Lets see if the Goron has any guts at all:
Washington - Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms. “I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he’s not too much willing to make such a conversation,” Klaus said. “So I’m ready to do it.”
Klaus was speaking a the National Press Building in Washington to present his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?, before meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday.
“My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity,” he said.
Gore a former US vice president who has become a leading international voice in the cause against global warming, was co-winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Gore’s effort was highlighted by his Oscar winning documentary film An Inconvienent Truth.
Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
“Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said.
“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet,” he added.
Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he oppposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.
“It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,” he said.
Klaus alleged that the global warming was being championed by scientists and other environmentalists whose careers and funding requires selling the public on global warming.
That pretty much says it all about the motivations behind global warming alarmism - just another attempt at making a utopia on earth, and the only thing we have to sacrifice is the Common Man…’cause the elites, once again, have need of his blood and treasure for one more attempt at getting it right.
I think, though, that Klaus is right about facts and reason having no place here - it is my view that we have utterly lost the global warming debate; not on facts and reason, but because of relentless, alarmist propaganda, all too often joined in by politicians on the make and grant-mongering institutions and individuals. But if Gore has the courage of his convictions - if he really thinks that the truths of global warming are so solid - then he’ll take Klaus up on his challenge…and if he doesn’t, then just what are we to make of such an act of cowardice?
Tags: Al Gore, Climate Change, global warming, liberal lies, Vaclav Klaus
May 28th, 2008
Global warming zealotry as a threat to liberty - Vaclav Klaus in The Australian:
A WEEK ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism.
As an economist, I have to start by stressing the obvious. Carbon dioxide emissions do not fall from heaven. Their volume (ECO2) is a function of gross domestic product per capita (which means of the size of economic activity, SEA), of the number of people (POP) and of the emissions intensity (EI), which is the amount of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. This is usually expressed in a simple relationship: ECO2 = EI x SEA x POP. What this relationship tells is simple: If we really want to decrease ECO2 we have to either stop the economic growth and thus block further rise in the standard of living, stop the population growth, or make miracles with the emissions intensity.
I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the change just now, especially with arguments based on such incomplete and faulty science. Human wants are unlimited and should stay so. Asceticism is a respectable individual attitude but should not be forcefully imposed upon the rest of us.
I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with. Without resisting it we would find ourselves on the slippery road to serfdom. The freedom to have children without regulation and control is one of the undisputable human rights.
There are people among the global-warming alarmists who would protest against being included in any of these categories, but who do call for a radical decrease in carbon dioxide emissions. It can be achieved only by means of a radical decline in the emissions intensity.
Did you exhale while reading that? Then you contributed to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. I recommend reading the whole article - it hits at the crux of the problem with global warming alarmism: the threat to liberty posed by those who say that the crisis in gigantic and they are the people who know how to fix it.
There seems to be latent within humanity a desire to control things - a desire, that is, to set everything to right and by a web of rules to make everything fair and square. Such plans are always doomed to failure because of human nature - we are a fallen people, and thus there is in us a desire to deliberately choose the wrong thing even though we know full well that it is wrong, and that we’d be better off chosing the right thing. As long as human beings are human beings, there will be nothing but approximations of equity and justice in human affairs. Enter the utopian idealist (100 years ago, a socialist; today, an environmentalist) who ignores all of human history, asserts that our problems are the results of the rules we use and if we could just alter the rules, everything will come together just fine. Of course, to obtain the control necessary to change the rules, the utopian idealist will puff up the problem to gigantic proportions (100 years ago, the horrors of the robber barons; today, the claim that the very earth will be wrecked), and will insist upon a totalitarian system under the utopians’ exclusive control.
Even the most benign of the global warming zealots contains within himself the seed of what I call “junior-league Leninism”; “junior league” because these people don’t contemplate murdering millions of people, as Lenin did from an early age; but “Leninist”, none the less, because like Lenin they aspire to a baby-out-with-the-bathwater overturning of society in the name of alleged human progress. The plain fact of the matter is that even if the global warming zealots are correct that the world is rapidly warming due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions there is no way short of the most radical, totalitarian program to reduce CO2 emissions to a point where global warming ceases and then starts to reverse itself. And I’m doubtful that even totalitarian efforts would do the trick - I think that as long as there are to be 9 to 12 billion of us a century or so hence, there is simply no way to reduce CO2 emissions to a point where more CO2 comes out of the atmosphere than goes in.
And so, only a collapse of the global economy resulting in a massive die-off of humanity will do the trick…and mark my words, good people, as the global warming zealts gain power and come to realise just what it would take to reverse what they view as the central problem of our times, there will be more and more of them willing to go that route. In my view, we should make efforts to pollute less and clean up our messes from the good stewardship mindset - and we should leave off any alarmism, just as we leave off any program to create heaven on earth.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, Vaclav Klaus
March 13th, 2008
