.

The Best at the UN ends up reflecting also on the worst: The UN Headquarters have many people of value – of compassion and of hope for a better future – this besides of some in the bureaucracy that might be innocents with no vision, others might be plants from Member States that want no part of human rights, dignity, or even of plain truth – so be it.

The good people under the leadership of Eric Falt and Kimberly Mann came up with a very interesting program that we posted earlier so people from outside the UN could know how to find their way in order to participate at these events. The list is in our following link:
 http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2010/01…

Later we found out that the information about these events was sent to parties outside the UN, was made available to the Press accredited to the UN, but as it turned out – from the 6 events listed by UN Outreach – only two events were printed in the Daily Journal of the UN. That journal is not made available now to NGOs – only to the diplomats – but then NGOs get their information from reading the Journal on the internet – so you can say that the UN Department of Information – the source of the Journal – even though it can contend that it made the information available to the PRESS – can in no way justify why it did not make available the information to the in-house members of the UN – except may-be say that some of those were not interested in the Holocaust as more pressing issues are at hand. But what about the educational aspects that were so important to the good people of the UN Outreach Division?

The day after the main event of Wednesday, a head of an NGO Committee that is daily at the UN, asked me – how did you know about the concert? I did not see it listed anywhere. And trust me – that was neither a question of space nor of security. Then what?

The UN In-House events numbered six, and participation was being granted by various sources – some of them outside the UN.

Let us start with the two events that appeared continuously in the Journal announcements:

These were the Wednesday January 27, 2010 event organized by the Jewish B’nai Brith International NGO in cooperation with the UN Permanent Mission of the Czech Republic. It dealt with the “Inter religious responses to the Holocaust – 65 years after liberation.” Tickets to this event were sent out by the B’nai Brith organization. There was no problem obtaining them after the appropriate phone call.

The other event was on Thursday January 28, 2010 – titled “The Moroccan Jews and Their legacy of survival.” The Journal does not mention that it was organized by the Moroccan Government but directed those interested to contact the DPI/NGO section as it was booked as a regular, weekly, DPI briefing to the NGOs. When approached – the appropriate UN officials said – send us a letter on NGO letterhead. So – this event was being treated as a regular NGO event – not as the important message that the Moroccan Government intended to put forward before members of the UN, and others who actually had no knowledge that during the terrible days of the Holocaust – there was indeed one Arab King – H.M. King Muhammad V of Morocco – who told the Nazis – the Jews of Morocco are my subjects and I do not discriminate between Jews and other Moroccans. Now that was a powerful message that deserved to be heard at the UN – and if not – the organization does not deserve the funds the world sends its way. I had no doubt that I had to take a stand on this issue – and I did.

———

The other four events of the week, none of them listed in the Journal, included two quentesential exhibits organized by Non-Governmental factors outside the UN.

On Monday, January 25, 2010,  there was a show of hope – it was actually called “Generations: Survival and Legacy of Hope,” for which entrance was obtained from the Shoa Foundation Institute in Los Angeles. This organization, funded initially by Mr. Steven Spielberg from Schindler’s list funds, has documented on video the stories of survivors and their descendants. Two families were present at the showing of material. Despite the terrible material it is the hope that shows through in the success of having picked up their lives again – this is what gives a reason for having hope in institutions that were established under the “Never Again” logo. This event – paired up with the following day opening – together form the raison d’etre for the UN institution – but you would not know this from the way the UN kept these two events of its Journal.

On Tuesday. January 26, 2010, the Exhibit – “Architecture of Murder: Auschwitz-Birkenau,” for which entrance was obtained from the Yad Vashem – Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. At this event participated also the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, The Israeli Minister for Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, and US Ambassador Rick Barton.

——–

The other two events that were not listed in the Journal are:

- The main Holocaust Memorial Ceremony and Concert in the General Assembly Hall for which one needed special tickets – so it was clearly a more controlled participation, and that was the event that the lady I mentioned earlier asked me about as she would have wanted to come had she known about it.

