Czech President Calls For Rational Debate On Global Warming, Rejects "Current Hysteria"

Czech President Vaclav Klaus called for a rational debate on global warming, rejecting what he called "hysteria" driven by environmentalists. "Let's bring the debate to whether the 0.6 (degree Celsius warming over the last century) is much or little, how much Man has contributed to the warming and ... if there is anything at all Man can do about it," Klaus said when presenting his book "Blue, Not a Green Planet." He charged that groups other than scientists have now seized on the topic and ambitious environmentalists are fueling a global warming hysteria that has no solid ground in fact and allows manipulation of people. "It is about a key topic of our time, and that is the topic of human freedom and its curtailment," Klaus said.President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus "The approach of environmentalists toward nature is similar to the Marxist approach to economic rules, because they also try to replace free spontaneity of the evolution of the world (and of mankind) with ... global planning of the world's development," Klaus writes in his book. "That approach ... is a utopia leading to completely other than wanted results," he says. Klaus, an economist by profession, has repeatedly warned that policy makers are pushed by the widespread fear of global warming to adopt enormously costly programs that eventually may have no positive effect. Klaus served as Czechoslovak finance minister after the 1989 fall of communism and as Czech prime minister after Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. As president, he now has mainly ceremonial powers.