The Carbon Curtain
Investor’s Business Daily editorial, May 29, 2008
Climate Change: Czech President Vaclav Klaus warns that environmentalism is becoming a new totalitarianism. There is still a bear in the woods, but it’s no longer the Russian bear. This time, it’s a polar bear.
Having lived much of his life in a nation once ruled by communists, Klaus recognizes a tyrannical ideology where elites trample on individual freedoms for the greater good when he sees one.
Speaking Tuesday at the National Press Club to introduce the English version of his book, “Blue Planet, Green Shackles,” Klaus said that global warming is being used as a means to erode our freedoms.
Klaus called alarms about man-made climate change a “quasi-noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of something above him” and that it is being exploited by a new elite “certain they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea a reality.”
Like Marxism, it will tell us how we can live, what we can drive, what temperature we can set our thermostats. “In the past it was in the name of the masses (or of the proletariat), this time in the name of the planet,” said Klaus. “Structurally, it was very similar.”
To those who find his fears unfounded, we offer the words of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who, campaigning in Oregon, said: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
Obama added: “That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”
On June 2, the Senate is going to take up the America’s Climate Security Act, a cleverly titled assault on both our freedoms and our economy offered up by Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Warner.
The bill essentially limits how much gasoline and other fossil fuels Americans can use, as Klaus puts it, “in the name of the planet.” … [more]