- The Thursday January 28, 2010 screening of the film “Defiance” that was co-sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the US and had present the lady that wrote the book, Nehama Tec, and her son who made the movie. The great thing about this movie is that it depicts the true story of the Bielski brothers – a story of Jewish fighters in the forests of Belarus – as the UN release says correctly – it depicts  “the struggle of a group of brave Jews who fought against overwhelming odds thus providing a sharp contrast to the countless WWII movies that portray Jews just as victims.” The two Bielski Brigades – the one under one brother that fought with the Russian partisans, and the other – under another brother that guarded the Jewish families in the forest. When the two groups fought together – they turned around the Nazi effort to clear the forest. 1200 people survived thanks to the Bielskis’ leadership. Two of the three Bielskis survived and eventually owned a small trucking business in the US.

ALDE group calls for EP debate on role of EU Council President

As candidates names for the position of President of the European Council are circulating with increasing frequency in the media ahead of the EU summit meeting in Brussels at the end of the month, Liberals and Democrats are calling for a parliamentary debate to better define the role and responsibilities of the new post before attempting to fill it. This morning, Parliament’s Group leaders backed the Liberal and Democrat group proposal to include a debate on the matter at the next Brussels part session on 11-12 November.

The Treaty of Lisbon, which is still awaiting the signature of the Czech President, is not specific on the job description of the European Council President which leaves an opportunity for the Parliament to give its own opinion on the subject.

The ALDE group also believes Parliament should address how the Commission needs to be structured to take account of the new external representation roles of the Council President and High representative as well as issues of accountability to Parliament for the actions and expenditure of the future activities of the Union.

Greening our economy, preserving our planet. ALDE aims to achieve a new,
greener and more competitive economy, utilising new skills and new
technologies to deliver prosperity and job opportunities.

nbsp;EUobserver.com – 19.09.2009 ******************************
************

THE FUTURE OF THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY IN THE EU.
The Good Word Seems To Be – Transformation Through Crisis – The start of the thinking process.

WHEN: 8th October 2009 from 9:00 -13:00h
WHERE: Committee of the Regions, Brussels? ‘Open Days’ – Rue Belliard 101,
1040 Brussels
WHO: European and American automotive industries, climate change experts,
transport specialists, regional
authorities, city planners, trade unions, consumers, lawmakers and media

Registration is FREE and is required due to limited number of seats.

Please register on: http://conferences.euobserver.com/auto/i…
(the workshop No is: 08A02)

ALDE – Distribution: immediate – July 8, 2009, 11:04 am
Watson to withdraw to give Buzek a clear mandate of support

Former ALDE Group Leader and EP Presidential candidate Graham Watson MEP today announced his intention to withdraw from the Presidential contest to give EPP candidate Jerzy Buzek a clear mandate of support from Parliament’s three major political families.

“The EU is mired in a crisis – economic, environmental and constitutional,” Mr Watson said; “and the three political families which founded our Union have decided to unite their forces to save it. The European Parliament is more divided than ever, with no stable majority possible. That is why I am withdrawing from the race to be President in support of a three-party agreement to save the EU.”

“Despite renouncing my plans for the Presidency of Parliament, I will continue to argue for a stronger and more effective Institution more focussed on the interests and concerns of the citizens and more engagement with national and regional parliaments.”

Note: Graham Watson MEP led the ELDR (later ALDE) Group in the EP for seven and a half years, two and a half years longer than any of his predecessors. He built the group from a membership of 46 MEPs in 2002 to a membership of 106 at its peak in 2008.

