Václav Klaus: three questions for G8 politicians

Seemingly courageous and certainly likable (for those who don't think about the consequences) was the "decision" of top politicians of G8 to reduce emissions of the so-called greenhouse gases by 50% in comparison with the current rates before the year 2050. It is necessary to ask them the following three simple questions:

1. The first question is: why did they make this "decision"? What is the evidence that has convinced them to propose such a far-reaching intervention to human lives and to the functioning of the whole human society, rich countries as well as very poor countries? Convincing scientific evidence that a massive global warming occurs or that human activity and primarily greenhouse gas emissions are behind the observed moderate warming do not exist. I am afraid that those eight presidents or prime ministers of the most developed countries of the world know this fact very well. That's why I ask: why this gesture?


2. The second question is: do these eight politicians know methods and ways how to achieve their goal? Do they know a different way than a radical de-industrialization of the whole world and than preventing billions of people from participating on positive effects of long-term economic growth, effects that have brought such an improvement of lives for the people in developed countries? Are these politicians able to compare costs and benefits of interventions that they are proposing or at least anticipating? Do they appreciate elementary causal relationships that are being stressed by rationally thinking opponents of the warming hysteria on a daily basis?




3. The third question is: do these politicians - whose limited mandate should inevitably lead them to a short-term perspective - have the right to mess up with lives of billions of even those people who will live half a century after these politicians' mandate ends? Are human beings - politicians or someone else - able to decide rationally about anything in 2050 except for their own lives? Are the events of 2050 equally "major" and important as events of 2007 for the people who live today? Shouldn't a politician discount the future as dramatically as every "normal", rationally thinking person does? Isn't any goal and every goal that reaches 50 years into the future a mere gesture that doesn't cost anything which is why politicians can make it so easily? Isn't it a mere politically correct, cynical game with the public?
   

These were my three questions that I would be asking to eight politicians in Heiligendamm, Germany. The primary sad fact is that these politicians have demonstrated an enormous historical pessimism. They showed that they don't believe in positive results of unregulated creative spontaneity of the human society and instead, they primarily believe in the duty to plan and organize the society from above. They are being forced into this mode of thinking by the "green" movement which - unlike the climate - has become a real threat of the contemporary era.

Let me make one thing clear: I can imagine that in 2050, the global emissions of greenhouse gases will be equal to one half of their present rates. But it will only happen if Man will be able to protect his natural creativity and if he gets enough room to act freely, to react to new phenomena, and to invent new things. Simply if he will be allowed to do what he did in the last several millenia.

And that's the memo.

Václav Klaus, Czech president, June 9th, 2007, "Mladá fronta Dnes" daily