Vaclav Klaus on environmentalism in strange times:

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

Meanwhile, Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis wants to provide every school in Greece with former US Vice President Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” and the film of the same name. While Gore believes the climate change to be an issue of “planetary emergency”, which Mr Karamanlis wants the younger generation to tackle, Klaus goes along with MIT Prof Richard Lindzen:

Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.

Strange times, indeed.