————

In 1963 Jerzy Buzek graduated from the Mechanics-and-Energy Division of the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice specializing in chemical engineering. He became a scientist in the Chemical Engineering Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gliwice. Since 1997 he is a professor of technical science. He is also an honorary doctor of the universities in Seoul and Dortmund.
From 1997-2001 he was Prime Minister of Poland. In 1998 he became a laureate of the Grzegorz Palka Award, was nominated the European of the Year by the European Union Business Chambers Forum and Man of the Year of a Polish political weekly Wprost.
After losing the parliamentary elections in 2001, he stepped back from Polish political life (although he was elected a member of the European Parliament in 2004) and focused more on his scientific work, becoming the prorector of Akademia Polonijna in Częstochowa and professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Opole University of Technology in Opole.

Jerzy Buzek comes from the well-known Buzek family, present in Polish politics since the 20 years of free Poland between the World Wars (World War I and World War II). His family comes from the Polish community in Zaolzie, a region of Cieszyn Silesia which is now part of the Czech Republic. He is a Protestant.
In the 1980s Jerzy Buzek was an activist of the democratic anti-communist movements, including the legal (1980-1981 and since 1989) and underground (1981-1989) Solidarity trade union and political movement in the communist Poland. He was active organizer of the trade union’s regional and national underground authorities. He was also the chairman of the four national general meetings (1st, 4th, 5th and 6th) when Solidarity was allowed to act legally.

In years 1997-2001 he was the prime minister of Poland, first of the right-centrist AWS-UW coalition government until 2001, and then of the rightist AWS minority government. His cabinet major achievements are 4 significant political and economic reforms: the new local government and administration division of Poland, reform of the pension schemes system, reform of the educational system and reform of the medical services system.

On 13 June 2004 Jerzy Buzek was elected Member of European Parliament from Silesian Voivodeship constituency, without printing of any posters, basing his election only on popularity of his name and on direct contact with the voters. He received the record number of votes in the whole Poland: 173,389 (22.14% of the total votes in this region).
His party is the Platforma Obywatelska which joined the European People’s Party and sits now on the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy.
Buzek is a substitute for the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, a member of the Delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee and a substitute for the Delegation for relations with the countries of Central America.
On 7 June 2009 Buzek was reelected Member of European Parliament from Silesian Voivodeship constituency. Just as in the previous election, Buzek received the record number of votes in Poland: 393, 117 (over 42% of the total votes in the constuency).

============

The Original July 4, 2009 posting:

Will it be   Jose Manuel Barroso or Graham Watson at the helm of a strengthened EU?

Graham Watson MEP

Leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group

He is the candidate from ALDE to the left of The European Parliament to stand up as counter-candidate to Jose Manuel Barroso’s bid to become European Commission president for a second time.’s bid to become European Commission president for a second time.

It seems that the elections will now take place mid-September – under the Swedish Presidency of the EU.

Coal: An answer to energy insecurity?
Monday 1 – Tuesday 2 June 2009
Chatham House, London

A major two-day international conference

The Chatham House coal conference is taking place at a critical time of debate in the industry, with governments the world over weighing up their energy options with climate security. Register now for this highly topical event, offering:

• Discussions of the most pressing issues within the debate, including the reality of CCS, creating policy conditions for cleaner coal and achieving universal best practice
• Keynote addresses from Mike O’Brien, Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, UK and Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director, International Energy Agency
• A unique cross section of international policymakers, practitioners, environmentalists and experts, from China, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Japan, USA and the UK to discuss this highly topical issue.
• Many opportunities for audience interaction and networking with the leading thinkers in the field.

From: Mikael Román <mikael.roman@sei.se>
Date: Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 3:09 PM
Subject: Swedish Report on US Climate Policies under the Obama Administration

Dear Colleagues

Please find attached the links to a report “Sea Change: US Climate Policy Prospects Under the Obama Administration”, which was published last week by the Swedish government’s Commission for Sustainable Development as part of its preparation for the COP 15 in Copenhagen this fall.

