2013 forecast with his own. Here he showed the graph and commented on this comparison between the green model (IPCC) and the yellow (Scafetta):] As you can see, the yellow model appears to agree better with the data than

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the green model. Because the green model runs too hot, that is an indication that they are more or less overestimating the system.

Science of Climate Not Settled

With this problem in the models, why are people told that the climate science is “settled”? In reality, that is not true. [He showed slides from the scientific literature to further illustrate the point.]

I would like now to discuss the credibility of the policy of reducing CO2 emissions. People particularly in Europe would like to reduce CO2 emissions to zero—or reduce it by a lot—by 2030. But the problem is that most countries are still increasing their emissions according to the European Union. From the emissions that are the basis for world atmospheric research in Europe, it is clear that while in the world there is an increase of emissions, in Europe there is a decrease; but that is happening in Europe. In the rest of the world, CO2 emissions are increasing.

I would like to end with a world map of new coalfired power plants under construction or planned. (See Figure 6.) This picture is very telling to me: The coalfired plants are the ones that emit most of the CO2. So

FIGURE

what we find is that in Western Europe, there are no new coal-fired power plants; in the United States, in Canada, there are none. But if we look at the Asian side of the world—in China, India, Malaysia, but also Japan, South Korea, and so on—they are building a lot of coalfired power plants!

Europe and the United States are decreasing greatly their CO2 emissions, while the Asian countries are increasing so much their coal-fired power plants, it is obvious that there is no way to reduce CO2 in the world. CO2 will increase, and the only effect of this policy would be the impoverishment of Europe and the United States.

Conclusion

The models on which is based the anthropogenic theory of global warming observed from 18501900—these models are not scientifically validated; they contradict each other, and therefore cannot be considered reliable for future climate predictions according to the various emission scenarios proposed by the IPCC.

The evidence from the data is that there are large cycles. These cycles can actually be fit to astronomical forcing, such as solar forcing. But these factors are not present in the models, so the modeling needs to be greatly improved. They are not really credible. The in-

clusion, however, of natural climatic cycles and forms of non-climatic-cycle warming, and also the effect of the cities, can reduce the effect of the anthropogenic component by 50% to 60%. I did not discuss the effect of the cities. [Here Prof. Scafetta is referring to the skewing of temperature measurements from the measuring stations being disproportionately concentrated near cities. —ed.] So there will be a huge reduction of the impact humans can have on the climate.

The observed warming from the time of the pre-industrial era could be due 50% to the Sun, 30% to man, and 20% is spurious because of urbanization and urban heat that is not corrected yet in the climate data.

And so, I would like to thank you for the time. Thank you!

Jason Ross: Thank you, Professor Scafetta. It’s interesting that one of the components that Professor Scafetta, also Professor Lüdecke—and actually a number of our speakers—have brought up, is the impact of the Sun on the Earth’s climate. You shouldn’t be surprised that the Sun has a major effect on the Earth’s climate. It’s pretty important.

One of the ways that I’ve seen videos try to debunk this claim is to reduce it entirely to the amount of heat coming from the Sun, or total solar irradiance. But this

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

leaves out the work of people like Hans Svensmark from Denmark and Amir Shaviv in Israel, who have looked at the relationship between galactic cosmic rays striking the Earth, which form cloud condensation nuclei and help to form the level of cloudiness in our atmosphere. Of course, clouds reflect sunlight. A lot of clouds mean a cooler Earth.

The amount of cosmic radiation reaching the Earth is modulated by the magnetic field of the Sun. We measure

this activity in such things as the amount of sunspots. It’s amazing how many different processes interact on this level. In this sense the Sun is modulating it, it has an effect on the Earth, but the mechanism that the Sun is actually modulating, is cosmic radiation coming from somewhere in our galaxy. It’s pretty phenomenal to look at the Earth in its broad context and to think that these huge processes actually do impact us, in a significant way.

John Shanahan

Greetings to the Schiller Institute Conference

John Shanahan is a civil engineer, and an editor at All About Energy (allaboutenergy.net). This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!”

Hello! My name is John Shanahan. I’m a civil engineer living in Denver, Colorado. I would like to thank Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche for organizing the Schiller Institute conference on avoiding World War III, and inviting me to participate.

I started my professional life as a civil engineer in commercial nuclear power in 1970, and then became interested in public education for broader topics of energy in general, nuclear science, the environment, and the human factor.

It is clear to most engineers that solar and wind power are too diffuse and incapable of providing energy for the modern global economy. So, to counter the disinformation in the media, some friends, associates, and I began a website, allaboutenergy.net

I am determined that our knowledge will not be lost. I am helping students in Latin America, Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia learn about the importance of reliable, affordable, high-energy-density energy sources—fossil fuels and nuclear power. I have lived a

total of ten-plus years in Germany and Switzerland in the 1960s and 1980s, working directly with Europeans, in German, and visited Friedrich Schiller’s burial place in Weimar.

Since 2007, my wife, friends, and I have bicycled in Europe for two weeks each year. We are familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of governments in Europe and North America, and, by extension, governments around the world. Since the 1980s, I have travelled to Latin America for back-packing and visits with friends in Bolivia. I am familiar with literature of that interesting part of the world.

The website, allaboutenergy.net, is a holistic, educational effort about energy, environment, energy biproducts, nuclear science, and their importance for the modern world. A greatly revised and updated version of the website will be released in a couple of months. We have an international board of advisors—forty-four people, from eighteen countries. The website has about 2,200 articles, reports, power-point presentations, ebooks, and videos for public education. The volume of content is constantly growing. We have a newsletter that is sent to people in 124 countries.

Our mission is similar to the Schiller Institute’s. We focus on the next 200 years. The Schiller Institute focusses on however long humanity will play an important role in the Universe.

We look forward to working together, and thank you very much.

Schiller Institute

John Shanahan

Dr. Bennett S. Greenspan Introduction to Nuclear Medicine

Dr. Bennett S. Greenspan, MD is on the Board of Directors of the American Board of Science in Nuclear Medicine, and is a past President of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI). This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy,” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Parentheses have been used occasionally to add text from Dr. Greenspan’s slides, which could not be included here. Subheads have been added.

tering a radiopharmaceutical, usually intravenously (some are ingested or inhaled). Images are acquired with a scintillation or gamma-ray camera or, for PET (positron emission tomography, 3D imaging), a PET camera (now a PET/CT combination camera). Acquisition of images requires careful quality control of radiopharmaceuticals and instrumentation.

Types of Imaging

There are several types of imaging, including planar, dynamic, static, SPECT (single-photon emission computerized tomography), SPECT/CT, and PET/CT.

Hello, I’m Dr. Bennett Greenspan. I’m going to be giving you an overview of nuclear medicine, medical specialty that uses radiopharmaceuticals and the tracer principle, to evaluate molecular, metabolic, physiologic, and pathologic conditions of the body for diagnosis, therapy, and research.

Radiopharmaceuticals are basically drugs that are “labeled” with a radioactive isotope [by replacing one of the atoms in the drug molecule with a radioactive one —ed.]. We use the tracer principle, which means we give a trace amount of this radiopharmaceutical, and we can trace how the body will metabolize it, or digest it, or whatever.

These are very tiny amounts of radiation; they’re very safe. We’ve been using these in this field for 80 years with very good results. Most nuclear medicine studies are diagnostic, and evaluate physiologic characteristics or function of various organ systems.

Radiopharmaceuticals portray the physiology, biochemistry, or pathology of a body system without causing any perturbation of function. They are referred to as “radio tracers” because they are given in sub-pharmacologic doses that trace a particular physiological or pathological process in the body.

Images in nuclear medicine are formed by adminis-

Now I’m going to go through a few common studies that we perform. One of them is bone scintigraphy [detecting gamma rays emitted from the tracer in the bone tissue —ed.]. There are many clinical indications (such as primary tumor, metastases, osteomyelitis, fracture, arthritis, degenerative disease, and others). [Dr. Greenspan showed anterior and posterior images of a normal bone scan. Next, an example of metastasized prostate cancer, manifested as dark spots in several parts of the body. Then an example of osteogenic sarcoma, where the primary tumor was in the lower part of the right femur.]

In brain imaging, another common study we perform, there are a number of indications. Two of the most common are dementia and epilepsy. [Dr. Greenspan showed a normal brain scan.] This is a PET study, in which the tracer distribution, the metabolism that we’re looking at in the brain, is relatively uniform throughout the cortical margin, the cortex of the brain. Here you see [shows next slide] a case of Alzheimer’s dementia, where it’s not uniform and there’s decreased metabolism posteriorly, in the parietal lobes.

In tumor imaging, there are a number of indications: identification, screening or diagnosis, staging and restaging, identification of recurrence, residual disease or surveillance, monitoring response to therapy, and evaluating prognosis.

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Dr. Bennett Greenspan

Abnormal whole body PET/CT scan showing multiple metastases of a cancer. The cancer is not visible on the CT alone, at left. It is visible on the PET scan, center, and the combined image at right.

given off, it combines with an electron, and they annihilate each other and produce gamma rays in equal and opposite directions. We use what we call annihilation coincidence detection.

PET/CT is one of the major modalities for imaging a tumor. We can also perform image studies in cardiology (ischemia, myocardial viability), and in neurology (dementia, epilepsy), but the vast majority of PET studies or PET/CT are in oncology.

I’m going to explain how positron emission detection works (as used in PET). A radioactive nucleus [in the tracer molecule —ed.] is an emitter of a positron, which is a positive electron, β+. When a positron is

So, if the detectors detect an emission of gamma rays equal and opposite to each other and at the same time, they presume that there’s an event that occurred in between. [The inferred annihilation event will have been very close to the radioactive nucleus that emitted the positron, so the event signals the presence of the radioactive tracer there. —ed.] This technique has better sensitivity and resolution than the conventional nuclear medicine gamma cameras we’ve been using. It also provides accurate quantification. Normally, we can use short-lived positron-emitting radionuclides. The radioactive isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine are the common ones.

We take advantage of glucose metabolism by labeling glucose with a fluorine-18 (F-18) atom. The result is called fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), because we take an oxygen atom off of the glucose molecule

FIGURE 1

CC BY 3.0/Myo Han

A whole-body PET/CT scan of a normal human body, with FDG-18 as the tracer. From the left, the CT scan (X-ray tomography); the PET scan (positron emission tomography); and the PET/CT combination.

FIGURE 2

CC BY 3.0/Myo Han

and put on an F-18, so we can do the imaging. The F-18 goes up to the cell, and the cell takes it in through these glucose transporters and it gets in the cell and it starts getting metabolized, and then it gets stuck. So, it stays in the cell, and that’s why we can image it. It turns out that most tumors, especially malignant tumors, need more glucose than normal cells. And so F-18 FDG was labeled “The Molecule of the Century” in the 20th century. And I think rightly so. [Dr. Greenspan showed F-18 FDG imaging of patients with lung cancer, metastatic melanoma, and disseminated cervical cancer metastasis.]

Positron emission detection. At left, radioactive decay in the tracer chemical provokes a positron-electron annihilation event, yielding two gamma photons flying in opposite directions. At right, the detector array identifies multiple gamma photon pairs, enabling it to determine the region where the tracer is concentrated.

Radiopharmaceutical Therapy

I want to talk next about radiopharmaceutical therapy. I said initially that most studies are diagnostic. Radiopharmaceutical therapy is currently the hottest research area in nuclear medicine. We are using a number of radiopharmaceuticals, and new ones are being tested every day. We’ve been using iodine-131 and sodium iodide for thyroid disease since the 1940s to treat hypothyroidism and thyroid cancer. That still works very well. In 2013, radium-223 dichloride, an alpha emitter [an alpha particle has two protons and two neutrons —ed.], was approved for treating castrate-resistant metastatic prostate cancer. It’s had some success. One of the industry companies said that currently about 13% of nuclear medicine procedures are therapies. They predict that’s going to rise to 30% by 2030.

So, this area is really, really hot stuff. It’s expanding exponentially, and we’re getting some good results. We have sodium iodide for hypothyroidism and for various thyroid cancers. We have some somatostatin receptortargeted therapy for neuroendocrine tumors. Lu-177 Dotatate (Lutathera) was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in January 2018.

We have another agent (I-131 MIBG) for neural crest tumors.

“The molecule of the century”—glucose with a radioactive tag. The glucose molecule is labeled with a radioactive atom by replacing one of its oxygen atoms with a fluorine-18 atom (F-18). With this tag, the molecule is now a tracer, called F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose.

Coming soon is the agent (Lu-177 PSMA, prostatespecific membrane antigen) for prostate cancer. This one is being studied at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Melbourne, Australia, and this was the SNMMI Image of the Year in 2018. You can see there’s some incredible results here. The areas in red are tumor. The image on the left [of each pair —ed.] is before therapy, and the image on the right is after therapy. This agent is being used in Europe and Australia and Asia, and hopefully it’ll be soon approved in the U.S.

The agent Lu-177 Dotatate (peptide receptor radionuclide therapy) is another example where we can use imaging to detect tumor, before and after treatment. The imaging agent was just approved very recently, and the images show a vast improvement after

PSMA therapy. The therapy agent is not yet approved in the U.S., but we think it will be, within the next year.

Here’s an example [shows slide] of Iodine-124 PET/CT scans obtained before and after Selumetinib treatment of a patient with thyroid cancer who didn’t respond very well. [But] now we can use a certain drug that will help reverse the process and allow these lesions to show up, so we can then treat them. This work comes from Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.

In an amazing case in Germany, someone had extensive prostate cancer disease and the PSA (prostatespecific antigen) was very high. They treated the patient with Lu-177 PSMA, and the patient got worse. So they thought, well, we need to use a different agent. So, they used Actinium-225 PSMA to test the same [treatment] molecule, but it’s a different isotope. After three cycles, the PSA went down from 419 to less than 0.1. That’s an amazing result! See imagery in Figure 3 here (Curing the incurable!)

In the near future, based on biological characteris-

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tics of tumors, we will be seeing increasing use of predictive or prognostic markers, assessing therapeutic response, and focus surveillance and screening. This [forecast] comes from Dr. Lalitha Shankar at the National Cancer Institute.

Tumor heterogeneity is a key factor limiting response to targeted therapy, and personalized (precision) medicine depends on biomarkers for selecting patients and directed radionuclide therapy.

The Future: Precision and Theranostics

Dr. Richard Baum from Germany came up with some comments on the future, and I think he’s a visionary. I think he’s right. [Dr. Greenspan reads from a slide of Dr. Baum’s vision, titled “Theranostics—The Future of Cancer Treatment”:] “Eventually we’re going to be classifying cancers by molecular phenotypes, and the organ of origin will be a secondary classification. These molecular phenotypes will be determined by molecular pathology and by molecular imaging, using our PET and SPECT studies, and other imaging techniques like MRI and optical, using cancer type-specific probes.” This is what precision medicine will be become.

Future approaches may include utilizing negative feedback loops, such as in thyroid cancer; paralyzing various enzymatic pathways; whole-body irradiation for immune stimulation; disrupting the tumor microenvironment, especially the inflammatory component, and the acidic intra-tumoral microenvironment; treatment based on genetic mutations, including clonal variations; and preventing tissue invasion and metastasis. I think I probably shouldn’t go over all these because it’s pretty complicated.

I predict that future developments in cancer therapy will include specifically targeted (precision) radiopharmaceutical therapy with combinations of alpha- and beta-emitters, probably as theranostic pairs—“theranostic” means a combination of diagnosis and therapy—targeting of various enzymatic pathways and cell surface receptors, including clonal variations to address the variation in tumors. These radiopharmaceutical therapies will also rely on precise dosimetry, probably including intralesional dosimetry. In other words, dosimetry of actual tumor deposits. These radiopharmaceutical therapies will provide more precise and comprehensive therapy and lead to much improved outcomes and less morbidity. Thank you very much.

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Greetings to the Conference

Florencia Renteria is a Ph.D. student in Nuclear Science and Technology at Harbin Engineering University in China. This is an edited transcript of remarks she delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!” Subheads have been added.

My name is Florencia Renteria. I’m from Mexico. I’m 20 years old. Currently, I’m doing my Ph.D. in nuclear science and technology in China at Harbin Engineering University. My specialty is advanced reactor physics. Before that, I went to South Korea to study for my masters in nuclear power plant engineering, where I specialized in nuclear core design. And from Mexico, I got a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. For some time, I worked in the mining industry in Mexico. But afterward I went to Korea.

