From Melanie Philips diary,
The green shoots of reason
Last night I was on the panel on BBC TV's Question Time, which you can view
<
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/%20> here. The subject
of the G8 and global warming came up, and I made a brief reference to the
remarkable
<
http://www.vaclavklaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek_tisk.asp?id=IgDUIjFzEXAz%20>
speech made by the Czech President Vaclav Klaus when he appeared before the
American Congressional committee on energy and commerce. This is part of
what he said:
The - so called - climate change and especially man-made climate change has
become one of the most dangerous arguments aimed at distorting human efforts
and public policies in the whole world.
My ambition is not to bring additional arguments to the scientific
climatological debate about this phenomenon. I am convinced, however, that
up to now this scientific debate has not been deep and serious enough and
has not provided sufficient basis for the policymakers' reaction. What I am
really concerned about is the way the environmental topics have been misused
by certain political pressure groups to attack fundamental principles
underlying free society. It becomes evident that while discussing climate we
are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment but a clash of
views about human freedom.
As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to
say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and
prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its
various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious
environmentalism. This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the
slogans of their protection - similarly to the old Marxists - wants to
replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central
(now global) planning of the whole world.
The environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an
undisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and
PR campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their
argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the
future of the world to be under serious threat. In such an atmosphere they
continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary
limits, regulations, prohibitions, and restrictions on everyday human
activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic
decision-making. To use the words of Friedrich Hayek, they try to stop free,
spontaneous human action and replace it by their own, very doubtful human
design.
The environmentalist paradigm of thinking is absolutely static. They neglect
the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent
change, that there is and has been no ideal state of the world as regards
natural conditions, climate, distribution of species on earth, etc. They
neglect the fact that the climate has been changing fundamentally throughout
the existence of our planet and that there are proofs of substantial climate
fluctuations even in known and documented history. Their reasoning is based
on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which
cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw. They neglect the
complexity of factors that determine the evolution of the climate and blame
contemporary mankind and the whole industrial civilization for being the
decisive factors responsible for climate change and other environmental
risks.
By concentrating on the human contribution to the climate change the
environmentalists ask for immediate political action based on limiting
economic growth, consumption, or human behavior they consider hazardous.
They do not believe in the future economic expansion of the society, they
ignore the technological progress the future generations will enjoy, and
they ignore the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society is, the
higher is the quality of the environment.
The policymakers are pushed to follow this media-driven hysteria based on
speculative and hard evidence lacking theories, and to adopt enormously
costly programs which would waste scarce resources in order to stop the
probably unstoppable climate changes, caused not by human behavior but by
various exogenous and endogenous natural processes (such as fluctuating
solar activity).
Indeed. Of course, most of the Question Time audience were open-mouthed at
my heresy, as one would expect with an ideological Big Lie which takes a
society by the throat and brooks absolutely no dissent. That's why Vaclav
Klaus was absolutely bang on to identify man-made global warming as yet
another totalitarian ideology. But in view of that, it was very interesting
to note nevertheless that a significant section of that Question Time
audience were audibly on my side on this issue; and I have been receiving a
steady stream of public support since the programme from people who have
also rumbled the scam. Clearly, there are many, many individuals who are
silently refusing to sign up to this demonstrable absurdity, and who are
resisting it in the way that all peoples resist lies which are imposed on
pain of social ostracism, professional exile or worse - in their minds,
which no-one can touch, and where the flame of truth and freedom never dies.
]When satellite tracking becomes mandatory[
