Rush

on Vaclav Klaus, Communism and the Ideology of Environmentalism:

RUSH: You want to hear some conservatism? Vaclav Klaus, president, Czech Republic, yesterday, National Press Club, trying to warn everybody in America that we are being hoaxed with global warming and Algore.



Last night on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume during the panel discussion, the All Stars, Brit Hume spoke with Juan Williams about Vaclav Klaus, and Hume said, "Do you think Klaus is on the right track here or that he's an alarmist in the other direction?"

WILLIAMS: What he's saying is really interesting to me. I hadn't thought this through. But he's saying it's now beyond the scientists. He is saying in fact that it's an ideology that's seeking to take control of the world, is gonna tell us how to live, what cars to drive, whether you can have a refrigerator and all that, and suggest that it would somehow go beyond politics and not the way that suggests, oh, we have a green movement that everybody gets behind, but in fact would have political consequence not unlike a dictatorship. In all honesty, it struck me as something different. I had not heard this line of argument before because I've never felt threatened by an environmentalist. I think my consciousness is raised.

RUSH: I'm speechless. This is so typical. Here is a learned man, Juan Williams is a smart guy, and only yesterday has he ever heard somebody suggest that the environmental movement is not about environmentalism, that it's about large government, total control, dictatorial powers?

Right on Rush. Right on.

Update: Charles Krauthammer:

Look, on climate change, I'm agnostic. I wrote 20 years ago and believe today that humans pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere can't be harmless.

But the idea that we know exactly what it does, and that it's catastrophic, I think, is rank speculation. It depends on computer models which are inherently speculative. It depends on a cascade of events and a prediction of a cascade of events, all of which are improbable. And if you add it all up, it is pure speculation.

And I think Klaus is right. By pretending that the issue is closed — one of the news magazines had a cover article that the argument over global warming is over. No arguments in science are over. Newton's laws of motion, people for 300 years imagined was over the debate on that, and they turned out to be wrong.

So the idea that at this early stage in the science the argument is closed — but Klaus is right that it is being used by the new class, people, the experts, the planners, people on the left — they used to say we ought to control society in the name of the working class-that's communism- -and then in the name of state control of industry, and our superior knowledge of how to control society — that is the British socialist model.

All of those models have collapsed. And what they have been handed here is a gift. In the name of the planet, now, these experts are going to tell us how to live, and regulate.

And Klaus is right. It's a way to take these decisions out of the hands of individuals and to put it in the hands of experts acting in the name of the state and in the name of the planet. That is the new socialism, and he's right.