For me, I really like to study and to do things related to nuclear science, because I think it’s a wonderful field, where we can specialize and spread the benefits of the nuclear technology.

What Inspired Me to Study Nuclear Engineering

I’m from the north of Mexico, from the Coahuila State. In my hometown there is one of the universities where you can study engineering. And before I was finishing my high school, I was thinking, “What should I go study for my bachelors?” Then, I was thinking, chemical engineering would be a good choice because one of my aunties—she’s a chemical engineer—and I just got inspired, part of it from her, and also, from my chemistry classes in high school, because we had a good teacher. She was easily understandable in the way she was explaining chemistry and she was motivating people on how chemistry is everywhere. Eventually she was preparing her own chemical products, and selling

them to the people.

Then, I thought maybe it could be a good idea, and I just started looking for some areas where I could develop myself in chemistry. When I was still doing my studies in high school, I found out that chemistry is one of the main areas that are in industry, and it gives some flexibility to work in other areas.

After college, I did one of the specialties, extractive metallurgy. It’s a part of the mining industry. That’s how I got into the mining industry. I did an internship. It was pretty amazing how people extract minerals and convert it into different parts of the technology, even computer cards, etc.

It was a great opportunity also to be there. After I finished my internship in the mining industry, I got the opportunity to go to Korea, to study the specialty of nuclear engineering. At the beginning it was a little bit hard to change my mind because I was planning to develop myself more in chemistry and [in the] mining industry. But some challenges come through in life, and I thought, “Why shouldn’t I take the chance to go for nuclear industry?” I found out it was amazing, because you can combine what you know from chemistry with the new things in nuclear engineering.

I was pretty new in the field. I had to start from scratch in South Korea with so many things, because I didn’t know many concepts. But I was really lucky, because at the school where I studied in Korea, they really train you from the basics to understand and learn the overview of the industry.

And that’s how I ended up doing my Ph.D. And also, because I got inspired and wanted to learn more. I’d like to study other competencies to broaden my knowledge and keep developing my skills.

Classical Culture in Education

History plays an important role in our lives and decisions, of course. In my high school, we took a literature class and every month we had to read at least three or four books. At the end of the month, we would take

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Schiller Institute

Florencia Renteria Florencia Renteria

an exam and we would write answers about what the lessons were that we learned from the books.

This reading time helped us to develop our personal and interpersonal skills. Sometimes we may tend to be shy or sometimes it’s hard to express ourselves. But through Shakespeare, through Don Quixote, other authors—I remember Albert Camus as one that we read and Homer from the Greek culture. We had to understand their visions in that time, which were challenges. And we were analyzing, in the classes, how we can take it into the current stage.

In 10 years? In 50 years?

For the next ten years, I would really like to promote more programs for graduate students. I know sometimes in our countries the educational system is not created for all of us to go for graduate education. But I’ll be very happy if at least, from the people who graduate with a bachelor’s, at least half, or 20% or 30%, can go for a master’s degree, because we end up [with] very few people doing a Ph.D.

And it’s not that it’s hard—it’s just consistency and being disciplined. At least, we must help people to develop their talents. To see whether you’re good doing it, and how you can adjust or contribute to the world. And also, to see policy makers adjusting their educational plans, maybe for more energy topics. Because, hearing

the opinions of many people, more now expressing more positive thoughts about nuclear energy. Not everyone shares the same opinion. But at least they can go through it; they can understand what is nuclear, or how they can adjust to many other energy sources to create sustainability in all the world.

I think that will be the plan for the next 10 years. And if every other student can have the opportunity, as I had, to go to Korea or come to China or even in your own country, just to keep developing your talents. Maybe create a system of scholarships for everyone, to develop their abilities.

For the next 50 years, I’ll be very happy if we can reach fusion, the fusion projects, and to see in more countries, an economy where everyone can have a perfect balance of energy. There are still a lot of countries, like African countries or Asian countries, where they don’t have access to electricity or water. Those are essential services for having a quality of life. If we cannot have electricity, we cannot learn, you cannot use Internet, you cannot even have access to a smartphone.

For some people it is a big dream to have this opportunity. Of course, we have the privilege to have it in our daily life. At least everyone should have the available tools in the next 50 years to keep developing ourselves, and create this synergy and these projects to keep developing technologies of their own countries.

Paul Driessen is a senior policy advisor for the Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). He also works with the Heartland Institute, and is the author of EcoImperialism: Green Power, Black Death. This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered to the second panel, “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy” of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, “For the Common Good of All People,

Not Rules Benefiting the Few!”

Good afternoon! It’s an honor to join you today and I look forward to engaging with you more personally during the Q&A.

The proposed Biden Green New Deal is so all-encompassing, deceptive and destructive, we could spend weeks discussing it. Just addressing the junk science and useless climate models behind it would take days. So, this afternoon, I’m going to focus on six myths or scams about

Paul Driessen

Schiller Institute

Paul Driessen

fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, and supposedly clean, green renewable wind and solar, and battery energy.

Green New Deal Scam No. 1

Fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas are evil, we need to get rid of them, right now, without resorting to nuclear power, or damming more rivers or hydroelectric power.

What a crazy idea! Fossil fuels built the United States and the developed world. They’re the foundation for our industries, jobs, living standards, revenues, healthcare, and countless other social, economic and environmental benefits. They still account for over 80% of America’s and the world’s total energy. To suggest that the United States could, or should, make them disappear and somehow replace them with renewable energy is sheer insanity and fantasy.

Green New Deal Scam No. 2

Carbon dioxide is poisonous, an existential threat to humanity and planet.

Absolutely ridiculous. Carbon dioxide is the miracle molecule, the gas of life! Yes, it comes from burning fossil fuels. But it also is what humans and animals exhale and what plants absorb and use to grow and release oxygen. CO2 or carbon dioxide makes life on Earth possible. More CO2 in the atmosphere enables plants to grow better and faster, even under adverse conditions, like limited water, hotter air temperatures, and insect and other infestations. These enhanced rates of photosynthesis and biomass production occur for virtually every kind of plant, every part of the plant, in every ecosystem, and on every continent.

conceivable harm from carbon dioxide’s tiny role in natural climate change and extreme weather.

Green New Deal Scam No. 3

We can easily replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Not a chance! Wind and sunlight absolutely are clean, green, renewable, and sustainable, but harnessing them to meet humanity’s huge and growing energy needs is not. Harnessing them requires minds, lands and raw materials that are anything but renewable, using fuels and methods that are absolutely not clean, green, ecological or sustainable.

President Biden, Miss Ocasio-Cortez, and their political media and corporate allies, want the United States to have 80% hydrocarbon-free electricity gener-

Fossil fuels account for over 80% of the world’s energy. Shown here is the Francisco I. Madero Refinery, one of six in Mexico.

Higher atmospheric CO2 levels mean higher crop yields, so that more people have greater quantities of nutritious food from less land, with less water. Higher levels let plants absorb carbon dioxide through smaller pores in plant tissues, improving water use efficiency and helping to green desert areas, like the Sahara. By contrast, if we had to feed the world and replace oil and natural gas fuels and petrochemical feedstocks with biofuels, we’d have to plant biofuel crops on millions of acres, that are currently food-crop fallow, scenic, and wildlife habitat lands. Hundreds of plant and animal species would simply disappear.

These enormous benefits vastly overwhelm any

ation by 2030, and 100% by 2035. They want to totally eliminate fossil fuels from all sectors of the U.S. economy by 2050. They want to replace all reliable, dispatchable, affordable coal, oil and natural gas energy, with expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent, wind and solar power.

Their Green New Deal requires replacing coal and natural gas for generating electricity, gasoline and diesel for powering vehicles; natural gas for smelting and manufacturing; natural gas for cooking, heating, and water heating in homes, hospitals, schools, and factories, and businesses of all kinds. Together, this would mean the nation’s annual electricity requirement would skyrocket, from about 2.7 billion MW-hours, which is the fossil fuel portion of total U.S. electricity generation in 2018, to almost 7.5 billion MW-hours a year by 2050. Substantial additional generation would be re-

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

quired to constantly recharge backup batteries for windless, sunless days, and safeguard society against cyberattacks and blackouts.

Generating all that electricity without new nuclear and hydroelectric plants would require tens of thousands of 800-foot tall offshore wind turbines, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of somewhat smaller onshore turbines, and billions of solar panels. Backing up sufficient nationwide electricity for even one week of windless, sunless days, would involve well over a billion half-ton battery modules, like those in Tesla cars, so that blackouts don’t shut down our economy and lives. Connecting all those facilities to energy dependent communities, industrial centers and data hubs would require thousands of miles of new underwater and onshore transmission lines.

These are incredible numbers, to be sure, but that’s because wind and solar generate electricity only 25-50% of the year in the best U.S. locations, and less than 33% on average nationwide. It’s because the more wind and solar electricity we need, the more we have to put turbines and panels in lower-quality areas, where they might generate power only 15-20% of the time. Hundreds of millions of acres would be impacted, a huge swath of the continental U.S.A.

Looking more closely at offshore wind energy, President Biden wants to install 30,000 MW of wind power off America’s coasts by 2030. That’s over 2,000 monstrous, 14 MW turbines. Even if they operated at full capacity, 24/7, these turbines wouldn’t meet peak summer electricity needs for New York State, much less the entire U.S.A.

Just as crazy, in a Green New Deal United States, we’d have to throw out trillions of dollars’ worth of still, perfectly good fossil fuel generating and industrial systems. Home furnaces, stoves and water heaters; gasoline and diesel vehicles; and other equipment that are far from the end of their useful lives, and replace them with electric versions. We’d also have to expand and upgrade home and business, community, state and national electrical systems to handle the added power demands and fast charge electric vehicles. That’s more trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars per family.

Even if wind and solar facilities avoided the most highly sensitive ecological areas, they would still disrupt or destroy scenic areas, croplands, and wildlife habitat. Turbine blades would kill millions of birds and bats. Vibration noise from offshore turbines would dis-

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

rupt whale and dolphin navigation and communication. Wind turbines would interfere with military and civilian air and sea radar and navigation. Their light flicker and infrasound would impair human sleep and health.

And what about the trash? Solar panels and wind turbine blades the length of football fields cannot be recycled: Where are we going to put them? Who’s going to pay for it?

Green New Deal con artists simply sweep all of this right under the rug.

Green New Deal Scam No. 4

The metals, plastics, concrete, and other raw materials for all these wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and power lines, would just be there, through a process best described as “materials acquisition for global industrial change,” abbreviated as MAGIC, magic!

The problem is, there’s no such thing as magic. Even the International Energy Agency has now finally admitted that manufacturing fossil fuel replacement technologies would require tens of billions of tons of nonrenewable iron, copper, aluminum, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, plastics, cement, and other materials. That would mean mining, crushing, processing, refining, and transporting, tens of billions of tons from thousands of mines, various ores of all different kinds, from thousands of mines and quarries, using gigantic gasoline and diesel equipment.

These fuel-intensive activities often employ hazardous chemicals and release toxic pollutants. They require enormous volumes of water, often in the world’s most water-deprived regions. They cause acid-mine drainage, create mountains of waste, often result in vast lakes of toxic chemicals from refining the ores.

Foreign laws governing these operations are often well below U.S. standards. Wind, solar, battery, and electric vehicle technologies require far more metals and minerals than their fossil fuel counterparts: Electric cars, for example, require three times more copper than gasoline versions. Onshore wind turbines need 9 times more copper and other materials per megawatt than a modern gas-fired power generating plant. Offshore wind turbines require 14 times more materials. Just that initial Joe Biden offshore wind program would require nearly 110,000 tons of copper, plus millions of tons of other materials.

At an average of .44% copper in all types of copper ore deposits around the world today, that means just those initial 2,100 offshore wind turbines would require

mining and crushing and processing 25 million tons of copper ore, after removing some 40 million tons of overlying rock to reach the ore bodies.

Add in materials for solar panels, additional wind turbines, backup battery systems, subsea electrical cables, onshore transmission lines, electrical vehicles, electric heating systems, and other technologies to run the entire U.S.A. and the green energy transformation would require tens of billions of tons of metals and minerals, trillions of tons of ores, trillions of tons of overburden and thousands of mines, processing plants and factories.

The Green New Deal would require raw materials in excess of the entire world’s current and foreseeable mining and processing capabilities. A global Green New Deal would probably require mining the entire galaxy!

Green New Deal Scam No. 5

The United States can outsource all this mining activity, mostly to China, probably, without compromising our national security or commitment to environmental protection and human rights.

Hogwash! The United States permits very little mining for the metals and minerals that are essential for the energy transformation that climate alarmists demand. Even worse, Mr. Biden, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and their fanatical allies have made it clear that they intend to have nearly all of the Green New Deal’s minerals extracted overseas, often by Chinese companies which also control the processing of many minerals mined in Africa, Asia, Russia, and Latin America; and the manufacturing of increased percentages of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries.

Some 40,000 children as young as four years old, already toil with their parents in Democratic Republic of Congo mines for a few dollars a day, under constant threat of cave-ins, and exposure to toxic, radioactive, mud, dust, and water—just to meet today’s cobalt needs, which would skyrocket under any Green New Deal.

The cobalt ore is sent to China for processing in plants with equally abominable safety and pollution conditions. They’ve been linked to alarming cancer, blood diseases, and other health problems. An enormous toxic dump for effluents from rare earth mining and processing in Inner Mongolia, has destroyed agriculture and created serious health issues for workers and residents. China also uses Uighur slave labor to

The need for cobalt, lithium, and copper would skyrocket under any Green New Deal. Shown: mining copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

build solar panels for sale to the United States. If there have been any calls for responsible sourcing of these critical materials, I sure haven’t heard them.

Scam No. 6

The United States will go from being an exporter of oil, natural gas, and refined products in recent years, to being almost totally dependent on often unfriendly foreign sources, for the materials required for our energy, economy, manufacturing, living standards, health, communication, transportation and defense.

In addition, China and many of these other foreign countries do not apply U.S. laws and standards for environmental protection, pollution control, mined land reclamation, workplace safety, fair wages, child and slave labor, or human rights, which activists demand for clothing and coffee, but not for green energy.

Other countries will follow our lead, rapidly eradicate their fossil fuels and join America in preventing the heavily hyped, but phony climate catastrophe.

Fat chance! China, India and other major emerging economies are doing nothing of the sort. They’re rapidly increasing their carbon-based fuel use and greenhouse gas emission to modernize, improve their people’s living standards, and conduct the mining, processing and manufacturing needed to support our Green New Deal ambitions. That means, even if the United States completely eliminated its fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, there would be no global

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emission benefits from doing so. But there’d be a lot of human rights, economic and ecological abuses, from this misguided Green New Deal fiasco.

Over the past decade, the United States actually significantly reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by replacing coal-fired capacity with natural gas-powered generation. Meanwhile, Asian and other countries opened new coal-fired power plants, in addition to those they already have in operation. In 2020 alone, China put 38,000 megawatts of new coal plants into operation. Beijing is also building, planning or financing more than 300 coal plants in Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt and other nations. African countries are planning to build more than 1,250 new coal-fired and gasfired generating plants by 2030 or so, many financed by Chinese banks and built by Chinese companies because “woke” EU and U.S. banks and companies refuse to do so.

Coal still supplies 62% of electricity generation in India, the world’s second largest coal user, after China. India and Russia plan to mine much more coal and build many more generating units in the coming years. Norway is planning to pump a lot more oil and natural gas; countless other countries have the same intentions and aspirations. Any American energy transformation would simply transfer emissions, sources, and other ecological impacts, from the United States to these and other countries. Worldwide fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution would increase significantly. That’s eco-imperialism by the United States at its worst.

aries, where Green New Deal mandates do not apply and will not be enforced; where wind and solar installations are prohibited, or strictly regulated under the same wildlife and environmental laws that apply to all other projects, including fossil fuel projects.

Tell cities, counties, states, and countries, to demand independent certification that wind turbine, solar panels, batteries, metal, and minerals have come from sources that did not involve child, slave, or forced labor, and were operated in full compliance with all U.S. environmental workplace safety, and human rights laws. Encourage cities, counties, states and public interest groups like the Schiller Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow to file more lawsuits, or join other plaintiffs in their lawsuits to block climate change and other Green New Deal mandates and junk science.