The report provides an assessment of climate change efforts by the new administration as of late March, as well as an overview and analysis of the key factors that will influence the development of US Climate policy leading up to and beyond Copenhagen. It concludes with a selection of observations considered especially relevant and important, and the Swedish Government would be wise to take into consideration in its role leading the EU delegation. We’ve included a couple of introductory paragraphs at the bottom of the page.
 http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/11736/a/12…

Yours,

Mikael Roman, PhD   Stockholm Environment Institute
 Mikael.Roman at sei.se

Marcus Carson, PhD, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University
 Marcus.Carson at sociology.su.se

SEA CHANGE: US Climate Policy Prospects Under the Obama Administration

Less than two months into the Obama Presidency, there remains no doubt that its policies constitute a fundamental break with those of the previous administration. The commitment to vigorously grappling with climate change is a core element of this break – a “sea change”, in the words of UN Climate Chief Yvo de Boer. The Obama Administration has already begun to demonstrate its seriousness about climate change through actions being taken within US borders. It has also begun to re-engage energetically in international climate negotiations. With many of the important details on staffing decisions, principles and timelines for legislative initiatives, and other priorities now fleshed out, the essential goals and contours of the new American climate change agenda have taken form. Developments are unfolding rapidly, so that any assessment must cope with a rapidly moving target.

US climate politics has reached a critical political tipping point. The dramatic shift in the climate politics of the Executive Branch of US Government is accompanied by more incremental changes in the Congress, at the regional, state and local level, and in public opinion. In short, the conditions for adopting and implementing forceful measures for addressing climate change looking far better than at any time previously. That is the good news. Nevertheless, some of the important circumstances that condition the development of US climate policies remain stubbornly fixed.

———————

- http://www.climate-l.org – A knowledgebase of International Climate Change Activities, provided by IISD in cooperation with the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) Secretariat

Last year, at the Heartland Institute New York City Event, the oil companies had their free run and actually it was quite an entertaining event. Paleontology was well rehearsed, but also seemingly honest naive people spoke out their thoughts. Some thoughts were provocative indeed, and caused real scientists a work-out in finding reasonable answers – and let us face it – science does not have yet answers for everything, and if it had, it would be no science. It is only religion that has answers for everything, and our website suggested in the past that the oil-use religion is causing humanity’s assured self-destruction. Darwin, another of the Heartland’s targets, made it clear that it takes eons to effect evolution, and life as we know it evolved within the context of a carbon/oxygen chemistry within a given composition of the mixture of gases we call air. A serious deviation from this composition might indeed end life on earth as it evolved – a very frightening idea that no sophist should dare to disregard. But well ….

We reporrted then:

Vaclav Klaus, President of The Czech Republic, Sets The Timing For The Heartland Institute’s New York Climate Change Conference, He May Yet Become, Personaly, A Serious Impediment On The Road To Copenhagen.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 9th, 2008

by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

————————-

This year, on March 9, 2009 – At Columbia University, March 9, 2009, 3-4 pm, Rotunda, Low Memorial Library., World Leaders Program, Victoria de Grazia, Moore College Professor of History will moderate.

President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republicnda, Low Memorial Library

This World Leaders Forum program features a keynote address by

—————

http://www.heartland.org/

The big event:

