Modra, nikoli zelena planeta: Co je ohrozeno: klima, nebo svoboda?
(A Blue, not Green Planet: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?)
By Vaclav Klaus
164 pages, Prague: Dokoran, 2007 (in Czech)

Just when you thought the terrible totalitarian ideologies that caused so much suffering in the 20th century had been relegated to the past, another incarnation of evil is on the horizon. Called environmentalism, it is the most prominent antiliberal, populist ideology of the contemporary world, comparable to communism and Nazism. At least, that is, according to Czech President Vaclav Klaus.

The rise of environmentalism is, in Klaus’s view, closely intertwined with the worldwide debate over climate change. He agrees with the views of many scientists and politicians who maintain that we cannot, with any degree of certainty, link climate change to human activity. Although such views arguably represent a minority of the world’s scientific and political community, in most cases they would not draw much attention.

Klaus, however, wants attention. And that is why he is fighting a political—not a scientific—battle. His recent book, Modra, nikoli zelena planeta: Co je ohrozeno: klima, nebo svoboda? (A Blue, not Green Planet: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?), argues that climate change is a crisis invented and hyperbolized by naive politicians and environmentalists. Although he supports the arguments in his book with reasonable quotes from, for the most part, reputable scientists, he draws extreme conclusions about what the current debate over climate change means from a political point of view. “The biggest source of dangers for freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th century and at the...