China and other major emerging economies are rapidly increasing carbonbased fuel use to improve their people’s living standards today, while preparing to transition to nuclear fission and fusion tomorrow. Shown: a Chinese coal-fired power plant.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that greenhouse gases are the primary factor controlling Earth’s climate, there would thus be no climate or extreme weather benefits even from completely eliminating fossil fuel use in the United States, and attempting to replace that energy with wind, solar, battery, and biofuel power, at enormous, environmental, social and human costs.

Stand for the Truth

So, what should you do, and we do? Challenge these totalitarians. Refuse to be conned and bullied. Refuse to have your jobs, health, living standards, and environment compromised or destroyed. Persuade cities, counties and states to declare themselves fossil fuel sanctu-

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

Demand Green New Deal mining, right here in the U.S.A. Not only will it create thousands of jobs and reduce our dependency on foreign sources for these critical metals and minerals, it’s the ethical, responsible thing to do.

Above all, tell your legislators, regulators, climate activists and other Green New Dealers, “You first. You be the guinea pigs for the laws and policies you want to impose on us. You go 100% wind, solar and battery, and let us watch how it works for you and your families. You be the first to have your electricity cut off when there’s a blackout and the last to have it turned back on. You pay the full cost of your climate and energy ambitions out of your own pockets, then come talk to us. We’ll let you know if we’re interested.”

Thank you.

CC/Tobixen

III. Resist the Green New Deal

DISCUSSION SESSION

Schiller Institute Conference, June 26-27, 2021

Panel 2: ‘The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy’

This is an edited transcript of the discussion period following Panel 2: “The Real Science Behind Climate Change: Why the World Needs Many More Terawatts of Energy,” of the Schiller Institute’s June 26-27 conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few.” Participating were panel moderator Jason Ross and conference speakers Dr. Bennett Greenspan, Dr. Vincenzo Romanello, Prof. Nicola Scafetta, Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Paul Driessen, Richard McPherson, and Megan Dobrodt. The Discussion concluded with a short video clip of Lyndon LaRouche. Subheads have been added.

The Infrastructure for Nuclear Medicine

Jason Ross: Dr. Greenspan, regarding the production that’s required to use nuclear medicine, you brought up the molecule of the century, 18- fluorodeoxyglucose, which doesn’t sound like it’s on shelves everywhere; lutetium-177-PSMA, some type of gallium, iodine, actinium; these are things used for medical diagnosis and treatments. How hard is it to make these molecules? Do you need a nuclear reactor on hand to produce them? Are these available to all countries? What kind of infrastructure is needed to be able to practice nuclear medicine?

Schiller Institute

Panel 2 discussants, from left to right. Top row: Jason Ross, Megan Dobrodt, Paul Driessen. Middle row: Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Dr. Vincenzo Romanello, Prof. Nicola Scafetta. Bottom row: Dr. Bennett Greenspan, Richard McPherson.

Dr. Bennett Greenspan: That’s a very good question. Many of these compounds are made in central pharmacies and shipped to hospitals for use. Iodine-131 comes from a reactor, and that’s easy to make. It’s shipped to us at our hospital and our nuclear medicine department receives it, and gets it ready for the patient so it can be administered. Some of the others are made in central pharmacies and shipped to hospitals. Many of these compounds come either from reactors or from cyclotrons, and then they’re shipped to central pharmacies for further compounding or development so that they can be made into ready pharmaceuticals that are safe and effective for patients.

Ross: At the end of your discussion, you talked about precision medicine, and having more precisely tailored molecules for different conditions. Do you see this as something where you would be actually producing compounds on demand, made for a specific patient? Is it that specific? Or, is this the kind of thing, where maybe you’d have a larger stock of things on the shelf?

Dr. Greenspan: I think we are going to be developing ready pharmaceuticals more specifically for specific patients in the future. That’s some time off, but one size doesn’t fit all anymore, due to clonal variations in tumors and so on. I have discussed the patient who didn’t respond to lutetium-177-PSMA, but did respond to actinium-225-PSMA. We may be able to have a variety of agents available, so that patients can benefit from therapies like that. So, I think that is in the future. And we’ll have to take into account both symmetry and genomics, I believe, to accomplish this. It’s not right around the corner, but I think it’s in the near future.

Atoms for Peace

Ross: Dr. Romanello, I’d like you to say something about your creation of Atoms for Peace: why you created this institution, what you hope to achieve with it, and why you think it’s necessary?

Dr. Romanello: I will say three things about it which should be interesting:

The first, is that we would have rights, according to Italian law, to some public financing, public money, but we refuse any public money. This is the first thing. We are very proud of it.

The second, is that despite the fact that we are not specialists in climate sciences, we wrote in our organi-

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zational statutes that we refuse to exploit in any way the climate change argument, to promote our discussion. It would be very easy for us, to say, “Ah, look, IPCC and all the media, and all the so-called mainstream scientists are saying that we have climate change due to fossil fuels, so use nuclear energy.” We have always refused to use this argument because we think that the first thing you have to do, is tell the truth, to be absolutely scientifically sound.

The third thing that I would like to say about our way of working is, in our documents, in our videos, we always say, “We don’t expect you to believe us, because we can understand it can be shocking to know the reality, but reserve the same treatment for the others, who say the opposite. And check what you are told. Because this is the only way you can learn something new.”

Cycles in the Ever-Changing Climate

Ross: The next two questions go to Dr. Kemm and Prof. Scafetta:

Bob asks: “Various speakers have referred to the Milankovitch Cycles as an important cause of climate change. Could you please briefly explain what those cycles are? Also, would anyone like to comment on the research of Henrik Svensmark, or Nir Shaviv, on the galactic cycles and processes responsible for climate change?”

Manuel asks: “The experts in this presentation have shown us, in a very graphic demonstration, why no one should pay any attention to what the IPCC people tell us. How is it that France is moving ahead with building the ITER fusion reactor, even though France has joined the Paris Accord on climate change? Are these a contradiction?”

Prof. Nicola Scafetta: The Milankovitch cycles are many cycles; there are changes in the changes in the orbit of the Earth. The Earth’s orbital eccentricity can change, the declination of the axis can change a little bit—the inclination of the axis—and so on. But those are very long cycles. Those Milankovitch cycles are 100,000 years, 41, 000 years, 21,000, and 26,000 years. So, those are very, very long cycles, compared to what is important for us.

To understand climate change that we are talking about, which is climate change during the last few hundred years, we need to talk about much shorter cycles.

So, the Milankovitch cycles don’t really matter for these short cycles. The short cycles are mostly due to the Sun, as we have discussed earlier, and possibly to other astronomical factors. We are talking about 1,000year cycles, few-hundred-year cycles, 60-year cycles, 20-year cycles, 10-year cycles and so on. These are all astronomical cycles.

And the theory of cosmic rays: If there is a change in solar activity, it changes its luminosity. But the Sun is not just light. The Sun has also a very strong magnetic field, and this magnetic field varies with the solar activity. The magnetic field interacts with everything that is electric. And also with cosmic rays, which are particles that come from the deep galaxy. When the Sun is very, very strong, when its activity is strong, cosmic rays are deflected by the magnetic field of the Sun. When the Sun is weak, the cosmic rays can enter into the Solar System and reach Earth more easily. And when they reach Earth, they can produce clouds, essentially. And then the clouds will change the climate. The formula would be: changes in the cloudiness of the Earth depend on the strength of the Sun.

Defects in the Climate Models

All these are missing in the climate models. So, this is one of the several mechanisms that are missing in the climate models. But there is not just cosmic ray action. There may be other astronomical forces, so, for example, there is interplanetary dust that can fall on Earth, and the dust is brought close to the Earth by gravitational forces of planets, for example, which are also cyclical. And there are a lot of things that are not really known.

invest in that form of energy. Right now, we have other mechanisms, like normal, traditional nuclear energy that is sufficiently developed so we can use it. But the other form of energy, we hope that we can reach the nuclear fusion and to use nuclear fusion, because that will solve all energetic problems that we have. We need to start.

Solar Radiation’s

Effect on Earth’s Climate

Ross: Dr. Kemm, I want to also pose one additional question that came in. From Samuel: “You said that atmospheric CO2 went up from .03% to .04%. What if it continues to increase over the next 600 years? Will there be any negative consequences? Will the positive consequences continue?”

What is known, what has been proven, is that the climate system is characterized by a lot of cycles; all these cycles are astronomical cycles. So, we need to look at [systems in] space to understand climate change. That is the main issue.

I repeat, the models don’t have anything on this, and do not reproduce any natural cycles, which means they don’t understand climate change, at all.

Regarding the last question about nuclear fusion in France, of course there is the hope that we are able to develop this technology, but right now it’s very—I don’t think that it’s possible. Perhaps in the next 50 years it may be possible. But of course, we need to

Dr. Kelvin Kemm: First, I’d like to mention, the Sun has been comprehensively covered now by the gentleman who just spoke before me. But the influence of the Sun on the Earth, and therefore the probability that it’s responsible for any global warming we see, is far, far more likely than any anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Now, often when one says, “the Sun,” the antagonists say, “Oh, it can’t possibly be the Sun, because the heat coming from the Sun varies so little that it couldn’t do that.”

It’s not the heat from the Sun that is the issue, it’s the

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NASA/TACE Project Solar magnetic field activity and galactic cosmic rays have a far greater effect on Earth’s climate than anthropogenic CO2. Shown: sunspot eruption imaged in ultraviolet light, April 10, 2011.

magnetic field around the Earth, which is affected by magnetic charged particles coming from the Sun. All of the time, the Sun shoots off what’s known as the solar wind, and it’s just tons of particles pouring out from the Sun in all directions. As they come to the Earth, they impinge on the Earth. The Earth has, of course, a magnetic field, something like a bar magnet, and it comes down to the ground, so to speak, at the North Pole, and down to the ground at the South Pole: And that’s what gives rise to the famous Northern Lights, and the Southern Lights that you see in the Antarctic. When these charged particles strike the upper atmosphere and go through the magnetic field, some of them are driven downwards, and they create those Northern Lights and the Southern Lights. So that’s when you can see this happening.

Now, as the magnetic field of the Earth interacts with these charged particles coming past, its ability to screen the Earth alters. There are other charged particles, cosmic rays, coming in from all the other stars in the universe as well. As the magnetic field of the Earth strengthens, it causes less of these rays to penetrate, and when it’s weaker it allows more. And that varies the amount of cloud cover that you get on Earth, which then holds heat in, or stops heat coming in, because the clouds are in the way.

To put it simply, I’m trying to say in very simplistic language what is going on, because there’s this big misunderstanding of so many of the public that it’s the heat of the Sun that we’re talking about, and it isn’t. It’s the magnetic field that varies the amount of cosmic rays coming in which in turn alter the cloud cover.

A simple way of watching the activity of the Sun is to count the sunspots on the Sun. This has been done for hundreds of years. In fact, from about the middle of the 1700s, it was done very informally, but sunspot counts go back a long time before that, can be tracked back in history to ancient Chinese records, and there’s some in Mayan culture in South America and so on. So, you’ll find that the sunspot activity can be very much correlated with the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warming, and then little ice ages, so on. We know that when the sunspots vary, the magnetic field of the Sun is varying, we see a result on Earth which leads global warming or global cooling, and that correlation is far, far stronger than any correlation of human-produced, anthropogenic global warming.

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A Rising CO2 Level Greens the Earth, It Doesn’t Kill It

As far as CO2 rising from 0.03% to 0.04%: Enthusiasts who push the [anthropogenic] CO2 arguments say, “When there’s more CO2 in the atmosphere, it just holds more heat, like putting more and more blankets on, or something.” It doesn’t work like that. There’s a saturation that occurs, and in fact a good paper was produced on this by Prof. Will Happer and Prof. Guus Berkhout that we heard from earlier. If you just double the amount of CO2, you don’t get doubling the amount of warming. It’s much more complicated. Because as the heat photons, the rays of light, go up, they strike the atoms of the carbon dioxide molecules. The CO2 molecule is like a stick that wobbles like this.... And you cannot just argue that the more CO2 you have, the more warming you’ve got. It’s far more complicated than that, as the gentleman who spoke before me indicated. This is why it’s so simplistic when people just say, “The science is settled,” and Al Gore and people like that say, “The science is settled.” It isn’t settled!

But if one wants to see what is most likely from a scientific point of view to be the cause, it’s the variation of the magnetic fields of the Sun.

Now, if we also mention the Milankovitch cycles as well, they’re astronomical. The Moon goes around the Earth, and the Earth goes around the Sun; everybody knows that. But many people don’t realize that the Sun’s also moving through the Milky Way galaxy, and so it’s moving, obviously, on a much longer timescale than the Earth going around the Sun. But as it moves, there are variations induced by the stars and so on in the galaxy. The galaxy’s got spiral arms, and so depending on where the Sun is on its pathway, which takes many millions of years, you get these various cycles that can constructively interact with each other, or destructively interact with each other, and those can give rise, for example, to major ice ages and that type of thing.

All of this is terribly, terribly complicated. And so, anybody who believes that the science is settled, and that it’s terribly simple, you’ve just got to stop burning coal, it’s very simplistic and it’s just plain and simply not true. And I don’t think that the CO2 is a problem at all. In fact, as one of the speakers earlier said, if anything, the planet is CO2 deprived: We’ve seen a distinct greening of the planet that’s been taking place over the last number of years as the CO2 has gone up, and probably we can double the CO2, triple the CO2, without any

trouble, and the benefits would be better crop yields, more greenery around the Earth, but certainly not global warming. There might be some minor contribution, but the big one is almost certainly the Sun.

The Wages of a Transition to an All-Electric World, Powered by ‘Renewable’ Energy

Ross: To Paul Driessen, Sébastien from France asks about how do you envision the transition of the petrochemical side of the fossil fuel equation? So, claims that we’re going to decarbonize, what about petrochemicals? Anna asks about electric cars. She says, the electric car may not pollute, but what about the power that goes into it, and what about producing the car?

Paul Driessen: Let’s start with electric cars:

First, you have to make them, and that means a tremendous amount of mining for all kinds of metals and minerals in larger quantities and different types of metals and minerals than we used before, so that means far more mining on top of everything we’ve got to do for the wind turbines and solar panels and backup power batteries.

Then, if we’re going to have all these electric vehicles, we have to have that many more wind turbines and solar panels and backup batteries to power them up; we need to have much bigger charging systems, not just 110 volts here in the United States, and not even 220 volts, but a much improved transmission and operating system in our homes and our communities in order to fast-charge these vehicles, so that they can be charged up in 30 minutes or an hour, instead of many hours. The batteries when they go bad can’t really be recycled at this time. They get thrown in the trash. I think the manufacturers of the batteries and the vehicles need to take responsibility for those and take them back and find a way to recycle them.

It becomes very complicated on many, many levels; also very expensive on many levels, far more than people are willing to pay. Some interesting surveys done in the United States and elsewhere over the last couple of years, even among people who say they’re concerned about climate change and want to do something about it, indicate that what the average family is willing to pay ranges somewhere between $10 and $25, maybe $50 a month or a year.

And yet, when you look at what’s coming out of Britain in terms of projections for replacing all that equipment I talked about in my talk, all their heating

and insulation, their lighting equipment, their hot water heaters, and so forth—running it all on electricity, doing heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, for example— you’re talking about $10-, $20-, $30,000 per family, per household. So, the cost to families and businesses is going to be astronomical, and I don’t think anybody is prepared for something like that.

Ross: When you actually ask them, people say “No,” when they have the chance.

I want to get a comment from Richard McPherson, a retired U.S. Navy nuclear engineering officer. He was a U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency on a six-nation panel following the Chernobyl accident.

Do you have any question for the panel, or reflection on what you’ve heard?

Richard McPherson: First, a reflection on this panel: I’d love to have Paul Driessen’s speech, because he said what I say all the time.

The facts are not heard. The facts are lost in the noise. In 1975, when I was still on active duty, I joined the San Diego section of the American Nuclear Society: One of the things I’ve learned since then, is facts don’t matter to everyone else. And that’s really sad. And what I’ve heard today is a lot of facts, and the facts need to be heard.

There was a statement made that “we need seven terawatts of power.” Well, seven terawatts of power is about seven thousand 1,000 MW nuclear power plants which will cost us in excess of $20 trillion. I’m involved with a group right now, worldwide, for which we know of $38 trillion that’s looking to go into mostly energy projects, and the good energy projects are not there for a whole variety of reasons.

