(CNSNews.com) - Centralized planners with "megalomaniac ambitions" are now working to restrain democratic development and economic activity under the guise of environmentalism, said Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic. He spoke Tuesday morning at conference in New York City.

Klaus was among the 100 speakers and panelists taking part in the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. The event brought together scientists from a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, England, France, New Zealand, Russia and Sweden. Klaus, who is the second president of the Czech Republic and a former prime minister, is also an economist my trade.

Advocates of man-made global warming theories in Europe and the U.S. are pushing cynical political schemes that will erode individual liberty, curtail the standard living and stymie economic growth, Klaus warned audience members. Unfortunately, these individuals are not sufficiently challenged in the field of climate science or in the social sciences, he argued.

For this reason, Klaus believes it is necessary to "restart the discussion of the very nature of government and the relationship between the individual and society." In Europe and America there is "a powerful combination of irresponsibility and wishful thinking" at work among those who believe in their own omniscience, he warned.

The revolutionary talk aimed at re-ordering economic reality is not entirely dissimilar from what Leonid Brezhnev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, attempted in the 1970s, Klaus pointed out.

But because the historical failures communism are not fresh in the minds of succeeding generations, Klaus recommended to listeners that they reacquaint themselves with Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist and political philosopher, who wrote a book entitled "The Fatal Conceit." Hayek argued that humans are not equipped to reshape the world based on any particular set of wishes and have a limited capacity to process complex scenarios.

Those who are argue in favor of man-made global warming theories are making the very mistakes Hayek warned against, Klaus said. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is often cited by such advocates, relies upon incomplete and faulty data, he argued.

Nevertheless, European Union (E.U.) officials have talked about reducing CO2 emissions across the entire E.U. by about 30 percent over the next 13 years, Klaus pointed out. Such radical reductions would most likely extract a tremendous economic cost, in his estimation. To drive the point home, Klaus discussed how the three different types of European countries performed from 1990 to 2005, the era of the Kyoto Treaty.

The less developed countries -- namely Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain -- tried to catch up with more developed countries during this period and increased their carbon emissions by 53 percent, he said.

By contrast the post-communist countries like the Czech Republic experienced a "radical shakeout" and saw their Gross Domestic Product decline dramatically during this period. The carbon emissions of all the post-communist countries fell about 32 percent during this time. The "normal" slow growing EU countries saw their emissions fall about four percent during this time period.

This statistics should give pause to policy makers before they embrace policies that open the door to economic decline, he observed.

The main message of the Heartland conference should not climatology per se, but the preservation of human freedom, Klaus concluded.

Make media inquiries or request an interview about this article.



E-mail a comment or news tip to Kevin Mooney