welcome The world’s largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics will assemble Sunday in New York City to confront the issue, “Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?” The complete program for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, including cosponsor information and brief biographies of all speakers, can be downloaded in Adobe’s PDF format here. About 800 scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives are expected to register at the second International Conference on Climate Change, opening Sunday, March 8 and concluding Tuesday, March 10 at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel. Produced by The Heartland Institute and 57 co-sponsoring organizations, the conference is devoted to answering questions overlooked by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That panel concluded global temperatures may already have reached crisis proportions, and that human activity was a key driver in raising temperatures, primarily because of the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the 80 experts scheduled to speak at the Heartland conference say they will present a substantially different viewpoint. “The number of people registered for this event is nearly twice as many as attended the 2008 conference,” noted Heartland President Joseph Bast. “And the presenters at this year’s conference are the elite in the world among climate scientists. We will be delighted to demonstrate once again the breadth and high quality of support that the skeptical perspective on climate change enjoys.” Headliners among the 70-plus presenters will be: Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and of the European Union. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he declared, “Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. I’m afraid that the current crisis will be misused for radically constraining the functioning of the markets and market economy all around the world.” American astronaut Dr. Jack Schmitt–the last living man to walk on the moon–a geologist Ph.D. who has contended he has seen “too many of [my] colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming.” William Gray, Colorado State University, who claims global warming alarmists have hijacked the American Meteorological Society. Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world’s leading experts in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves. Stephen McIntyre, primary author of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is a devastating critic of the temperature record of the past 1,000 years, particularly the work of Michael E. Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph. That graph–thoroughly discredited in scientific circles–supposedly proved that mankind is responsible for a sharp increase in greenhouse gases. Arthur Robinson, curator of a global warming petition signed by more than 32,000 American scientists, including more than 10,000 with doctorate degrees, rejecting the alarmist assertion that global warming has put the Earth in crisis and is caused primarily by mankind. Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville, principal research scientist and team leader on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Don Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, who will present new data showing “the most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling.” The Heartland Institute, a 25-year-old national nonpartisan think-tank based in Chicago, said all of the event’s expenses will be covered by admission fees and individual and foundation donors to Heartland. No corporate dollars or sponsorships earmarked for the event were solicited or accepted. Co-sponsors do not pay any fee or donation to Heartland to be a co-sponsor. Heartland hasn’t received funding from either the Koch or Scaife foundations in at least a decade. Click here for the full proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change — including audio and video for more than 100 speakers.

program

last updated: March 5, 2009

Where and When

The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change will take place in New York City on March 8-10, 2009 (Sunday – Tuesday), at the Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel, 1535 Broadway, New York, NY.

There will be four tracks of panel discussions:

1. Paleoclimatology
2. Climatology
3. Impact of Climate Change
4. Economics and Politics

The complete program, including cosponsor information and brief biographies of all speakers, can be downloaded in Adobe’s PDF format here.

The tentative schedule appears below.