This whole thing with the IPCC: I became involved in it when I was still at the International Atomic Energy Agency. They came to us from New York and asked for information from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The International Atomic Energy Agency had good data on the environment. Our work was titled “Nuclear Fuel Cycle Facilities: The Environment and Public Opinion.” To us, who made up that six-nation group, nuclear fuel cycle facilities was easy; the environment was easy.

What we spent 50% of our time on was learning about public opinion. And public opinion is what has not been addressed, that I’m aware of, since 1975, to Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

educate the public about nuclear power, about energy, about the environment. And yet, we’ve given up all that space to the anti-nuclear people, and the bottom line is the anti-nuclear people are promoted and paid for by communists. The reason we don’t have the energy security, and economic security that we could have today, after President Eisenhower’s speech, is simply because the communists don’t want us to have it.

Global Humanitarian Resources

I think that this panel, this group, this presentation should be heard by everybody in the world. This is the single most informative group or international panel that I’ve ever listened to. I applaud you all, and I’d like to continue to help as I can. I moved to Idaho in 2015 to retire and learn how to fish. It took ’em three months to find me. In December of 2016, I finally said, “OK, they’re not going to give up, so I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted to do, because I’m not looking for a job, I’m not looking for promotion.” So, I formed a company called Global Humanitarian Resources, Inc.

Global Humanitarian Resources, Inc. is very simple: We’re looking for individual solutions under the nexus of agriculture, water, energy, that will never see the light of day for a whole variety of reasons; but by combining them with other solutions, we can create executable solutions that take agriculture, water, and energy and work together, and that’s what the world needs. And the environmental consequences come with that. The environmental consequences are better. Everything I’ve heard about, the complaints about CO2, global warming, etc., they’re all bogus—I know that, I know hundreds of researchers, good researchers that have been involved in this process for many years. I believe all of you. But what we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to somehow educate those other folks.

One of the things that came to me in 2018, while we were working with soils and water, was, I was introduced to Dr. Paul Marotta. Well, I never knew Dr. Paul Marotta, even though he designed nuclear power plants in upstate New York for the U.S. Navy. Paul was bored, because the Navy didn’t have any new nuclear power plants to design. He went out on his own. He knew what the country needed for security, so he has designed something called the molten salt nuclear battery, which will be a reality in a couple of years.

We combined his technology with what we were doing, what we called combined heat and power for greenhouses, and with a man up in Montana who

Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

started life as a farmer, grew up as a farmer; had a great life in business and was very successful. He knew that the answer was in soils. He started working on soils so that we could grow crops faster, we can reduce the need for insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, all those other -cides that I can’t pronounce. That’s why I’m a nuclear guy, because I can’t pronounce all those other words.

I’ve watched George in the last three years take a plant that was in the best soil that he had, he got two feet. Last year he got the same plant in the same period of time, three months, to grow nine feet.

So, we know that the answers are available, and the answers are available in all of these countries where you talk about 30-some countries that people need food and water. It is available with the technology we have today, right here in the United States, between Idaho and Montana, and it’s not that expensive.

We can go, take these technologies to other countries; we can help them get the water, we can help them grow the food to feed them, and there’s no excuse why we’re not doing it. Thank you.

The Paradox of the Great Oxygenation Event

Ross: Here’s two questions for you, Megan. One is about the great oxygenation catastrophe, or the great oxygenation event, where I guess it seems like from what you described, cyanobacteria performed a mass genocide and killed most of the life on the Earth, which sounds like a terrible fascist plot to me. That’s pretty brutal, if that’s actually what happened. I’m wondering if you could say how that’s a good thing, if it’s good, or what that tells us about the biosphere.

And a question from New York: “Alexander Hamilton, in his paper ‘On the Subject of Manufactures’ said that the division of labor would increase as technology became more advanced. This would require population growth. It seems that in a healthy economy, losing people could have bad economic consequences, as opposed to increasing consumption. Is there a good rate of population increase?”

So, the cyanobacteria versus population growth, do these contradict? Does this say something about economy? Pull it all together, please.

Megan Dobrodt: I have to answer them separately, instead of combined. In terms of the great oxygenation event, I think it’s a great paradox! You look back through the geological record, and there are, I think five

great extinctions. The great oxygenation event is the biggest, and most destructive of them. I think it points to a certain irony; it’s really fun. Yes, these cyanobacteria pumped out this toxin, which even they couldn’t abide, and it wiped out most living things.

But there’s a process of evolution of the system of the biosphere as a whole, which is above any particular species, and this is an important thing that Vernadsky really brought to light, which is a direction of growth, in an anti-entropic direction. And so, the catastrophe of the moment seemed to yield a new system of creatures which had a higher potential than the dominant creatures that existed before this mass extinction. And that’s also true if you look at the K-T extinction, which I pointed out with some of those charts.

I really think it’s a delightful aspect of the evolutionary process. There is an unfolding process of the development of life, which isn’t just the sum of its parts. And we’re the only species that’s able to consciously reflect on that, and then consider what is our role in that.

And then, in terms of population growth, and the fact that Hamilton observed that with a developing economy and further and further division of labor you need more people: Yes, you need more people. There’s not a number you can give to the right rate of population growth.

Man’s Limits to Growth Are Political, Our Creativity Is Unlimited

Driessen: Let me jump in just a little bit from the perspective of someone who’s been to Israel multiple times. You wouldn’t think a desert area like Israel, the Arava Valley, the Negev, and so forth, which receive about one-fourth the water in a year that Phoenix, Arizona, the greater Arizona/New Mexico area, does in the United States.

You wouldn’t think such an area could support so many people. But the Israeli drip irrigation technologies, and many other technologies, the greenhouses and

CC/Borisshin

Drip irrigation technology today provides almost half of the food crops of Israel

If you study Lyndon LaRouche’s discoveries in the science of physical economy, what he concluded is that the important thing is a system of inequalities, where the particular finite number is not what’s important, but the trajectory. Is the rate of the rate of increase growing? Is the rate at which your economic profit—and he didn’t mean monetary profit, he meant what he called “free energy” profit, that could be reinvested to grow— is the rate of the growth of profit growing? And if that’s growing, then naturally there will be a growth in the population, and that’s the measurement of a healthy economy. So, you want to look at this rate.

And I think the thing that always alarms people, at first, because of the brainwashing we’ve all had to endure, is the idea of unchecked, unending population growth. “But there has to be a limit somewhere, right?” Says who? I’ve never seen any evidence for that.

so forth, that they’ve put into place in those areas, provide almost half of the food crops, the vegetables and fruits of Israel at this point. They’re exporting well out of the Valley, way into Israel and into Europe. It’s an example of how an area that is most inhospitable to humanity and to animals, can still become tremendously fertile, with the right application of the stuff in between the walls of our head, our cranium: Human ingenuity, innovation is incredible.

There’s nothing in that perspective that limits the population, but it does say we can put a lot of people into small areas, and create the energy we need, the food we need, water from the sea. The desalination plants in Israel provide 80% of all the drinking water, and by the end of this year it’ll probably be more like 85% of all the water they drink there.

The limits to growth there, are really within the po-

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litical realm and the realm of our own creativity. If we circumscribe the amount of energy or water we’re allowing people to have, that has an impact on populations, on people’s ability to improve their lives and living standards, their health and wellbeing. But if we get the politicians and the radical alarmists out of there, the ones who are trying to scare people all the time about climate change, and what have you, the limits to our own abilities are very expansive.

We can do a lot more than we think we can. We just need to have the opportunity to debate fully and very robustly, and not have our discussion points “cancel cultured,” thrown out of the universities, out of the big tech, out of the regular media. We need to have these debates and discussions, over climate change, over water availability, over our ability to provide the energy that we need, and not destroy the planet in the name of saving it, by blanketing our planet with wind turbines, solar panels, and mines.

Small Modular Reactors and an Electrical Grid

Dr. Kemm: I would like to comment on nuclear power plants, nuclear reactors. When one hears about nuclear reactors, you often have people saying, “They’re far too expensive.” And they’re thinking about large-scale power stations which have been the norm for many years. But there’s a huge number of different reactors being developed right now: The nuclear power stations that last 20-30 years or so are typically a couple of reactors that add up to 2,000 MW. They need water cooling, and are often built on the coastlines, so we can use the ocean for water cooling.

clear ways of producing power. For example, the Perseverance rover which is now driving around on the surface of Mars, it’s nuclear powered.

But I just want to link that, also, to the concept of an electricity grid. For many countries, you don’t need an electricity grid if you have some small reactors. When electricity was first started in a place like New York and London and so on—and incidentally, New York was the second city in the world to get electric street lighting; the first was the diamond-mining town in South Africa called Kimberley. In those days, when they started with electricity, there wasn’t a national grid. Somebody started producing electricity somewhere, and distributed a few blocks, and then a few more blocks, and so

But now, there’s another group of reactors being developed called “small modular reactors,” and instead of them being, say, a 1,000-1,500 MW reactor, they’re a 100 MW reactor. Also, with the larger conventional reactors, you find they only need to be refueled ever one and a half years, so you switch it off for a refueling period. With the new, small modular reactors you don’t have to turn them off for refueling; you just keep adding either fuel balls into it, or there’s the liquid one we heard about earlier, as well.

So, there’s these, that are 100, 200 MW and so on; there’s even micro reactors now being developed, 10 MW and smaller than 10 MW, and various other nu-

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on, and it grew incrementally.

We find now, often when people refer to the very large African countries, that are very poorly electrified, they say, “You’ve got to have this grid first.” You don’t. You can, with the new concept now, have these small modular reactors and you can put them wherever you want the power. There’s two basic categories of them: There’s water-cooled ones, but there’s also gas-cooled ones. South Africa has the most southerly nuclear power station in the world called Koeberg, down by Cape Town, and it supplies power from the bottom up.

Virtually all of South Africa’s coal is in the northeast; I’m sitting in Pretoria right now, but the distance

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Perseverance rover operating on the surface of Mars is nuclear powered.

between me and Cape Town where the nuclear reactor is, is the same distance as Rome to London. They’re conceptually completely different from any European countries. You can’t go to some of these African countries that are very under-electrified and say, “Build an entire national grid, to put wind turbines and solar panels and whatever in there,” before you can electrify the country. A far quicker way is to get a small modular reactor that’s gas-cooled.

South Africa recognized this, and in the 1990s started to develop a small modular reactor, probably the most advanced development in the world at the time The team grew to a size of 2,000 people, and it was then put on ice for a while because of antinuclear sentiment, and the 2008 financial crash in the U.S., and so on. That was called the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, PBMR.

Afterwards, when a lot of the people had dispersed and gone into other jobs, another group started developing a modified version of PBMR, called the HTMR-100, a 100 MW reactor; some of that team is still working in Pretoria today, developing that concept. It’s a much-faster-toconstruct reactor, cheaper-to-construct reactor. Ideally, you need something like a HTMR-100 in many places around the world with a radial grid around it that only needs to be 10-20 km wide. It can serve one industrial area; it can serve one town. As time goes by, you can link a number of these grids up, to incrementally improve the size of the national grid, but it’s not a necessity to have a massive national grid before you put something into it.

solutions—wind, solar, hydrogen, batteries—just are not going to make the grade for them. So, nuclear is available for everybody at various different scales.

Ross: There are several follow-up questions. Zikhele asks—and this is for Dr. Kemm: “South Africa was a leader in small modular reactors, with its 160 MWe PBMR that was shelved in 2010, and with TRISO fuel manufacturing. What advice would you give South Africa about its pebble bed modular reactor program?”

From Carlo in Italy: “I’d like the nuclear scientists on the panel to stress the ability of nuclear fission to provide humanity with clean energy for millennia, especially by means of the fast breeder reactors.”

Of course, the smaller reactors are far cheaper and far easier to put in place, because these small modular reactors can be largely built indoors in a factory environment, and the components can be taken out, like a Lego set, and put together onsite.

So, the assumption that a country has to be very wealthy and have huge sophistication technologically and so on before it can go nuclear is just false. Already, there’s about a dozen African countries, over and above South Africa, that have indicated to the International Atomic Energy Agency that they intend following a nuclear future, because they realize that some of the other

From Miguel, in Spain: “Today it’s not possible to store energy on a large scale. This is a great problem in physics. The solution is to make energy through continuous production, natural gas, carbon thermal power plants, nuclear plants. If we use renewable energies, with production that’s discontinuous, we won’t have energy for all.”

Advantages of the Great Energy Density of Nuclear Fuel

Dr. Romanello: Let me start with one simple example. A pellet of uranium oxide weighing 7 grams can produce the energy that can provide the heat or electric energy of an average U.S. citizen or European for one year. That 7-gram pellet costs around $10. Well, this is

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NuScale Power

A cross-section of NuScale’s design of a reactor building, containing multiple small nuclear reactor modules.

the present technology of the present reactors. To obtain 1 kg of this fuel, we use 10 kg of natural uranium, and of this fuel, after getting rid of 9 kg and using only 1 kg out of 10 kg, we burn only 5% of this pellet. This means 5% of 10%. If we use the whole amount of the uranium that we extract from mines, we could multiply the energy resources, the amount of fissile material by a factor of 200. Which means, we could use nuclear energy, not for one or two centuries, but for millennia.

This is the importance of fourth-generation technology research. Some of these reactors are being built around the world, but of course some R&D is necessary, but this is much easier and faster than fusion. I’m not saying that we don’t have to make research on fusion, I’m simply saying that it would be fundamental from my point of view, to use fission technology as a bridge technology toward fusion.

This [showing it] is a pellet of a fast reactor. This much smaller pellet can provide the same amount of energy as the 7-gram pellet I just showed you, even though it’s hard to see. It can produce the energy of 3 barrels of oil, or 1 ton of coal, speaking about the concentration of energy. And this [showing a marble-sized spherical pellet], just to be clear, would be the amount of vitrified waste produced in one year by each of us, using only nuclear energy.

So, we are using today a technology which was exploited for nuclear submarines, and it was very useful for them, but of course, it’s not the best thing to do for exploiting the resources. On the other hand, we know that there will be a spectacular increase in energy demand in the next years, especially starting in the next half of this century. It was mentioned that we will need 7,000 new reactors. Well, this is a possibility, but you also need to fabricate the manufacturing fuel plants, reprocessing plants, transport, and to exploit efficiently the research, otherwise you can step into a black hole somehow.

Speaking about the small modular reactors: There is this trend today to develop many designs—there are many, and they are interesting, of course, because you can reduce the upfront costs, of course. In some areas they are very good, of course, when you don’t have big net which can transport energy, but let’s consider, however, that the small modular reactors can be not that convenient from the price point of view, from the cost of energy point of view. They are very effective in small

countries, in developing countries and remote islands, yes. But not necessarily everywhere. In some other places, big plants are a better choice.

Politicians Crave Certainty, Scientists Pursue the Unknown

Ross: Professor Scafetta, let me turn to you for some of the other climate questions. One person wrote in, saying: “Listening to the speaker from Switzerland [Emanuel Höhener], on the voting result and his explanation on the subject about the CO2 referendum, I can imagine very well that politicians, not only in Switzerland, do not understand at all what they are doing to their countries in the name of climate.”

In another question, somebody asks: “In your field of climate science, given the amount of disagreement, what kind of response do you get from your ideas?” So, if you present your ideas at a climate conference of climate scientists, what happens?

Scafetta: Well, that is a very interesting question. Regarding the first question, how the politicians react to these changes? Let me say, it’s very difficult to answer this question, because politicians reason in a way very different from scientists. A politician would like to have certainties, he would like everything to be clear, everything is certain, so they can make a decision. Scientists instead look for uncertainties, so they put the emphasis on what is not known. So that is the way scientists act, we look for what we do not know, and we try to find the answer to new things. And this makes it very difficult to talk with politicians, because they would like to have an answer, on everything.

Right now, the simplest answer to climate change is given by the climate models. The models tell us that CO2 is the main driver of climate change, and so on, so that is the simplest answer.

What the politician should understand is that the models need to agree with the data. They need to reconstruct climate change that was observed in the past— and unfortunately the models fail in doing this. Therefore, the models are useless for predicting future climate change, or interpreting correctly the climate change during the last 100 years. But this is very difficult for politicians to accept, because then other interests come in. Also, we know that there is a huge amount of financial interest behind this topic: A lot of people have invested a huge amount of money and of course, these

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people would not like to lose money, and therefore, they influence politics.

