Vaclav Klaus

Czech President Vaclav Klaus is unique among world leaders in that he is, as far as I can tell, the only prominent politician in Europe, and perhaps the world, who has not jumped aboard the group-think bandwagon of the man-made global warming hysteria. A student of the Austrian School of economics, he understands what few others do in Europe and elsewhere; that what's at stake here is our freedom. In environmentalism, Klaus perceives similar traits once distinguishable in life under Communist tyranny. Here's a dandy of a quote from Klaus, lecturing the hapless, yet maddeningly sanctimonious booboisie at the United Nations Climate Change Conference last September.

If I am not wrong I am the only speaker from a former communist country and I have to use this as a comparative -- paradoxically -- advantage. Each one of us has his or her experiences, prejudices and preferences. The ones that I have are, quite inevitably, connected with the fact that I have spent most of my life under the communist regime. A week ago I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there...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 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 man and his freedom in order to make this idea a reality." What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its current strongest version, climate alarmism.

http://spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12862