Vaclav Claus on Environmentalists

For those not familiar with Vaclav Claus, he is not only a respected economist and professor, he is also the current President of the Czech Republic. Claus has never been afraid to speak the truth, and now he had identified his greatest opponent since the fall of global communism — radical environmentalists.

Claus has written an op-ed piece for the Financial Times titled Freedom, Not Climate, Is At Risk. In the article, Claus takes a hard line against these pseudo-scientific enemies of human progress.

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.

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

The entire article is well worth reading, and forwarding to your friends.