Regarding how the scientists behave: This is very difficult to answer, too. Here in Italy, we had many, many scientists who signed the letter where we informed the politicians that things were not clear at all. We had hundreds of scientists from several universities who had signed such a letter. So many, many scientists agreed with what I say, that science is complex, that science is not settled on this topic, and we need to be very careful about what we are doing.

But the politicians don’t want to listen to complex topics. So, it’s a difficulty, and we need to find a way to communicate with politicians better, because if they don’t listen, or if they just listen to some very naive interpretation about climate change which is the one given by the climate models, then we will end up in big problems.

As I showed in my talk, China is not doing much, and that is also because there the scientists don’t say that climate change is so dangerous. The same thing in Russia. Russian scientists don’t say that there is this climate “emergency.” In Europe, in United States, there is some pushing.

Another issue regarding politics and science, is that in Europe, and also in the United States, it seems there is also political interference on what scientists can do. For example, we know that most science in Europe and the United States is paid by the government, so it’s possible that many scientists just receive money to say what the government would like to hear, to sustain some politics they have. But this is not the way how science should act, and climate—the data show that we are talking about a very complex issue, and so we need to be very, very careful about this.

Ross: What you brought up about chasing money, or the need to get grant money, and therefore saying things that are going to be received well by the people with all the money, in the case of the government, or in the case of—you know, the huge amount of money that’s flowing into green things overall, where the Bank of England says we have to put the money, and BlackRock says we have to study climate impacts to measure the value of financial instruments.

I was just thinking about how on the lower level, you get something as small as say, YouTube, putting up warning messages, like, “Uh-oh, here’s a scientist saying something that YouTube has decided is wrong,

therefore you shouldn’t be allowed to hear it, or you should be ashamed of yourself, and we’ll tell you that this is very bad because a video website should obviously be able to tell scientists what they may and may not discuss!” I mean, it’s like creating a sense where you don’t even try to figure out what’s true; you start to become used to this idea of just, you’re told—you’re told.

Roberto from Italy asks Megan: “I ask if you envision a growth of population in the universe, coming back to a conception of jobs contracts, directly under a big public, or private program, like the New Deal, or the work of Enrico Mattei? Or, do you imagine that the development of population within the universe where almost all current and future members of the world’s population must make a job by themselves, the cult of the ‘self-made man,’” which Roberto thinks would lead to no more future other than being the new homeless.

Another question, from Samuel: “Doesn’t the world need more responsible people? Because even if our

numbers are not a threat, our irresponsibility could be threatening.”

The Biogenic Migration of Atoms by Technology

Dobrodt: I want to reference something I said in passing in my presentation, which is Vladimir Vernadsky’s conception of the biogenic migration of atoms by technology. Remember, this is where living forms aren’t transforming the chemistry of the planet by passing material through their bodies, but actually moving it, changing it. Animals do this in a very limited way:

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YouTube acts as Big Brother when it censures content.

Beavers build dams, earthworms turn up the soil, and so forth, but this is really what we as humans do. One of the important aspects of that—what Vernadsky points to as the substrate of the noösphere—is that it’s not just the individual mind, it’s also the social organization of man. We change our behavior and we organize society to carry certain things out.

One of the very important technological breakthroughs in that domain was the discovery of a republican form of government. And one of the beautiful manifestations of that was what Franklin Roosevelt organized in the United States to get this nation out of the Great Depression, and his intention that after the war, there would be no more colonialism, and we would work with other nations, show them what we did in the United States, how we did it, and move into an era of great, big projects as an incredible social effort of humanity.

That may a kind of long-winded way of saying it— yes, I’m going to keep calling it technology—that this, developed in terms of the American Republic, and in our ability to organize efforts among mankind that no individual can carry out on his or her own, absolutely will have to be the mode of existence of human progress for many, many centuries to come. I can’t predict thousands of years into the future what will be developed, but I think we can say that with certainty at least for the next several centuries.

In terms of needing more “responsible” people, the way I’ll answer that is, again, referring back to something I brought up, which we discussed earlier, which is these great extinctions. In the biosphere, there is antientropic perpetual progress of the biosphere. But not of individual species. Individual species within that will go extinct. All living matter, or forms of living matter at some point will go extinct as they are outmoded by the biosphere’s rate of progress.

Human beings are different. We don’t evolve biologically. What goes extinct with man, hopefully is not “us” in a nuclear war, but in the best scenario what goes extinct are outmoded ideas. We lay to rest and leave behind us unworthy, or outmoded, or, in some cases, evil ideas. And if you want to make a responsible human species, you should leave behind oligarchism forever.

The Real and the Ideological

Ross: A couple of more questions that have come in. Elliott says: “Could you comment on the process in Italy about the debates or webinars on climate change,

and the purpose of the letter to the nuclear energy institute that Dr. Kemm and Dr. Shanahan have worked on? Why are these developments, why are these debates taking place now?”

Prof. Scafetta: It is very important that people learn how science really works, and that people realize that climate science is very complex. It’s not settled at all. People should understand why it’s not settled: Because the climate models are not able to reproduce the climate of the past, therefore, we cannot trust this modelling interpreting the climate change that we have observed during the last 100 years. To understand this is not very difficult. Often people who look at it, can realize it. So, it is not really difficult.

My hope is that people will realize these things more and more, will realize that we are in a time where, in my opinion, there is an ideological push to many things in Europe and the United States. I hope that people realize that this pushing exists only in Europe and the United States. In the other parts of the world, the things are quite different.

First, we need to understand the difference between what is real and what is ideology; that is perhaps the most important thing. There is too much ideology on this topic. When we hear these things from the TV, from the media, from politicians, we are hearing not about science but about ideology. I think people should learn how to listen to scientists and listen to what they really do, to learn how to listen to the debate that happened in the scientific circles, to learn what is the debate in the scientific journals. There are a lot of websites on the internet that help people to understand, in part, these debates.

I just invite people to learn more about this topic, so they can eventually convince or force the politicians to make the right choices for everybody. That is my last invitation.

In Italy we are doing something, we are doing some in Europe, we are doing some in the United States, many people are doing many things, like yourself. I am optimistic about this, but I think it will be a long fight.

Humanity: Our Most Valuable Resource

Ross: Thank you for being with us, today. Dr. Romanello, your concluding thoughts?

Dr. Romanello: I certainly understood one thing that is obvious for many of us, probably, but it’s nonWho’s Afraid of CO ₂?

sense for others: The plain fact is that the biggest resource that we have in this world is not uranium mines, iron mines or aluminum mines, but it’s humanity, it’s people. It’s their ability to make smart networking, peaceful sharing of ideas and producing new technologies: This is by far the best, most reliable, and most solid energy resource, food resource and water resource that we have. The sooner we understand it, the better it is.

Dr. Kemm: I think a significant problem which has to be addressed, now, is how to talk to the public. What we’ve found over the last number of years, is that the technology of the news media and of publications in general has gone ahead dramatically. During the Vietnam War, the video footage that came out of the Vietnam War was still on film. They had to film it, race to the airport with a can, put it on an airplane, take it all the way back to the U.S., have it processed, and so on.

Now, you can stand somewhere with a cell phone and you can video something, and it can be on world news moments later. So that what is happening is that information is being given to the public very, very rapidly, and often in a way that hasn’t been interpreted correctly. Unfortunately, a lot of science sounds as if it’s easy, so there are far too many people that feel that if they just know some little bit about science, then A+B=C, and then they know what’s going on. It’s far more complicated than that.

Earlier, I mentioned cardiologists, for example. You’d never find a group of people in a pub, just having a discussion on how to do a heart transplant. But there are people in a pub who will just have a discussion on how to produce electricity, or that nuclear is bad, or something like that.

So, one of the issues is, how do we get more scientists to talk to the public? And how do we also get the people that are producing the news media, whether it’s television, or whether it’s magazines, whether it’s internet, and so on, to actually go and talk to scientists and try and interpret the truth. Otherwise, we have enthusiastic people in the public, who think they’re doing something good, and going out and they’re spreading wrong stories; the politicians then want to be where the popular opinion is, so they repeat the wrong stories, because they feel it will gain them the most votes.

That’s where the snag is at the moment: There’s a mismatch between the scientists who actually know what’s going on, and the picture that’s generated in the

worldwide media that gets people’s attention. So, many people have got the wrong ideas, and they don’t know that. They’re just doing it from a good heart. Of course, there’s also people who are deliberately trying to manipulate it, who feed incorrect information. But by far, the majority of people are well-meaning, honest, decent people, who’ve just got the wrong end of the stick. And that’s a big snag at the moment.

Dobrodt: I’m very happy and excited with this panel today. I think we should be sure to get it out far and wide, continue the discussion. I’ll just put a call out to everyone watching, to organize with us. I think everyone on this panel, is in their way, making tremendous efforts to—I was going to say, “correct the mistakes,” but they’re not really mistakes, are they—to crush these lies that are really threatening human progress and human existence.

Ross: I’d like to give the final word of our panel, here, to Lyndon LaRouche, to some brief remarks. Megan, you had talked about some things that should go extinct, like oligarchism; maybe like the anaerobic creatures that existed before the great oxygenation event. Here Mr. LaRouche is speaking on June 27, 2007 to a group of young people interested in his ideas and in his runs for the presidency of the United States.

See Your Identity as a Mission To Secure Humanity’s Survival

Lyndon LaRouche: And it’s in that part of our life, in our determination to express that—into a future which exists beyond our death: That, is the meaning of human life....

And the problem that you have, in your generation: You are young adults, where an older adult generation has failed, existentially. There may be individuals in the older generation who have not failed, but the generation as a whole, especially the white-collar generation has failed. They’ve failed catastrophically.

Your job, because you are receptive to these ideas of principle, to the notion of the individual as immortal, an immortal personality, despite the death of the mortal body, is your destiny, and your responsibility to guide the changes which must occur in society, if society itself is to survive. And therefore, your generation has a unique historical role, in the existence of mankind as a whole.

And to understand this in yourself, and to see your identity as so situated, is my mission for you.

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₂?

Stopping the Swiss-EU Negotiations and Voting Down the CO2 Tax Law

by Reinhard Greter

This is the edited transcript of Swiss entrepreneur Reinhard Greter’s presentation to a June 16, 2021 online seminar on the reasons for the failure of the EUSwitzerland Framework Agreement and the CO2 law. The seminar was sponsored by the Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität (BüSo), the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity, a German political party founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Subheads have been added.

EU and Swiss Government Systems Differ

The government systems of the EU and Switzerland could not be more different. Below is a list of the divergences.

The EU has a top-down system of government. That means, parlia ment and government decide, and citizens have to act on it, no matter what the topic. The EU citizens can vote once every four years and based on the results of the individ ual countries, parliamentary groups are put together in the EU Parlia ment. This means that individuals are not elected as members of par liament, but those who are elected to the EU Parliament are sent de pending on the party strength of the individual country.

Switzerland has a system that is organized from the bottom up. That means that the highest authority in the state are the citizens. The parlia ment, both the National Council (representatives, large chamber) and the Council of States (two representatives per canton, small chamber) are also elected every four years. In Switzerland, we maintain a concordance system, which means that the four parties with the most voters make up the Federal Council, which is then elected by parliament. This constitutes itself, that is, the departments are determined and distributed coopera-

tively and the Federal President, who heads the body, is newly appointed every year.

Direct democracy allows the following in our system:

• No long-term power for individual members of the government.

• If the federal state and parliament decide something that some of the citizens do not like, a “referendum” can be called, which requires a collection of 50,000 valid signatures. This can block a deal in that there is a referendum on it. This deprives the Federal Council of the power to make decisions without public con-

Wikimedia/Andrew Toskin

On June 13, Swiss voters pried the cover of lies off the Green New Deal, and voted it down.

If some of the citizens want to bring a concern to the people, there is the “right of initiative,” which requires a collection of 100,000 valid signatures. This means that the issue can be brought before the people in a vote.

In addition to the right to vote, we can also vote on technical issues— for example, on tax increases or reductions, or additions or deletions to the constitution, or on the enactment or deletion of laws, etc.

We usually have four voting

Our constitution can only be amended by means of a referendum. This also requires a “cantonal majority” where small cantons carry equal weight to big ones.

How did this system affect the Framework Agreement?

Some History of the Framework Agreement

A brief historical summary: In 1992 the Swiss people decided against joining the European Economic Area (EEA). This fact led to bilateral agreements being negotiated on an equal footing in order to regulate a regular relationship in mutual coexistence.

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In the meantime, the EU emerged from the EEA. The question of direct EU participation became once again the center of attention. EU membership would totally undermine our direct democracy, and this fact divided the citizenry.

The government then sent a membership application to Brussels, but this was never put into effect. Membership in the EU would not have stood a chance in a referendum.

Then came the idea of the Framework Agreement, an action by the then President [of the European Commission], José Manuel Barroso, and with that began the misery. Above all, Left and Green circles and also the federal administration, as well as a majority in the Federal Council, were in favor of such an agreement.

Negotiations began, and the problem was that the Swiss negotiator was an EU supporter. He then responded to the EU’s demands too quickly and too naively. Most of the treaty was to the advantage of the EU. It was then negotiated and negotiated ... and for a long time it was agreed not to disclose the content. Years later, this treaty was revealed, and three issues emerged that the people would never have agreed to. These official topics were:

• Wage protection was mainly demanded by the trade unions, their fear being that citizens who immigrate from the EU would lower our wage level.

• The Union Citizens Directive, an intrusion into our social system, was fought above all by right-wing circles. Every EU citizen would have the right to receive the same social benefits even though he never paid for them.

• The free movement of people, also opposed by right-wing circles, their fear being that citizens who immigrate from the EU would undermine our social system.

These three points were discussed and negotiated from bottom to top and vice versa until no one understood what it was all about. In my opinion, these reasons were all a pretext; what it really was about was never clearly stated. The following is a selection:

• We recognize financial equalization among the cantons, that is to say; financially strong cantons support financially weak cantons. These amounts do not have to be repaid by the weak cantons. (This right would be nullified.)

• Our cantonal banking system would be undermined (state support is not allowed).

• Since the cantons are the owners of our National Bank, their surpluses are distributed to the cantons (state aid, that would no longer be possible.)

• We would be required to adopt current and future EU law. We could still vote against it, but if the EU officials didn’t like it, we would be subject to compensatory measures or, better, sanctions. (Why should we punish ourselves?)

• We would be required to accept future laws that we cannot anticipate.

Framework Agreement Would Nullify Swiss Constitution

Many provisions in this Framework Agreement are diametrically opposed to our Constitution. That would be the end of our direct democracy. The EU has insisted that it is no longer ready for further negotiations. The pressure on the Federal Council not to sign this treaty grew steadily. According to the Federal Council, this treaty would never have had a chance of being adopted in a popular vote. According to surveys, those in favor of joining the EU are only at around 10%. This means that many party members are no longer fully behind the decisions of the party leadership. For these reasons, the Federal Council broke off the negotiations. The supporters of the Framework Agreement are simply sore losers who are already trying to restart negotiations or want to ask the Federal Council to apply for membership.

Switzerland is under no compulsion to act; most bilateral agreements are to the advantage of the EU, so why should the EU terminate these agreements? I also took a look at the trade balance between Switzerland and Germany. Switzerland imports one billion fewer goods from Germany than the other way ’round, which means that Germany earns one billion euros every year with Switzerland. Hopefully, the EU will not open a trade war against Switzerland.

Access to the domestic market (in which we would have to adopt all EU rules) is not absolutely necessary for Switzerland. A market access like we have to all countries with which we trade would be sufficient. We do not ask the EU to adapt to our rules if they do business with us. Trade between countries only takes place in statistics, in reality trade is between suppliers and buyers, who are usually harassed by regulatory and fiscal measures from their own countries as well.

It follows that only well-run companies can create wealth, but never politics. If our negotiators would

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rather sit in the chair of the opposing side, rather than in their own, when drafting contracts, then nothing useful can come about. At least nothing that is in line with our direct democracy.

Many politicians feel far too important; they would like to make their own decisions like their colleagues abroad, but thanks to our system, they cannot do that. That is why you should never send a Federal Councilor to negotiate. What is said is said; a Federal Councilor can then no longer deviate from his statement, whereas a negotiator can object that he must first consult the government on this issue. A Federal Councilor should only be sent abroad to for the signing and toasting.

