On the Pope’s Encyclical on Environment and Climate Change
Just who is Dr. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire?
Excerpt from the LaRouche PAC weekly webcast of June 19, 2015
OGDEN: : Now to follow up what Jeff has just had to say, especially regarding the genocidal proclivities of the British Monarchy, both presently and historically, and also to set up the next segment of our broadcast here this evening, let me read our institutional question for this week, which we did have an opportunity to discuss with Mr. LaRouche in detail earlier this afternoon, when we met with him. And what I’ll do is ask Jeff to come back to the podium to very briefly delivery Mr. LaRouche’s direct response to this, and then we’ll segue directly into a presentation from Jason Ross, who will elaborate in more specific detail, the scientific background behind the answer to this question.
So the question reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, Pope Francis this week issued a sweeping 184-page Papal Letter, writing that climate change is a global problem with far-reaching environmental and social consequences, especially for the poor. He blamed apathy and greed, and called on developed countries to limit the use of non-renewable energy, and to assist poorer nations. He called on humanity to collectively acknowledge a sense of responsibility, for our fellow men and women, upon which all civil society is founded, and wrote that climate change represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.
“In one particularly direct passage, he writes, ‘The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. … Frequently no measures are taken until after peoples health has been irreversibly affected.’”
“The Pope is calling for fossil fuels ‘to be progressively replaced without delay. Mr. LaRouche, our question for you, is in your view, will His Holiness’s Encyclical contribute to a new generation of nuclear and fusion energy, to replace fossil fuel consumption?”
So, Jeff.
STEINBERG: Well, of course Mr. LaRouche is one of the leading voices in favor of a massive expansion of nuclear power and of a crash project, a Manhattan Project, to realize the long-overdue potentiality of thermonuclear fusion, and that could be accomplished in the next decade, were there to be the kind of concerted international effort. But that really is an issue that’s an aside, to what really is being raised both in the Encyclical, and in the fact that one of the most notorious genocidalists alive today, Schellnhuber, was part of the sort of festivities as the Papal Encyclical was being rolled out. And Jason will have a lot more to save, to elaborate on that point.
But Mr. LaRouche’s comment was very brief. He said, “The Pope in his Encyclical has not located the actual cause of what he presented as evidence. Those of us who do know the history, and the technology, are in a better position to respond to the pure evil of Schellnhuber. Schellnhuber represents precisely the kind of filth and pollution that the Pope should be happy to see gone.”
So on that, I’ll pass things on to Jason.
JASON ROSS: That certainly sets it up pretty well.
So, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, who is this guy? He is — first, let me get his name properly — Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. I think he goes by “John,” though. [laughter]
Schellnhuber was the leading scientist, so-called, advising the Vatican, advising the Pope, on the matters of what came out in this Encyclical, and it is, in regards to the global warming side of things, I mean, there are very legitimate concerns about the poor having a good quality of life, about pollution which, in the real sense of pollution, does exist and is a problem — global warming isn’t; that’s not an actual issue.
What Schellnhuber’s proposing, what ends up coming across in this Encyclical, is a form of tyranny: The most direct sort of oligarchical tyranny that you could imagine, and it’s not science. So, I’d like to read something that Mr. LaRouche said back in 2011, in response to the Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber’s report with the WBGU. That’s the organization that he heads: It’s the German Advisory Council on Climate Change, and in 2011, this group put out a report called “World in Transition: Social Contract for a Sustainability.”
Now, LaRouche had read over this report, and what he said about it was that this wasn’t science, this was the imposition of oligarchical tyranny. He said, instead of it, we have to have a form of “practiced freedom.” Here’s one paragraph. LaRouche wrote in 2011 in “Rebuttal of the WGBU: That Which Could Not Be Sustained.”
He said, “It is not sufficient, therefore, merely to denounce that ancient, inherent evil into which the promoters of the referenced WBGU statement have been lured. We must affirm the truth which must supersede and uproot such kinds of evil; the necessary action is not to simply denounce the errant proposition; the urgent need is to replace it with a truthful account of the nature of mankind.”
So let’s learn more about Schellnhuber and his background, and then return to the Encyclical and where we really ought to be going, laying out, as LaRouche put it, “the truthful account of the nature of mankind.”
Schellnhuber: He helped set up the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit; he ran it from 2001-2005. This is the group that you may be familiar with in “Climategate,” where emails were leaked about how they were keeping data from people, falsifying temperature records, etc. That’s Schellnhuber.
In 2004, he was sent, along with a Brit, to go visit George Bush. He was sent by Queen Elizabeth II to try to get George Bush on board the global warming campaign. That didn’t work. In 2004, also, later that year, there was an event at the British embassy in Berlin: It was called the British-German Climate Conference. Queen Elizabeth II herself attended this conference, as did Schellnhuber. This is where he was made an Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
He’s been Merkel’s advisor ever since she was environment minister, and then, around the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 [cop15], which again, Queen Elizabeth II herself made a major push for among the Commonwealth nations, Schellnhuber worked directly with Prince Charles on preparations for the conference. That conference, you may remember, was kiboshed by the Group of 77, which called the plans for decarbonizing “a suicide pact.”
So what is being proposed here? The idea of eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables, which are not going to be able to support civilization at a decent standard, or be able to support the 7 billion people we have on the planet at present, the proposal is, very simply, population reduction, enforced poverty and the reign of Zeus, who insisted that humankind would not have fire. Prometheus brought fire to mankind; Zeus’s outlook was “no,” this is going to be reserved to the gods. The same kind of outlook seen by these seemingly environmentalist groups.
