Vaclav Klaus spoke at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last week. Here are some highlights.
What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.
As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory
the arguments we had been using for decades – till the moment of the fall of communism. Then they were quickly forgotten.
The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travelers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same “fatal conceit.”
The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong
We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society.
to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago.
It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
Vaclav Klaus is an economist, and President of the Czech Republic.
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