That was a résumé of the last 30 years of cooperation between Europe and Switzerland.

The CO2 Law’s Provisions

Now to the CO2 law.

First, good news: on June 13th, this law was rejected in a vote by the people; that is, the government has lost to the people. Two months before the vote, the polls were still at 60% for the law. In the last week before the vote, the ratio had deteriorated to 50:50, so a close result was expected. After the votes were counted, 51.6% were against and only 48.4% were in favor.

But how did this CO2 law come about? This was decided in parliament (the legislative authority) by the Left-Green side and handed over to the Federal Council (the executive authority) for execution. Only one party opposed this, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). On the other hand, a referendum was then called by the people. Thus a referendum vote was forced. The idea for this law was related to climate change (which has been taking place since our planet has existed, even without people), with the claim that climate change was manmade.

Here are some examples of this law:

Basically, everything that pollutes the climate is charged a fee, and people who live “climate-consciously” get something back (steering tax). So, what pollutes the climate, who pays, and who gets something back? A huge administrative task that requires additional federal staff. It was promised that only about 20 new jobs were needed?!? Until everything works smoothly, it will require many times more staff in the future.

Oil and gas pollute the climate. A petroleum price surcharge of CHF (Confoederatio Helvetica franc) 0.12

per liter is required; those who drive a lot pay more. That seems fair at first sight. In rural areas, however, where people are dependent on a car, they usually drive longer distances and are therefore asked to pay more.

Fuel oil penalty fee: CHF 2,200 per household per year, for a family of four. This is CHF 550 per person. Not all of them can switch to more climate-friendly heating systems in the short term.

Flying pollutes the climate. A fee of between CHF 30 and CHF 120 is added to the regular flight price, depending on the destination, short- to long-haul routes.

Road pricing: costs. CHF 1,000 per 10,000 kilometers. People who depend on a car and drive longer distances are, again, asked to pay more. Should driving only be possible for the rich?

Fee for the use of nuclear power: Electricity comes from the outlet! Who calculates who consumes how much nuclear power? It mainly affects companies, tenants, and homeowners. The landlords will pass on these additional costs directly to the tenants. Another huge administrative effort. (With 20 additional positions, throughout Switzerland?!?)

Solar power obligation: CHF 2,600 per household per year, with the aim of replacing all oil heating systems by 2030. If a homeowner converts to solar power, there are costs (depending on the location, between CHF 80 and 100,000). The remuneration is a maximum of CHF 5,000 (a ± 30-year period is required until the whole thing is amortized). Many older homeowners who live on retirement income would no longer get mortgages or loans to finance a renovation.

That is just a selection from the catalog of demands that Left-Greeners employ. This catalog can be expanded immeasurably in the future. So, an absolute sham for the citizens, nothing more than hidden taxes or a Left-Green fee monster.

“We are rich” and we can afford it, is the proponents’ motto.

Another goal is to raise (create) a climate fund of CHF 1,000,000,000 to finance environmentally friendly projects. Then whatever that is, it’s an incredible redistribution mechanism.

During the referendum campaign, the supporters [of the Act] lied about the incentive taxes that citizens would have to pay, whatever the case. This exposed to the citizens the sham package in this law, which ultimately led to this positive result for the opponents of this law. Who’s Afraid of CO ₂?

IV. International News

Xi Jinping to the ‘Summit of the CPC and World Political Parties’

July 8—The full text of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s keynote speech, “Strengthening Cooperation Among Political Parties to Jointly Pursue the People’s Wellbeing,” opening the “Summit of the CPC and World Political Parties” on July 6 follows below. The Summit was attended by leaders of 500 political organizations and parties, representing 160 countries.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and Chairman of the Schiller Institute was an invited guest as was Jacques Cheminade, as the President of the LaRouche cothinker organization in France, Solidarité et Progrès.

Following the event, Zepp-LaRouche noted that the breadth of participation and repeated expressions of thanks for China’s unique support for development through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and extraordinary medical support during the COVID pandemic, made the repeated claims by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others that China is “isolated in the world community” due to its supposed “malign actions,” an absurdity.

The twenty-one speakers at the summit, after President Xi, were fifteen Prime Ministers or Presidents, starting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The others were political party leaders. The 21 nations were South Africa, Kazakhstan, Russia, Argentina, Vietnam, Cuba, the Philippines, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Serbia, Pakistan, Mozambique, Namibia, Congo-Brazzaville, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Morocco, the Republic of South Sudan, Spain, and Greece.

Your Excellencies leaders of political parties, Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to join you, leaders of more than 500 political parties, political and other organizations from over 160 countries as well as the ten thousand and more representatives of political parties

and various circles, at this on-line event to discuss the important question of “working for the people’s wellbeing and the responsibility of political parties,” just as the Communist Party of China (CPC) reaches its one hundredth anniversary. Over the past weeks, more than 600 political parties, political and other organizations from over 170 countries have sent 1,500-plus congratulatory messages and letters on the CPC’s centenary

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Xi Jinping, President of China.

conveying their goodwill and best wishes. I wish to take this opportunity to express to all of you, on behalf of the Communist Party of China, our heartfelt thanks!

A few days ago, we celebrated the CPC’s centenary with a grand gathering. Over the past hundred years, the CPC has united and led the Chinese people in working ceaselessly towards the tremendous transformation of the Chinese nation from standing up and growing prosperous to becoming strong. Over the past hundred years, the CPC has persisted in closely associating the future of the Chinese people with that of other peoples of the world and steered the course of China’s development amid the general trend of the world and the currents of the times to promote common development and prosperity of all countries.

The historic achievements the CPC and the Chinese people have made would not have been possible without the generous support of world peoples.

Here, on behalf of the CPC and the Chinese people, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to political parties, peoples and friends of all countries who have cared about, supported and helped the CPC and the cause of revolution, development and reform in China.

famine and diseases remain prevalent, and estrangement and confrontation grow even deeper. The call for a better life from people of all countries is becoming all the more loud and clear.

Today, human society has once again found itself at a historic crossroads. It is about hostile confrontation or mutual respect, seclusiveness and decoupling or openness and cooperation, zero-sum game or win-win results. The choice is in our hands and the responsibility falls on our shoulders.

Viewed from the perspective of “my own country first,” the world is a cramped and crowded place perpetuated in fierce competition. Viewed from the perspective of “a global community with a shared future,” the world is a vast and broad place full of cooperation opportunities.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends,

The world today is undergoing profound transformation unseen in a century, amid which the trend of multi-polarity and economic globalization is experiencing a sea change, and countries are becoming increasingly intertwined, interdependent and interconnected. To cope with COVID-19, restart the economy, and safeguard world stability, the international community has made strenuous efforts. Political parties in various countries have also exhibited a strong sense of responsibility by making active explorations. Meanwhile, in some places, wars and conflicts are still raging,

The human race is an integral community and the planet Earth its homeland. In the face of common challenges, no person or country can remain insulated. The only way out is to work together in harmony with one accord. Political parties, as an important force behind human progress, need to set the right course forward and shoulder their historic responsibility to ensure the people’s wellbeing and pursue human progress. In my view, political parties need to work even harder on the following:

First, we need to shoulder the responsibility to steer the course by seizing and shaping the shared future for mankind. People aspire to affluence and contentment. They yearn for fairness and justice. Great times call for grand architecture, and grand architecture calls for great vision. Viewed from the perspec-

EIRNS/James Rea

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and Chairman of the Schiller Institute.

tive of “my own country first,” the world is a cramped and crowded place perpetuated in fierce competition. Viewed from the perspective of “a global community with a shared future,” the world is a vast and broad place full of cooperation opportunities. We need to heed the voices of the people, follow the trend of the times and strengthen coordination and cooperation. By doing so, the interests of the people of one country will be kept in line with those of all others and humanity will move forward towards a shared future.

Second, we need to shoulder the responsibility to build consensus by upholding and promoting the common values of humanity. Despite differences among countries in history, culture, institution and level of development, their peoples do subscribe to the common values of humanity for peace, development, equity, justice, democracy, and freedom. With a strong sense of responsibility for the future of all mankind, we need to champion the common values of humanity, foster broad-minded tolerance toward the understanding of values by different civilizations, and respect the explorations of different peoples to turn values into reality. By doing so, the common values of humanity will be translated into the practice of individual countries to serve the interests of their own people in a concrete and realistic way.

see to it that the fruits of development are shared by all. We need to bring greater equity, higher efficiency and stronger synergy to global development, and jointly oppose the practice of seeking technology blockade and divide as well as decoupling. I believe that, in the final analysis, any political manipulation for the purpose of sabotaging the development of other countries and undercutting the livelihood of

All countries and nations are equally entitled to development opportunities and rights to development. We need to face squarely up to major problems such as wealth gap and development divide, with particular attention and care given to underdeveloped countries and regions, and impoverished people so that hope prevails in every corner of the world.

other peoples will receive little support and prove to be futile.

Third, we need to shoulder the responsibility to promote development by bringing greater benefits to all peoples in a fairer manner. Development holds the key to the people’s well-being. On the road to the well-being of all mankind, no country or nation should be left behind. All countries and nations are equally entitled to development opportunities and rights to development. We need to face squarely up to major problems such as wealth gap and development divide, with particular attention and care given to underdeveloped countries and regions, and impoverished people so that hope prevails in every corner of the world. As an ancient Chinese adage goes, “Those who only seek comfort for themselves will ultimately be rejected and those who sacrifice their own interests for the success of others will be supported.” Development is the right of all countries, rather than an exclusive privilege of the few. We need to enable all countries to step up development cooperation, and

Fourth, we need to shoulder the responsibility to enhance cooperation by working together to address global risks and challenges. In the face of the on-going COVID-19, we need to continue with a science-based response approach and advocate solidarity and cooperation so as to close the “immunization gap.” We must oppose the practice of politicizing the pandemic or attaching a geographical label to the virus. We need to work together to build a global community of health for all. In the face of terrorism and other common enemies of mankind, we need to pursue security and stability through cooperation so as to tighten the security fences together. In the face of the fragile ecological environment, we need to respect Mother Nature, follow the laws of Nature and protect her so as to build a green homeland together. In the face of the severe challenges to human existence and development brought about by climate change, we need to be brave enough to take responsibilities and work as one to find a way of harmonious co-existence between man and Nature.

Fifth, we need to shoulder the responsibility to improve governance by enhancing our capacity to ensure the people’s well-being. There are different pathways toward well-being. People of all countries are entitled to choose their own development paths and institutional models. This, in itself, is what well-being en-

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tails. In the same vein, democracy is the right of all peoples, rather than an exclusive privilege of the few. There are multiple ways and means to realize democracy, instead of a single stereotype. The judgment on whether a country is democratic or not should be made by their people, not by the handful of others. To advance political democracy in a way that suits the national conditions of a country, we need to strengthen exchanges and mutual learning, improve mechanisms for communication, be fully aware of public opinion, put into place well-fledged institutions and enhance our governance capacity. By doing so, our capacity and efficacy to ensure the people’s well-being will be elevated continuously.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends,

Working for the people’s well-being has been the original aspiration the Communist Party of China cherishes all the way. With the goal of moderate prosperity in all respects achieved, China has embarked on a new journey towards building a modern socialist country. The Chinese people are brimming with a greater sense of fulfillment, happiness and security with each passing day. It is the unswerving goal of the CPC to run our own house well, ensure a happy life for the 1.4 billion plus Chinese people, and advance the lofty cause of promoting peace and development of all mankind. The CPC will continue to uphold the peoplecentered development philosophy, reflect upon the overarching issues of national rejuvenation and human progress in the greater context of time and space and lead the entire Chinese people in creating an even better tomorrow through ceaseless pursuit and in an enterprising spirit.

As history has taught us, we can only embrace the future when we embrace the world, and can only travel safe and sound when we walk together. The CPC stands

ready to work with political parties throughout the world to live our dreams and act to create a better future. Let us always be builders of world peace, advocates for global development, and guardians of the international order.

• The CPC will unite and lead the Chinese people in pressing ahead with the Chinese-style modernization to make new contributions to humanity’s search for ways to modernize. Proceeding from reality in all it does, the CPC has led the Chinese people in finding, through trial and error, the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. History and practice have proven and will continue to prove that this is not only the correct path that works, but also the sure path that pays off. We will unswervingly follow the path leading to a bright future to ensure that development is pursued for both our own good and the benefit of the world. There doesn’t exist a fixed model for the path to modernization, and the one that suits you well will serve you well. Cutting one’s feet to fit the shoes will lead nowhere. All efforts of individual countries to independently explore the path to modernization in light of their specific national conditions are worthy of respect. The CPC is willing to share with political parties of all countries modernization experience to enrich each other’s toolbox to modernization for better ensur-

S&P

Jacques Cheminade (center), President of the French political party, Solidarité et Progrès, with a delegation from that party.

ing the well-being of their own people and all other peoples.

• The CPC will unite and lead the Chinese people in taking comprehensive steps to deepen reform and opening up to make new contributions to shared development and prosperity of all countries of the world. Currently, economic globalization, despite facing considerable headwinds, has in store even greater impetus

change. China is going to host the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, where parties will consult with one another on new strategies for biodiversity and embark on a new journey of global biodiversity governance.

Proceeding from reality in all it does, the CPC has led the Chinese people in finding, through trial and error, the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

to move forward. On the whole, the impetus prevails over the headwinds and the trend towards opening-up and cooperation in all countries remains unchanged, and will not change. The CPC is ready to enhance communication with world political parties in steering economic globalization towards greater openness, inclusiveness, balance and win-win results. We stand ready to work with the international community to improve global connectivity and further promote high quality Belt and Road cooperation, so that more countries and peoples will be able to share the fruits of development.

• The CPC will shoulder its responsibilities as a major political party in a major country to make new contributions to improving the well-being of mankind. The eradication of poverty has been a common aspiration of people of all countries and an important objective that all political parties strive to achieve. Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, all the 98.99 million rural residents living below the current poverty line in China have been lifted out of poverty, enabling China to meet the poverty reduction target set out in the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule. The CPC is willing to contribute more Chinese solutions and Chinese strength to the poverty reduction process worldwide. It will spare no effort to support international cooperation against COVID-19 and to enhance the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in developing countries. China will make extremely arduous efforts in delivering its promise of achieving carbon peak and carbon neutrality and contribute more to the global fight against climate

• The CPC will actively improve global governance to make new contributions to humanity’s joint response to common challenges. Multilateralism has been the core concept of the current international system and order. The better multilateralism is practiced, the faster humanity’s common problems will be resolved. International rules should be based on universally-recognized norms rather than rules of the few. Cooperation among countries should aim at serving all mankind instead of seeking hegemony by way of group politics. We should stand opposed to the practice of unilateralism disguised as multilateralism and say no to hegemony and power politics. Upholding the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, China is of the view that matters concerning all shall be handled through joint consultation so that the international order and system will be more just and equitable. I wish to reiterate that China will always be a member of the developing world, and is committed to enhancing their representation and voice in the global governance system. China will never seek hegemony, expansion, or a sphere of influence. The CPC will work with political parties of all countries to promote state-to-state coordination and cooperation through party-to-party consultation and cooperation and bring into better play the due role of political parties in global governance.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends, Our journey ahead will be a long and arduous one. But as long as we press ahead with a sense of perseverance, there will be much to expect. There will be twists and turns down the road, but hopes abound. The CPC stands ready to continue to work with political parties and political organizations of all countries to stand on the right side of history and the progressive side of mankind. Let us make even greater contributions to the building of a community with a shared future for mankind and that of a better world!

I thank you all.

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Economics Briefs

Is U.S. Debt Bubble

Worse Now Than at the 2008 Crash?

It appears that the average American household is less crushed in debt today, than when the huge financial bubbles based on household mortgage debt blew up the world economy in 2007-09. At that time, total household debt in the United States had risen post-Glass-Steagall from $3.5 trillion in 1991 to $13.2 trillion in 2007. Mortgage debt had quadrupled over that 16-year period, and other categories of household debt had tripled. Worst of all, the ratio of household indebtedness to disposable personal income went from 80% in 1991 to 130% in 2007. In the latter year, household debt was 400% of disposable income for the lowest income quintile of the American population; 250% of disposable income for the second-lowest quintile, and 200% for the middle quintile. Banks were loaded with various forms of household debt, debt securities, debt derivatives, off-balance-sheet debt vehicles—all had been prohibited to them by Glass-Steagall enforcement, and all were defaulting.

