Show me one head of state in the world, besides Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who is willing to stand up to the anti-CO2 juggernaut?  We’ve reported on President Klaus before, in our post “Vaclav Klaus, Skeptic,” and he’s in the news again.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus “The climate change debate is not about science, it’s about ideology.”

Klaus addressed the UN Climate Change Conference on 9-24-97, then four days later he gave a follow up speech in Salt Lake City, Utah.  He is the only politician on the international stage who is correctly identifying what is really at stake in the debate on global warming, saying:  “I don’t talk about climatology but about environmentalism, about an ideology which puts nature and environment and their supposed protection and preservation before and above freedom.”

Klaus understands what is at stake is our political and economic system and our way of life.  Having lived through the communist occupation of (then) Czechoslovakia, he can smell the coffee.  As he says, “our communist experience made us sensitive to all kinds, forms, manifestations and aspects of the suppression of freedom and democracy in the name of allegedly ‘higher’ goals.”

Most people still don’t realize the political choices we are making in the name of environmentalism, nor that it is possible to pursue environmentalist values without yielding to what Klaus refers to as “soft socialism.”  As we wrote in our post “John Stossel & Global Warming” a few months ago:  “There is an ideological struggle for the soul of environmentalism that anti-environmentalists don’t care about, and environmentalists barely grasp.  There are two ways to address environmental challenges and they should be complimentary approaches.  One approach centers on reducing consumption, improving efficient use of energy and water, conserving open space.  This approach dominates environmental thinking today.  But the other approach is vital - and that approach centers on increasing the production of clean energy and water, and developing land to accomplish these goals.”

We have advocated free market solutions to environmental challenges for years; recent posts include “Supply Side Environmentalism,” “Redefining Environmentalism,” “Radical Environmentalism,” and “New Environmentalism.”  In all of these we try to expose the risks of blindly acceding to rationing, restrictions, erosion of property rights, ordinances, taxes, internationalism - all in the name of preventing an alleged catastrophe.  Global warming alarm is being used in my own state, California, to drive housing prices into the stratosphere, and turn our cities and suburbs via ”infill” into hellacious ultra-high density housing compounds.  It is a blatant attack on everything America supposedly stands for, and the extra political nudge these leftists need to sell this tyranny is coming from global warming hysteria, read: “California’s Land Use Choices,” or “Lower Density, Please?”

Like Klaus, we don’t believe runaway global warming is imminent, and even if it is, we don’t think CO2 from industry is the primary cause.  Read our posts in EcoWorld’s “Global Warming” category.

Here’s more from President Klaus:  “The problem is that we are confronted with many prejudices, misunderstandings and now already also vested insterests. As I said, the climate change debate is basically not about science; it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature; it is about the concept of human society. It is not about scientific ecology; it is about environmentalism.”  His point about vested interests is not emphasized, but think about what he means.  Basically no influential interests remain who disagree with the anti-CO2 crowd - yet this “consensus” is exclusively among elites with various ulterior motives;  they will prosper from the new taxes, or subsidies, or they will misanthropically revel in the draconian enforcement of socialist ideologies.  Ordinary people and small businesses lose - i.e., 90%+ of the people in the world.  Read “Big Oil & Global Warming,” and “Emission Trading Tyranny.”

And here’s the solution to restoring balance to the global warming debate, intemperately proposed by Klaus to the United Nations Climate Change Conference just two weeks ago: 

“1. The UN should organize two parallel IPCCs and publish two competing reports. To get rid of the one-sided monopoly is a sine qua non for an efficient and rational debate. Providing the same or comparable financial backing to both groups of scientists is a necessary starting point.

2. The countries should listen to one another, learn from mistakes and successes of others, but any country should be left alone to prepare its own plan to tackle this problem and decide what priority to assign to it among its other competing goals.

We should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism. Therefore, let’s vote for adaptation, not for the attempts to mastermind the global climate.”

Bravo.