Czech President Vaclav Klaus published Blue Planet in Green Shackles and challenged Al Gore to debate on climate change. Having survived and overcome Marxism, he has fascinating insights into the parallels of centralized Marxist control mentality and the modern environmentalism trying to impose its utopian ideals on the rest of us. His insights appear to apply to understand the parallel efforts by materialists / atheists to impose their “scientific” worldview of macro-evolution on the rest of the world. See article and book abstract below.
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Czech President Klaus ready to debate Gore on climate change
Washington – Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms. “I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he’s not too much willing to make such a conversation,” Klaus said. “So I’m ready to do it.”Klaus was speaking a the National Press Building in Washington to present his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles – What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?, before meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday. “My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity,” he said. Gore a former US vice president who has become a leading international voice in the cause against global warming, was co-winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Gore’s effort was highlighted by his Oscar winning documentary film An Inconvienent Truth. Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. “Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said. “In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat – this time, in the name of the planet,” he added. . . . “It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,” he said. . . .
Copyright, 2008 DPA See Full Article
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Blue Planet in Green Shackles Vaclav Klaus & Fred L. Smith Jr. Competitive Enterprise Institute; 1st edition (2007)
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is proud to announce a provocative new book on environmental policy, Blue Planet in Green Shackles by Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic. President Klaus makes the case that policies being proposed to address global warming are not justified by current science and are, in fact, a dangerous threat to freedom and prosperity around the world. — Klaus argues that the environmental movement has transformed itself into an ideology that seeks to restrict human activities at any cost, while pursuing an impossible utopian dream of a perfectly “natural” world. The supposed threat of human civilization against a fragile Earth has become an article of faith, especially in the realm of global warming activism. — “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism,” writes Klaus. “It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.” — The publication of Blue Planet in Green Shackles What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? continues the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s history of fighting alarmist climate policies. CEI has long argued that whatever challenges future climate changes might bring, the worst possible response is to restrict human freedom and slow economic growth and innovation. — “Today, the global warming debate raging in both the United States and Europe has become extremely contentious. On both sides of the Atlantic, the debate has metastasized into cultural warfare against economic liberty,” writes CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. in the book’s foreword. “For that reason, pro-freedom voices are needed to reframe the debate to show how a free people can better address the challenges facing Western civilization. To that end, we are proud to publish Blue Planet in Green Shackles.”
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PS The effective consequences of modern environmentalism with its global warming alarmism is to starve the poor by trying to “save the planet”. For the rapid rise in food prices see: Food price crisis to get worse
Rome – High food prices are here to stay for the foreseeable future, potentially forcing millions more people into hunger, two reports from the United Nations and the OECD showed on Thursday.
A surge in commodity prices in the last year was not a blip and prices will remain at or above current levels for at least the next decade as some of the main underpinning factors – demand for a richer diet, the rise of biofuels and high oil prices – will remain, one of the reports said.
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In a 10-year look-ahead at likely food price scenarios, to be published next week, the FAO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development saw no return to pre-crisis levels.Prices will be 35% to 65% higher
“On average, nominal prices for cereals, rice and oilseeds are expected to be 35% to 65% higher than on average in the past 10 years,” said a summary of the Agricultural Outlook report seen by Reuters.
“Prices in real terms are projected to be 10% to 35% higher than in the past decade.”
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Good weather and increased plantings will provide a 3.8% rise in world cereal output, with wheat up 8.7%. That has meant the price surge has started to level off, but prices will not go back to pre-crisis levels, FAO said.Rice, a staple for more than half the earth’s population, will remain in short supply on global markets, and poor countries that rely on food imports could see food bills up 40% this year after a similar price hike in 2007, its report said.
Perfect storm
“The sustained rise in imported food expenditures (for poor countries) … constitutes a very worrying development,” it said. “Their annual food import basket could cost four times as much as it did in 2000.”
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As well as increased demand for a richer diet from rapidly developing India and China, the relatively new practice of turning food into fuel will remain strong, as will crude oil prices which boost demand for biofuel and increase farming and freight costs, he said.
See full article
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World fertilizer prices soar as food and fuel economies merge
Global fertilizer prices rose more than 200% in 2007 as farmers applied more fertilizer to aximize production of corn — now used for ethanol — at record prices; hardest hit are African armers who need fertilizer to replenish nutrient-depleted soils
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In the United States, 70% of corn production has traditionally been used as animal feed, Humphres says. But 18% to 20% of the 2007 U.S. corn crop was used for ethanol, driving corn prices up by 70%. In 2008, 25% of U.S. corn is projected to go into ethanol.
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“In the United States, the government subsidizes ethanol by 51 cents a gallon [3.8 liters],” Humphres says. “Large companies are contracting corn from farmers who apply more fertilizer to maximize product ion. But if all U.S. corn production were converted to ethanol, it would supply only 27% of the United States’ current transportation fuel demand.”
Only meeting the U.S. mandate for biofuel production would require a 60% increase in U.S. land planted to corn, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.