As of the end of 2020, total American household debt at $14.6 trillion was even higher than in 2007. But American households’ total disposable income was considerably higher, at $15.7 trillion; so, the burden of debt to disposable income did not seem to be as crushing as in 2007, when Americans started defaulting in large numbers.

But if we look at those quintiles of the population by income, the tremendous growth in income inequality

since 2007—in the current era of Federal Reserve money-printing— changes the picture. The ratio of debt to household disposable income, and therefore the ability of households to pay their debts, is better than in 2007 only for the upper two quintiles; for the other three quintiles, it is worse. For the lowest-earning quintile of households, it is approximately 500% according to Federal Reserve and U.S. Census figures. For the second-lowest quintile of households, that ratio is approximately 300%; and for the middle quintile, 210%.

The household debt bubble is, nonetheless, not the glaringly unpayable debt bubble which will crash with the inevitable slip-up by the Fed. That is corporate debt, which is nearly 150% of GDP, a mark never reached before. The debt of financial companies—most of which are not banks—at $18 trillion, is equal to its peak in 2008; but the debt of non-financial companies, at $12 trillion, has nearly doubled since 2008, when it reached its record for that time of $6.5 trillion. A full 17% or one-sixth of these firms are zombies, i.e., companies which cannot even pay the interest on their debt out of net income, and therefore survive only by continually refinancing that debt—meaning interest rates must steadily, indefinitely fall—and/or selling off their assets to make demanded payments.

Winners in New Global Minimum Corporate Tax: Tech Giants, ‘Offshore’

The Financial Times on July 3 reported that the City of London financial center had succeeded in winning an “exemption” for its banks and other

financial firms—and those of Wall Street and Frankfurt—from the new “global minimum corporate tax” agreement ballyhooed by the U.S. Treasury at the time of the G7 finance ministers and heads-of-state meetings. The minimum tax scheme, considered a U.S. priority, is actually being negotiated and planned under OECD auspices.

A Zero Hedge column on July 1 had already observed that “While Washington likes to talk about the new framework as a foregone conclusion, there’s plenty of reason to doubt that it will ever be implemented. One reason is that countries like Ireland, Singapore, Indonesia and island tax havens like Bermuda all oppose the new scheme.” It could be expected that London would play this card.

In what was portrayed in financial media as hard bargaining between “the United States” on one side and “the U.K. and France” on the other, financial corporations got a “carve out” or safe haven from the minimum tax; and in exchange, the U.K. agreed to eliminate in stages its “digital services tax,” which has no American counterpart. France agreed to do this as well, on behalf of continental European countries’ tax authorities.

While some nations may be hurt by the agreement—for example, Ireland and Russia, which currently have corporate tax rates below 15%—the Silicon Valley tech monopolists will come out just as sales-tax free worldwide, as they have always been in the United States; and the City and Wall Street banks will be subject to the 15% minimum corporate tax only in their home bases, and not in all the other places they operate in.

Chinese Are Leading Creators of New Rail Inventions

With its huge high-speed and other rail networks, it is not surprising that China has surpassed Europe in the area of railway inventions. This was revealed in a new report by the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA).

Most of China’s patents are only locally filed, while the European Union takes the lead in multinational filings. Over the last ten years, Chinese railway patents have increased and now account for the most filings, while Germany comes in second. As could be expected, the number of Chinese patents dramatically increased after 2013, when China launched its largest highspeed railway projects. While Europe leads in “high-value” inventions, China is second in this class.

As for companies filing such patents, China’s CRRC ranks first in terms of all inventions, but fourth for high-value inventions. In terms of high-value inventions, Siemens tops the list, followed by Alstom and then Bombardier. For American inventions, there is no strong growth pattern visible.

U.S. Employment Still in 2020 Pit

As of the Labor Department’s employment report on June 2021, total U.S. employment was still 6.55 million jobs short of its highest level, November 2019. Goods-producing employment—defined in these reports as manufacturing, mining/extraction and construction employment—was 780,000 jobs below its peak, which was reached slightly earlier, in August 2019. Crash programs

of vital new infrastructure platforms in energy, water, power and space exploration, and cooperation with other nations in building new healthcare platforms in third countries, would help.

U.S. Banks Are Not the Place for Loans Now

The strange and unexpected announcement by Wells Fargo Bank July 7 that it was shutting down all its customers’ personal credit lines within 60 days, is the latest sign of the slow shut-down of loan credit by major banks in the United States, which has been underway since the spring of 2020. Wells’ announcement closes down credit lines of anywhere from $3,000 to $100,000; many households use them to consolidate their credit card and other higher-interest debts. The closure of these lines of credit will adversely affect the borrowers’ FICO credit scores—as Wells Fargo warned them in its announcement—as well as lowering their borrowing power directly by closing out the loans.

Although Wells Fargo is under an asset limit imposed by U.S. government regulatory authorities because of its recent years’ record of banking malpractices, it did not cite the asset size cap as a reason for cutting off its customers’ loans. And its action follows the pattern of the entire American banking system, dominated by ten huge Wall Street and regional giants. Since May of 2020 the banks of the United States have cut their loans and leases down by $520 billion, or 5%, according to Federal Reserve data, at the same time their deposits and overall assets have surged by nearly 15%. Their holdings of securities have grown by 20% during that same period.

Yet it is “China’s credit impulse has

turned negative” which gets all the coverage in the U.S. and British financial media.

A Khyber Pass Economic Corridor in Afghanistan?

The Belt and Road Initiative, initially China’s land-bridge infrastructure project across Eurasia, but now involving more than 100 countries, offers economic development advantages and prospects to Afghanistan, including to the Taliban, if major nations in the region cooperate on them.

Railway-technology.com, the Belt and Road News, and The Diplomat have all recently reported on the agreement reached in February 2021 by the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for a railway to be built at an estimated cost of $4.8 billion from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s most northerly major city and its capital, through Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar, Pakistan. Uzbekistan—the initiator of the plan, according to The Diplomat—proposed to ask the World Bank to make a loan for this fund, and that request has been made.

Moreover, a Peshawar-KabulDushanbe highway project was recently agreed upon between Pakistan and Afghanistan representatives. As a Pakistani planned project, called the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor, as an offshoot of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, this plan dates to March 2015, when a feasibility study was begun.

If the rail and road developments are combined, effectively a NorthSouth transportation and economic development corridor begins to be launched running from the main Eurasian Land-Bridge in the north, to the Indian Ocean in the south.

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Africa Report

Jailing of Jacob Zuma During COVID Pandemic May Be a Death Sentence

Former South African President Jacob Zuma accepted arrest July 8, after he was sentenced to 15 months in prison by South Africa’s Constitutional Court on June 29. The arrest is the latest development in a two-year, highly selective investigation into corruption by the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, known as the Zondo Commission. The surprise verdict is technically for Contempt of Court, after Zuma walked out of the Zondo hearing several weeks ago, refusing to be part of his own destruction.

The Zondo Commission—named after Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo—was, ironically, initiated by Jacob Zuma himself, as one of the final acts of his Presidency, with intent to discover the truth behind the looting and bankrupting of stateowned enterprises, with emphasis on Eskom, which was looted of billions in the last 10 years. As the Zondo investigation unfolded, the Commission became increasingly politicized—with strong encouragement from the media—resulting in a “Get Zuma” orientation.

The verdict by the Constitutional Court—the highest court in the nation—has sharpened factional differences, which have been simmering since Zuma was forced to step down as President in early 2018. On July 2, Zuma addressed the crowd of supporters that had remained gathered at his home for three days. He also addressed the national and international

press. In his statement, he expressed his fear that South Africa was sliding back into apartheid conditions, with— as his “conviction” evidenced—detentions without trial, including pandemic lockdown and curfews—which he had fought against under apartheid, even spending 10 years in prison.

In that light, the former president said he saw it as his duty to fight these moves by the state. He said he did not fear going to jail, but noted that sending a 79-year-old man to jail in the middle of a pandemic was the equivalent of a death sentence, while the death penalty itself is now outlawed in South Africa. He said he was determined that his case not become a precedent, or that “Zuma laws” not be allowed to flourish in South Africa.

Several appeals of this verdict are in progress.

Gabon Mortgages Its Future in $150 Million ‘Climate’ Deal

The under-developed nation of Gabon made history, June 24, as the first African country to “get paid” to preserve its rainforest—thereby putting a cap on its development potential—as the Norwegian government issued a $17 million payment, allocated under the UN-initiated Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI). Gabon depends heavily on its oil exports; a third of its population lives under the poverty line.

In June 2017, under the CAFI program, the government of Gabon signed a Letter of Intent with Norway

and the Multi-Partner Trust Fund of the United Nations Development Program, under which it agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% below the 2005 level. This led to Gabon creating 13 national parks, effectively locking up the vast majority of its land area, prohibiting logging and access to other resources. Gabon is supposed to receive $150 million over the next 10 years, assuming continued compliance—a pittance in exchange for development, the pearl without price. The June 24 tranche of $17 million was the first.

First established in 2015, CAFI brought together European governments—specifically Norway, France, Germany, and the UK—and six Central African rainforest countries— Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central Africa Republic, Cameroon, D.R. Congo, and the Republic of Congo.

COVID Third Wave Hits Africa as Its Vaccine Production Begins

Africa is now suffering its third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in less than 18 months, with little relief in sight, and new, more virulent variants to deal with. “The speed and scale of Africa’s third wave is like nothing we’ve seen before,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, in a statement July 1. “The rampant spread of more contagious variants pushes the threat to Africa up to a whole new level.” The highly contagious Delta variant has been reported in 16 countries, accounting for 97% of samples sequenced in Uganda and 79% in the

Democratic Republic of the Congo. A meager 1% of the African population has been vaccinated, due to massive logistics barriers, lack of access to and financing for vaccines, and vaccine resistance.

It was announced on June 30— after critical months of delay—that South Africa will begin producing the first vaccines to be manufactured in Sub-Saharan Africa at the Aspen Pharmacare plant in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), a plant which last year underwent a multi-million upgrade for this purpose. At that critical point, an error at a Johnson & Johnson feeder facility in the U.S. caused production to be further delayed until this June. The plant will be capable of producing about 250 million doses by the end of the year, 30 million of which are earmarked for South Africa.

Egypt has meanwhile begun to produce vaccines under a contract with Sinovac of China, which was certified by the World Health Organization on June 1. In a statement quoted in Xinhua, WHO Egyptian representative Dr. Naeema Al-Gasseer said, “The cooperation between Egypt and China is a successful model for international cooperation and transfer of global expertise, which contributes to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

Australian Finance Now at Center of DR Congo’s Grand Inga III Hydro Build

According to a June 15 report by Reuters, the Democratic Republic of Congo has decided that Fortescue Metals Group, led by its Australian chairman, Andrew Forrest, will lead the development of the Grand Inga III hydro project, a 4,800 megawatt hydroelectric dam, which “had already been committed to Chinese and Span-

ish developers.”

The Inga project dates from the 1960s and DR Congo’s independence. The first two dams of seven envisioned were completed in 1972 and 1984. When fully developed, the Grand Inga complex will be capable of generating an astounding 44,000 MW of power, almost twice that of the world’s largest current dam, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

In 2018 the China Three Gorges Corp. had gotten a solid hold on the development of Inga III, when suddenly Spanish company ACS Group was added to the consortium, only to then pull out in 2020, causing the entire consortium to collapse. This latest announcement by Fortescue includes fantastically wasteful visions of producing “green hydrogen” from the hydro-electric power.

Reliable reports, recently confirmed to EIR by a DR Congo source, have put Tony Blair right in the middle of this, through his Institute for Global Change. Reuters reports only the outward appearance, that the new arrangement was a handshake deal, worked out quietly between DR Congo President Félix Tshisekedi and Forrest. Last week, Tshisekedi suddenly announced his intention to “reexamine” all of Congo’s extractive mining contracts—most of which are held by Chinese companies—under suspicion of “hidden corruption.”

Thousands of NATO Troops Invade Africa for AFRICOM Maneuvers

The largest peacetime military exercise ever on African soil ran from June 7 to 18, when troops from nine nations and NATO executed AFRICOM’s African Lion 2021 in Morocco, with extensions in Tunisia and Senegal. Activities in Morocco were concentrated around Kenitra Air Base

not far from Rabat, with naval gunfire exercises offshore that included the Moroccan navy. This is the 17th year of these exercises. Planning—including the choice of countries for the maneuvers—began months earlier, and were originally set for six days in March.

In its official release, AFRICOM refers to the political situation in Morocco, which has seen a flare-up of the decades-old Polisario separatist movement, at war with Morocco over the contiguous former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, which Polisario calls the Sahrawi Republic. Morocco occupies 80% of it and Polisario 20%.

The Sahrawi Republic is recognized by the UN and African Union, and the separatists have support from Algeria and Spain. But the U.S. currently supports Morocco’s claim. The underlying conflict is on the global geopolitical level.

AFRICOM has repeatedly declined to deny, but will not affirm, that its maneuvers extended to Western Sahara. They did include Mahbes near the Algerian border, less than 100 km from Polisario headquarters in Algeria. Significantly, Spain withdrew from the exercises.

On June 13, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France’s military “anti-terror” Operation Barkhane—under cover of which the former colonial power has had over 5,000 troops and air support in five Sahel countries including Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger—would come to an end. But French forces would remain in the region, he said, as part of a broader international mission. After seven years of failed engagement against jihadist terror, popular sentiment has begun to turn toward Russia, which has been engaged in effectively training troops in the Central African Republic for years.

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V. Self-Evident Truths

Frederick Douglass: A Constitutionalist Speaks the Fourth of July

by Dennis Speed

July 3—This Fourth of July, Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s call for a worldwide health platform to fight pandemics, involving the collaboration of Russia, China, India, and the United States, among other nations, may help Americans remember the international characteristic of the American Revolution, from France’s Marquis de Lafayette, Germany’s “Baron” von Steuben, and Poland’s Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, to the monarchs Catherine the Great of Russia and Carlos III of Spain. It may also call to mind that revolutionary world mission that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had enunciated, prior to America’s entry into World War Two, in his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

sion against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation….

Two of FDR’s freedoms—Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear “everywhere in the world,”—are

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggres-

addressed directly by that world health proposal. Only an international defense against pandemics can keep any nation truly safe. “We are only as healthy as our sickest nation.”

Why don’t many Americans get FDR’s message any longer? What blocks them from acknowledgement of their own revolutionary history? For example, when talking about the “threat” and “challenge” posed by today’s Russia and China, would Americans be startled to know that the post-Revolutionary United States pio-

The Four Freedoms carved in stone at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

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neered work in 1840s Russia and in 1860s China to create the beginnings of transcontinental rail systems as part of an alliance against “Rule Britannia,” the colonial naval power of the British Empire?

Would they be embarrassed to admit that the Belt and Road Initiative, and the improved alliance between Russia and China, were the intended, desired outcome of Abraham Lincoln’s diplomatic missions to both nations between 1861 and 1865, and that both of those nations supported the Union cause just as fervently as America’s “special relationship ally” today, Great Britain opposed and sought to undermine America at every turn?

Declaration of Independence Co-Signers Convention

American citizenship, from the time of the Revolution, has carried implications beyond mere privileges of birthright. As the Rev. James Luther Bevel, Director of Direct Action for Martin Luther King and the intellectual author and organizer of the May, 1963 Birmingham Childrens’ March, said to his friend, fellow civil rights organizer, Rev. Alonzo Shepherd, at a meeting held in Shepherd’s Philadelphia church on the early evening of King’s birthday, January 15, 1993, “You have to ask the American people whether or not they have actually co-signed the Declaration of Independence. Because, judging from the present state of America, I don’t know whether they actually agree with it.”

This might be one way to begin to remedy the true problem of the sorry state of American politics, education, and daily life: the failure to take responsibility for citizenship. He believed that, as Cassius says in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

To illustrate: The suppression of true American History is a condition that is tolerated by, not imposed upon, its citizens. Lies are told today about the Founders, and Preservers, of the nation, starting with who they even are. The lies stand because the citizens do not dispute them. Names like Alexander Spotswood of Virginia, Matthew and Henry Carey of Philadelphia, or Friedrich List of Pennsylvania and Germany, are unknown. The roles of others, like Frederick Douglass for example, are greatly distorted. This must be corrected.

