By Jeff Thimm
Earlier this week, on Monday Oct. 5, Vaclav Klaus, prime minister of the Czech Republic, promoted his recent book Blue Planet, Green Shackles – what is at risk: climate or freedom, newly translated into Albanian and published by the Albanian Institute for International Studies (available for sale at the Tirana Times Library, Rruga “D촨mor촠e 4 shkurtit”, No.7/1 Tirana, Albania).
His presentation on the core messages of his book suggested that the main topic was the fallacy of global warming, using specifically selected data from the IPCC’s 4AR (International Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report) and a few personal experiences to support his claims. His arguments centered on his belief that global warming is not only a scientific farce, but a well designed ploy by the environmental lobbies to gain political power and economic opportunity. This, he claims, is a direct affront upon economic development and the freedom of that underlies democracy. He even went so far as to call Environmentalism the new Communism.
A few points of clarification and correction are due to get the facts straight; both on the nature of global warming and climate change, and the role of regulation in promoting just and equitable economic development.
One of Klaus’s “scientific proofs” that global warming is not a reality is that Greenland is called Greenland because it was once a vast expanse of green. Ambassador of the OSCE to Albania, Robert Bosch, challenged this tabloidic proof with the historically accurate explanation depicted in acclaimed UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond’s world renowned book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies of the story of Eric the Red’s banishment to one of the now-once-icy Nordic colonies and his use of false marketing to attract colonists. Klaus’s retort was that such a story could only come a global warming alarmist like Al Gore. Regardless, the name of a country is not proof for or against the phenomena of global warming and climate change – the science is.
From macroscopic perspective of geological time-scales, while somewhat impractical, we see that the long term trend of the earth is cooling. In accordance with one of the laws of physics known as entropy, an equilibrium will be reached between the hot earth and the cold space around it. This will continue until the sun swells into a red giant and consumes the earth, returning it to whence it came. While creationists might disagree, the surface of the earth was originally a liquid mass of magma, expelled from the belly of the sun, and as it cooled, a thin crust solidified and the conditions developed to allow life to form and evolve.
From an ecological standpoint (microscopic in comparison to the earth’s existence), climate change is one of the most powerful forces driving evolution. Hot or cold, bright or dark, wet or dry – those species that are unable to survive the new environmental conditions become extinct and only those that make it through the evolutionary bottleneck survive. The critical element that allows this culling to occur without life ending completely is biodiversity; the seemingly excessive diversity of life forms that have evolved traits that allow them to survive the plethora of environmental conditions that are found on earth. For those species that have evolved within certain environmental conditions, climate change can spell the end.
Humans, Homo sapiens, have evolved within specific environmental conditions, two notable ones being temperature and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and oxygen (though others include rainfall patterns, seasonal variations, ocean levels, and ecosystem). While we have developed the technology to regulate temperature within a closed environment (e.g. fire, clothing, air-conditioning), we have not quite mastered the art of creating closed environments (though the Biosphere Project is noteworthy for its contribution). If we allow atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to increase beyond our biological tolerance, hopefully our technological developments will allow us to escape our industrial effluents and seek refuge in modern caves and bio-domes. Reproducing the countless ecosystem services that we depend upon, however, has proved extremely costly, such that many governments are turning to wetlands for wastewater treatment and forests for air filtration (pollinating a field of corn becomes quite tedious when the bees are gone and we must do it manually).
The question remains however if this is the trajectory that we wish to take, or more correctly, risk taking. A free market might create the incentives necessary to develop the technologies that will allow us to survive in the most extreme conditions – but is this what we want?
Unfettered capitalism and unregulated economic growth would return us to a paradigm of survival-of-the-fittest, which is perplexing considering that we fled this paradigm of nature by developing such things as culture, language, agriculture, medicine, education and governance. We realized that the elderly (the learning from our past) and the young (the possibilities of our future) were worth defending from the paradigm of wild nature. Why would we recreate another wild within our social structures in the name of absolute economic growth?
In his final statement, Klaus reiterated his believe that freedom is at stake, and central planning and government is the culprit. The use of the term freedom should not be tossed around lightly, for it is the boundaries we set collectively that allow us to be free from the perils beyond. Regulation and planning, if conducted in the right manner, do not impede economic growth, rather, they limit its undesired consequences. And make note: there are considerable differences between a planned economy (as attempted in communism) and a regulated economy (as is developed in Europe in relation to health care, education, social security, and environmental standards alike). We do not know for a certainty what the consequences of our actions are, but we do need to act upon the knowledge that we have, however imperfect it may be.
Let us not forget that the future of civilization is ours to develop, and that the quality of life held by all peoples of the world will be determined by our ethical foundations – may they be equitable and just.