Sunday, March 8
3:00 – 8:00 pm	Registration
3:00 – 7:00 pm	Exhibit hall open
5:00 – 6:30 pm	Registration and reception
6:30 – 9:30 pm	Opening dinner with keynote speakers Hon. Vaclav Klaus – No Progress in the Climate Change Debate Richard Lindzen – Climate Alarm: What We Are Up Against, and What to Do
9:30 – 10:30 pm	Networking and reception
Monday, March 9
7:00 am – 5:00 pm	Exhibit hall open
7:30 – 8:30 am	Breakfast with keynote speakers Hon. Tom McClintock – Inconvenient Questions Lawrence Solomon – Our Green Friends
8:30 – 8:45 am	Break
8:45 – 10:15 am	Session I
	Track 1: Paleoclimatology Tom Segalstad – Carbon Isotope Mass Balance Modeling of Atmospheric vs. Oceanic CO2 Syun Akasofu – Natural Causes of 20th Century Warming: Recovery from the Little Ice Age and Oscillatory Change David Evans – Carbon Dioxide Not Responsible for 20th Century Warming
	Track 2: Climatology – Serious Problems with IPCC Forecasting Procedures J. Scott Armstrong – A Forecaster’s View of Climate Change: Methodology Also Counts Kesten Green – Validity of Climate Change Forecasting for Public Policy Decision Making Terry Dunleavy- ‘Consensus’ in Climate Science: An Unsubstantiated Urban Myth
	Track 3: Climate Change Impacts Alexandre Aguiar – Dubious Connections between Global Warming and Extreme Weather Events Craig Idso – Carbon Dioxide, Global Warming, and Coral Reefs: Prospects for the Future David Legates – Climate Change and Extreme Events: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
	Track 4: Economics and Politics – The Economics of Energy Rationing Marlo Lewis – Economic Train Wreck: Regulation CO2 Emissions Under the Clean Air Act Ross McKitrick – Calling the Cap-and-Trade Bluff David Kreutzer – Modeling Results on the Effects of Cap and Trade
10:15 – 10:30 am	Break
10:30 – 11:00 am	Book-signing in the Exhibit Hall: Robert L. Bradley, Jr.
10:30 am – 12:00 noon	Session II
	Track 1: Paleoclimatology Fred Goldberg – Do the Planets and the Sun Control Our Climate and the CO2 in the Atmosphere? Craig Loehle – 1,500-Year Climate Cycles, Broken Hockey Sticks, and Ocean Cooling Tim Patterson – Gleissberg Cycle: Pacemaker for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation?
	Track 2: Climatology William Kininmonth – A Natural Limit to Anthropogenic Global Warming Brian Valentine – Proposed Experimental Methods to Measure the Downward Directed Component of Radiation from CO2 in the Night Sky Jan Veizer – Climate, Water, Carbon Dioxide, and the Sun
	Track 3: Climate Change Impacts – Exposing the Myths Regarding Global Warming and Human Health John Dale Dunn – Human Health Effects of Warming and Cooling Joel Schwartz – Climate Chnage and Human Health: A California Perspective Howard Maccabee
	Track 4: Economics and Politics – The Political Outlook for Energy-Rationing Policies Marc Morano – Prospects for Cap-and-Trade Legislation in the New Congress Chris Horner – Re-Writing the Rules for Kyoto II: Turning a Treaty into a Congressional-Executive Agreement Myron Ebell – Prospects for Energy Rationing: It’s Not as Grim as it Looks
12:00 noon – 2:00 pm	Lunch and keynote speakers Hon. Harrison Schmitt – Climate Facts that Really Are Facts Art Robinson – Nobel Prize for Death
2:00 – 2:15 pm	Break
2:15 – 2:45 pm	Book-signing in the Exhibit Hall: Christopher C. Horner
2:15 – 2:45 pm	Book-signing in the Exhibit Hall: Iain Murray
2:15 – 3:45 pm	Session III
	Track 1: Paleoclimatology Dennis Avery – Predicting 21st Century Global Warming with the 1,500-year Climate Cycle Joe D’Aleo – Data Integrity Issues, Natural Variability, and Climate Change
	Track 2: Climatology Patrick Michaels – EPA’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking William Cotton – Weather and Climate Engineering Anthony Lupo – Inter-annual Temperature Variations
	Track 3: Climate Change Impacts Indur Goklany – Climate Change Impacts Paul Reiter – The EDEN Project: Emerging Diseases in a Changing European Environment Stanley Goldenberg – Is There a Link between Global Warming and Hurricane Activity?
	Track 4: Economics and Politics – The Morality of Energy Rationing Barun Mitra -The Three E’s of Energy: Ethics, Economics, and Efficiency Cal Beisner – Remember the Poor: A Christian Perspective on Energy Rationing Roy Innis – Congress of Racial Equality
3:45 – 4:00 pm	Break
4:00 – 4:30 pm	Book-signing in the Exhibit Hall: Patrick J. Michaels
4:00 – 5:30 pm	Session IV
	Track 1: Climatology Richard Keen – Volcanoes and Climate Change Since 1980: A View from the Moon David Douglass – The Models Still Do Not Agree with the Observations Nir Shaviv – New Solar-Climate Link and Implications for Our Understanding of Climate Change