Bevel never believed in, and often preached against blaming the government of the United States for anything, “because the people are the government. We have the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. What else do you need? The American Revolution was already made for you. If you still find yourself oppressed by injustice, the first thing you have to do is take out the 51% that you are contributing, at least, to the condition that you must have, somewhere along the line, agreed to go along with.”

He suggested that there be an annual Declaration of Independence Co-Signers Convention, in which, after a reading of the Declaration, people go up and co-sign it.

One might argue that the United States has developed such disregard for its Revolutionary history these days that virtually no one has stopped to consider that we may be neglecting to even commemorate the actual process leading up to the 250th birthday of our nation. One might ask, for example, whether the focus given to 1619, the year when slavery officially commenced in the American colonies, a fact recently twisted into the “America was founded on racism” falsehood by the New York Times’s 1619 project, is less an attack on the Pilgrims landing from the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, than on the American Revolution’s process of birth.

The 1763-1776 organization of the American Revolution was the most successful conspiracy for freedom in recorded human history, a conspiracy that angered the British into creating in 1782 the Foreign Office, to prevent the American Revolution from being repeated anywhere in the world, ever again.

I Shall Never Prove a Traitor

More study, writing, publishing, and preparation went into the 1776-83 process than has accompanied any comparable process in history—if there even be another process that could be called comparable. And per-

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EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Rev. James Bevel, at a rally calling for the removal of the statue of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan leader Albert Pike in Judiciary Square, Washington, D.C., October 7, 1992.

haps that is exactly why no one consults those original sources to learn the truth. Perhaps never in history has such a record of success at not only conducting but perpetuating a revolution through a process of Constitutional government been so thoroughly ignored by so many people that simultaneously purport to hold undying fealty to that very Revolution of which they know nothing. Whether one agrees or not, for example, that the March 5, 1770 Boston Massacre, in which five colonials were killed including an escaped slave by the name of Crispus Attucks, were the appropriate event from which to date the “end of the beginning” of that process, the fact that it came and went in 2020 without any significant attention being called to it, is what must be immediately remedied in defense of not only the true history, but the very sanity of our citizens.

A note about Attucks. Consider that Attucks, born in Framingham, Massachusetts, appears twice in history books—once in the fall of 1750, twenty years before the Boston Massacre, as “Ran away from his master William Brown of Framingham, a mulatto fellow, 27 years of age, named Crispus, 6 feet 2 inches high.” and then in 1770, in an account of the bloody events of March 5 by the Massachusetts Gazette, quoted and recounted by authors Sidney and Emma Kaplan:

It was then that another group of citizens, apparently led by a tall robust man with a dark face, appeared on the scene…. Five martyrs fell that night: Samuel Gray, ropemaker; James Caldwell, mate; Samuel Maverick, apprentice joiner; Patrick Carr, an Irish leather worker; and the “stout man,” the first to die, “named Attucks, who was born in Framingham, but lately belonging to New Providence (Bahamas)… killed on the spot, two Balls entering his breast.” On Thursday, the corpse of Attucks was taken from Faneuil Hall, “all the Bells tolled a solemn Peal,” and the five were interred “in one Vault in the middle burying-ground.”

To understand what this meant, consider that African-American war veterans were not allowed to be buried together with white veterans at Arlington National Cemetery until 1948, 84 years after it was established.

The latest “critical race theory” fads notwithstanding, Crispus Attucks at Boston, Salem Poor at Bunker Hill, the First Rhode Island regiment, Boston’s Bucks of America, the Volunteer Chasseurs from Haiti, and Colonel John Glover’s Marblehead fishermen, many of whom were Indians and never enslaved or newly free Africans, were American Revolutionary patriots. When the 15-year-old James Forten, captured by British sailors when his ship, the Royal Louis was defeated by the British frigate Amphion, was adopted as a playmate by the captain’s son and offered “the life of an aristocrat, he replied,” I am here a prisoner for the liberties of my country; I never, never shall prove a traitor to her interests!”

Our 250th Anniversary

In any case, it is certainly indisputable that in less than four years from now, on April 18 of 2025, the an-

NARA

A 19th-century lithograph depicting the killing of Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770.

niversary of “Paul Revere’s ride,” even the most historically parsimonious will have to admit that the 250th anniversary is upon us. Preparations are already being made for the Olympics which will take place in Paris in 2024, and Los Angeles 2028.

How are we, the citizenry, preparing our nation, and other nations, for the 2020-2026 world-historical turning point we are already in? Will we, perhaps instigated by the British forces we fought a quarter millennium ago, launch a new set of population wars against the modern-day-equivalent of colonial populations in Africa or Asia? Or will we, in four years, be members of a depopulated, sick nation that has lost the moral fitness to survive, having abandoned the original purpose of the American Revolution—the promotion of the General Welfare of all humanity? The whole world would prefer to celebrate that anniversary, but will not be able to do so, unless the citizens of the United States take back their revolutionary history.

This history is readily available in source material and in the writings of those who worked to found the country. This is a body of work unlike any in any other nation in the world. The Federalist Papers alone, that series of essays written jointly by Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, supplied the people of the emerging state of New York with a public presentation of a Platonic dialogue, as in a drama, a dialogue carried out among the three authors, as well as with fellow delegates from the other newly forming states, and, as representatives of the committee advocating the Constitution, with the American citizenry as a whole.

the Federalist Papers aloud, and then simply asked to state in their own words what those essays mean. The same should be required of history teachers, judges, and lawyers, among others.)

Familiarizing students in our junior high and high schools, as well as colleges, with the source-documents revealing the “untold history” of pre-colonial, colonial, and revolutionary America, would immediately dissipate the most insipid of “critical theory” movements. This means, for example, discovering the ideas behind the 17th century colonial movements associated with Alexander Spotswood of Virginia, John Winthrop’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al., the United States of the two American Revolutions 1776-1783 and 1861-1865, and the aborted third American Revolution 1932-45.

Title page of “The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787.”

To Honorably Return

Today, however, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass:

What, to the American mind, presently enslaved in the service of British imperial/financial policy, and militarily deployed in no-win warfare, whether in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or in unacknowledged conflicts and clandestine operations, in Africa and other parts of the world, is the Fourth of July?”

We have made a mockery of the words spoken by our greatest Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, exactly 200 years ago, on July 4, 1821:

American society after seven years of conflict, and four of questionable self-government, required to be so addressed, and so convinced, through a density of argument and vigorous discussion that few among today’s electorate are literate enough to follow. (It should be a prerequisite that anyone in today’s United States, and particularly the Congress, who attempts to argue for a Constitutional Convention, should be required to read

[America] has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings…. She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-

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wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example….

How, at this late hour, might we honorably return to the original mission of this nation and its brilliant leadership that strove to attain, in a self-perfecting process of self-government, a higher standard than that characterized by their personal inadequacies or their momentary political practice?

This July 4, we supply, in opposition to the intentionally false representations of American history that have become epidemic in the past three decades, and to the various fad-flavors of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory” now running amuck, an accurate account of Frederick Douglass’ 1852 “Fourth of July” address. This exercise will hopefully inspire the reading of the words of other true founders, and refounders of the republic, as Douglass, in fact, was. This speech is one of the clearest presentations of the Socratic (Platonic) method of education, and its use in early American politics.

multiple voices by a single speaker, that would be summarily rejected by the “unmusical” narrow-mindedness of any comparable audience assembled in today’s United States.

The multiple oratorical and literary devices employed by Douglass throughout his speech were usual and familiar to an American audience of that time. From The Columbian Orator, Caleb Bingham’s “text-book” on “the art of eloquence” owned by Douglass from a very young age, to the Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory delivered by John Quincy Adams at Harvard in 1806-1808, everyone that intended to persuade others knew vocalization was an essential part of elementary literacy. The collapse of spoken language in contemporary America, now ongoing for about a century, has allowed idea-comprehension to be severely compromised, mugged, and “hacked.”

c. 1865.

The speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” while usually represented as an attack on the Constitution, is, in fact, a defense of the Constitution. Today’s illiteracy in, and unfamiliarity with the 19th century practice of the ironical-polemical style in public speaking, along with downright lying about the speech’s content, has allowed it to be so grossly misrepresented as to cause its actual intended message to be unrecognizable.

The Douglass speech, divided in three distinct sections, required of the more than 500 people that crowded Rochester, New York’s Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852 to hear it, a level of objective introspection born of careful listening to a nuanced argument, presented in

With that proviso, we present some excerpts from the Douglass Fourth of July Speech in the hope that during this Fourth, after reading, perhaps aloud, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, that families and groups, as well as individuals, might read the Douglass speech, preferably in its entirety, to correct the misrepresentation which you are virtually certain to hear.

The Constitution Is Greater than our Present Practices

So that there can be no doubt on where Douglass stood with respect to the Constitution of the United States, we quote the following from that third and final speech-section that Douglass called “The Constitution.” To set the context, we first quote the section immediately preceding, in which Douglass excoriates his audience, using the voice of one who is part of the oneseventh of the country that were still enslaved, as the freed slave Douglass stood there, speaking to that New York audience in 1852:

New York Historical Society

Frederick Douglass,

Fellow citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education….

Then, there is a complete break with this stream of argument. First, Douglass “sets up”—prepares—his audience, by first seeming to strengthen his denunciation of the Constitution and its authors:

But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that constitution framed by the illustrious fathers of this Republic…. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape….

Douglass then says:

But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe….

In that instrument I hold that there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? Or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding document, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of

entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? (All emphasis in the original.)

This Fourth of July, if you hear this “Douglass speech” either referred to by various commentators, or as either a “sound-byte” or text, they will not tell you this context. What you will hear, instead, is this passage:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence.… There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, then, are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will stay with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Our Constitutional Responsibilities

You will not be read, or told about, this paragraph, which comes immediately before the above, and will be omitted:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nations ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

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And that is exactly what Douglass does, in voicing the ensuing passage, which we intentionally quoted here in reverse order from its appearance. Douglass states his method, then, using a change of voicing, demonstrates his method in the ensuing section, then shifts his voice again. Douglass employs three voices, alternately—that of the slave, that of the present citizen of the slavery-compromised United States, and that of the free American citizen of the future, though presently endangered, revolutionary American Constitutional republic—that promise of the Constitution which had yet to be fulfilled, to be brought into existence. That America of the future was the America of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and was physically represented by the 19th century “Apollo Project” known as the Trans-Continental Railroad.

Douglass catalyzed the recruitment of 179,000 African-American troops to fight in the War of the Secession in the two years, 1863-65.

In conclusion, we will now refer to Douglass’ beginning voicing, that of Douglass, the “fellow citizen” of the compromised republic:

Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contend for, I will unite with you to honor their memory….

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not

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right. With them, justice, liberty, and humanity, were “final,” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times….

The complex country of which we are the descendants requires that this generation of Americans, Frederick Douglass’ fellow-citizen descendants, have as much dedication to the Constitution, and to the Republic now, as Douglass had then—in his case, even in the face of the then-extant practice of slavery. His support for the Constitution, rather than for self-destructive purgative violence like John Brown’s doomed-to-fail 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry (or the present-day “police action antics” of Antifa, etc.) is how Douglass found himself able to catalyze the recruitment of 179,000 African-American troops to fight in the War of the Secession in the two years, 1863-65.

By means of this caliber of dedication, only, can the Four Freedoms—the gift that Franklin Roosevelt wanted to give to the world, after fascism nearly destroyed it in 1945—be extended to humanity. Such dedication is given only to those whose knowledge of the history of ideas is extensive enough to allow them to know who they are, not only as individuals, but as the higher process of current history of which they are truly comprised.

Library of Congress

Eulogy for Thomas H. Wysmuller

(May 10, 1944 to June 29, 2021)

When the clouds are full, And the tempest master

Lets the loud winds sweep From his bosom deep Like heralds of some dire disaster, Then the heart alone

To itself makes moan; And the songs come slow, While the tears fall fleeter, And silence than song by far seems sweeter.

Oh, few are they along the way Who sing when skies are gray!

—“The Meadowlark” by Paul Laurence

I met Tom in 2015 at the tenth Heartland Institute Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C., where he gave a slide show that the sky wasn’t falling and the sea wasn’t rising. He came around giving his contact cards to everyone at my table. We met again in the hall and soon found we were kindred spirits— both of us were born in Holland under Nazi occupation; his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1948. The name Wysmuller is the anglicized form of the Dutch Wijsmuller.

Dunbar

of their Medallion Society, and eventually President and a multi-decadal director of NYU’s Alumni Association for all of NYU’s schools. In 2017, Tom arranged for Jason Ross, a Schiller Institute Science Adviser, to address the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, on the New Silk Road.

In 1968, Tom was one of nine people chosen through a series of nationwide exams for NASA Executive Interns in the U.S. He worked at NASA before, during, and after the Moon landings. His programming skills were so well-known throughout the agency that at one point he was the youngest person ever selected to serve on NASA’s Source Selection Board for agency-wide computer services.

Tom attended public schools in New York City, graduating from Bayside High School in 1961. His early jobs involved summers in the Netherlands working on the family’s ocean-going tug and salvage business and stints as a meteorologist at the Royal Dutch Weather Bureau. Tom went on to attend New York University (BA, 1966), The New School for Social Research, Long Island University, and Stanford University. His ties to NYU remained strong, having become Director of and Acting President

In 2009 he co-founded the NASA TRCS (The Right Climate Stuff) research group. He considered it one of his greatest achievements when in 2018, he solved the discrepancy of Sea-Level Rise (SLR) reported by the University of Colorado’s and NASA’s Satellites in comparison to land-coupled tide gauges. His “reverseengineering” technique showed how a programming error generated the much higher rate of SLR being re-

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Tom Wysmuller with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on January 26, 2016.

ported by satellites vs. world-wide tide gauge measurements.

Tom was deeply concerned with the poor of the world and specifically for the African countries, who were slated for genocide under climate guru policies. He was committed to a huge expansion of nuclear energy and advanced technology worldwide, especially because he thought that Mars’ moon Phobos would be an ideal jumping off point for moving humanity further out into the solar system.

A novel was written about his grandfather’s heroism, sailing ocean-going tugs in the worst of weathers to save ships and lives; it was soon banned by the Nazis. His great-aunt, “Tante Truus,” risked her own life numerous times to save thousands of Jewish refugee children, members of the Dutch Resistance movement, and others whose lives were in danger under Nazi occupation.

In 2012, Tom’s oncologist gave him only a year to live. But Tom had a mission and continued to debunk the climate hysteria, and prevent its deadly policies— for nine more years. He traveled the world, using slides to show the very slow, linear rise in sea level that has been steady since the end of the Little Ice Age. Over the years, he gave numerous presentations including in Porto, Portugal; London, England; Greece, Delft Technical University, and chaired “Water Day” at UNESCO’s IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. He addressed the German Parliament, the 24th World Conference on Climate Change in Rome, and had the honor of chairing the Oceanography Section of the World Congress on Oceans in Qingdao, China.

His meeting with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche in 2015 gave expanded scope to his mission. He understood the urgency of getting the U.S.A. to accept the invitation from China to join the One Belt, One Road program. Tom was among the first climate dissidents with the courage to call for the complete exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.

In the last five years of his life, he probably put more than 2 million miles on various cars and vans, driving from his home in Maine, to meetings with UN officials,

to medical appointments in Texas, where he always took the occasion to visit with his NASA friends. One of his personal highlights was a January 26, 2016 joint appearance with Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in an EIR forum on the topic, “Only a Scientific and Cultural Renaissance Can Stop a new Dark Age.”

Tom believed that he lived in the Golden Age of Humanity, due to our collective developments of technologies, exploration of our solar system, and awareness of ourselves, the Earth, and our Universe.

Humanity has explored the Earth to greater heights, the depths of the oceans, the mysteries of our genetic make up and much more. What an exciting time to have contributed to our knowledge and wisdom!

Tom passed away on the morning of June 29. He is survived by his son, John; his daughter, Jannine; his brother, Allan; his son-in-law, Aziz, and step-granddaughter, Laila; many cousins, nieces, and nephews; and countless friends. He was predeceased by his wife, Catherine, and his brother, Andrew.

He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

—Rick Sanders

Wysmuller (right) with Rick and Lenore Sanders in 2018, after the reception of the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus concert performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C