In this program of his, Schellnhuber said that the “the transformation towards a low-carbon society is therefore as an ethical imperative as the abolition of slavery and the condemnation of child labor.” To make it clear, though, he did not propose using nuclear power: He said, Fukushima should scare us all away from that.
And that what would be required to implement this world structure would be new United Nations Organization. He said we would have to have a new council, “a Council for Sustainable Development, par with the UN Security Council.” And we’d have to have a “World Commission for Low-Carbon Urban Development.”
To implement this program, you really would have to have a world dictatorship, which he’s asking countries to willingly join him on.
So, it’s very unfortunate that the Encyclical that the Pope released was advised, created by the likes of Schellnhuber. Here’s one quote from the Encyclical that we’ll come to: “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”
Let’s think about that: If we exist in a world of technology, this is actually true. If we have technology, but no science, yes, the resources available to us are limited. The fact of the matter is, that human beings are scientists. We create resources, that is the true nature of humanity as a species on the planet. And I want to take that up in a specific example of water.
Now, last week we discussed energy-flux density as a metric for understanding economic growth and development. You know, what is the concentration of energy that’s available? And over the history, over the time period, for example, of the history of the U.S., we went from the wood era, to the coal era, where the energy was of a dense-enough form that it could power steam engines, could create motion from heat — pretty amazing — to the era of petroleum, natural gas, the internal combustion engine, to the beginnings of the nuclear era.
Now, the kinds of resources these things make available are tremendous. The power of chemical bonds is 100,000, a million times greater, than physical forces. The power in the nucleus, again, is about 100,000 times greater than the power of chemical changes. By moving towards higher levels of energy-flux density, we create resources where they did not exist before, and are able to support an increasing population, including having the free energy to make sure that we’re able to take care of legitimate environmental and pollution concerns which do exist and should be addressed. But some people don’t want to address this, and have the goal — as I have been saying — of eliminating the world’s population. Take Prince Philip; in the forward to his 1986 book called, If I Were an Animal — I don’t know if it was a piece of fiction or not — he says, “I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings towards the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist? I must confess, that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.” In order to kill people; it’s a very sweet image he has.
Now, returning to this idea of limited resources, here’s a headline from a New York Times article about California: “California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth”. The New York Times wrote: “A punishing drought is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been the state’s engine, has run against the limits of Nature.” This is what’s being said about California. There’s no water, the state has too many people; it’s just too late, and there’s nothing that we can do about it. And as we’ve discussed here on our other programs, it’s just not true. Desalination is not very expensive; it’s certainly something that could be done for the coastal regions of the state.
More importantly, and on a broader scale, is transforming the weather. And understanding this requires thinking about ourselves not as a species of planet Earth, but as a galactic species; as a galactic humanity. The galaxy influences weather; the Sun influences weather. Changes in the Sun’s activity, which cause changes in the galactic cosmic rays reaching the Earth, change the cloud cover on the planet. Researchers have reconstructed the path of our Solar System through the arms of the galaxy, and reconstructed the effects that that had on our climate on a broad scale. Cycles of changing biodiversity on the planet over evolutionary time correspond to this motion through the galaxy; as do other geological cycles and volcano activity even. So, we can use insights gathered from understanding how our planet, how our Solar System as a whole is impacted by its real environment — the Solar System and the galaxy — to ourselves create ionization systems to form our own clouds, to form our own rain, to be able to control weather in the way that we currently control other things. We use electricity; we change the temperature in buildings in developed nations. We’re able to move water from place to place; we can also control it in the atmosphere. And there is no reason not to be doing this; not to be building these systems in California right now.
As a matter of fact, weather isn’t something that only happens on the Earth. You may have heard about Mars’ ice caps changing over recent years. The winds of Venus have gone from 300 kilometers an hour in 2006, up to 400 kilometers an hour in 2013. The great red spot of Jupiter is half the size it was 150 years ago. Saturn has a storm every Saturn year; every 29 of our Earth years; this time it’s seven years early. Why? Why do Uranus and Neptune have the incredible wind speeds that they have? Weather’s changing all over the place, and it would be very silly to say that human beings are the only cause of such changes. To not take up a broader study, and perhaps rename the IPCC instead of being the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be Interplanetary Comparative Cosmoclimatology.
How does the Solar System respond to the Sun? What effect does the galaxy have on the system as a whole? These are the kinds of questions that we’re able to answer and that give us the power to move to the next level of human development. These are the sorts of things that in the grand scale will be coherent with developing a fusion economy which is really the next stage of fire; the next stage of energy-flux density that’s needed to move into the future. If we reject that kind of change, if we reject moving upwards in that way, then yes, resources become limited. If we don’t reject that, if we develop higher forms of power, then we remind ourselves and we do create new resources; and find better ways of managing the ones that we currently have.
So, clearly the Pope isn’t trying to do something bad here; I don’t think that’s his intention at all. But he’s got a very direct operative of the British Empire, Schellnhuber, working with him drafting this material. And it represents this oligarchical outlook that still plagues the planet. That really should only be a couple of billion people on the planet, and that they should not be at a high level. That we should go back; that we should use renewables. You know, the technology of using the Sun and the wind, that existed a few centuries ago. You can’t support 7 billion people by those techniques. We can support the future with fusion power, and by fully implementing nuclear.