	Track 2: Climatology Anthony Watts – Weather Station Siting Issues within the USHCN Surface Station Network Steve McIntyre – Do We Know that the 1990s Were the Warmest Decade of the Millennium? James J. O’Brien – The Truth about Climate Change in the Southeast United States
	Track 3: Economics and Politics – The Kyoto Zone Roger Helmer – The EU Parliament Benny Peiser – The Crisis of EU Climate Policy Gabriel Calzada – Spain’s New Economy: Boom and Bust of the Spanish Renewable Miracle
	Track 4: Economics and Politics Kenneth P. Green – A Green Economy, or a Tide of Red Ink? Bob Ferguson – State Climate Policies: Arkansas as Profile Tom Tanton – Are California’s Global Warming Policies a Model for the Nation?
5:30 pm	Dinner on your own
8:00 – 11:00 pm	Dessert reception
8:30 – 9:00 pm	Book-signing in the Exhibit Hall: Richard A. Keen
Tuesday, March 10
7:00 am – 3:00 pm	Exhibit hall open
7:00 – 8:30 am	Breakfast with keynote speakers John Sununu – The Politics of Science: It Ain’t Pretty Willie Soon – Disconnects in Sun-Climate Studies: Removing Politics from the Science
8:30 – 8:45 am	Break
8:45 – 10:15 am	Session V
	Track 1: Climatology S. Fred Singer: No Evidence for AGW: A Personal Odyssey Christopher Essex – Climate Change and the Laughter of the Gods Piers Corbyn – What Does and Does Not Cause Climate Change
	Track 2: Climatology George Taylor – The Pacific Decadal Oscillation: A Dominant Mode of Climate Variability Roy Spencer – Satellite Evidence for Global Warming Being Driven by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation William Gray – Climate Change Is Primarily Driven by Salinity-Induced Deep Ocean Circulation Changes
	Track 3: Climate Change Impacts Laurence Gould – Global Warming Alarmism: Checking the Claims, Exposing the Methods Howard Hayden – Debunking Global Warming Propaganda Keith Lockitch – Green Energy: How to Undermine Industrial Civilization and Become More Vulnerable to Nature
	Track 4: Economics and Politics – Intellectual Roots of Alarmism Christopher Booker – From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth Iain Murray – Tracing Alarmism’s Methods Back to Their Roots Yaron Brook – Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Sacrifice
10:15 – 10:30 am	Break
10:30 – 11:00 am	Book-signing in the Exhibit Hall: Christopher Booker
10:30 am – 12:00 noon	Session VI
	Track 1: Climatology Don Easterbrook – ‘Global Warming’ Is Over: Geologic, Oceanographic, and Solar Evidence for Global Cooling in the Coming Decades Mike Jungbauer – Global Warming Science and Policymakers
	Track 2: Climatology – Findings of the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change Fred Singer Richard Lindzen Christopher Monckton David Douglass Christopher Essex
	Track 3: Economics and Politics Michelle Foss – Climate Science and Economics: Understanding and Balacing the Debate Francisco Capella – Climate Change and the Ethics of Freedom Jay Lehr – Green Energy Job Losses
	Track 4: Economics and Politics – The Alarmists Revealed Rob Bradley – The Malthusian Virus in the Scientific Debate Joanne Nova – The Great Global Fawning: How Science Journalists Pay Homage to Non-Science and Un-Reason John Coleman – Dead Wrong about Global Warming: How Al Gore Got that Way
12:00 noon – 3:00 pm	Lunch and keynote speakers Bob Carter – The Problem is NATURAL Climate Change, Stupid! John Theon – Is Climate Change Driven by Mankind: My Personal Journey Christopher Monckton – Magna est veritas, et praevalet (Great Is Truth, and Mighty Above All Things)

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registration

<PetitionSigners.jpg>
SPECIAL OFFER for signers of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Global Warming Petition! If you have signed the Global Warming Petition, you qualify for a 20 percent discount off the registration fees described below. To apply, call Events Manager Nikki Comerford at 312/377-4000. Please note we will confirm with OISM that you have legitimately signed the petition, and we reserve the right to reject discounted registrations from persons who have not signed.

The complete program for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, including cosponsor information and brief biographies of all speakers, can be downloaded in Adobe’s PDF format here.

Online registration: Pay in U.S. dollars

Online registration: Pay in Euros

To register by phone, have a credit card ready and call Ms. McElrath at 312/377-4000. To register by mail, download the form and mail it with check or credit card information to: 2009 ICCC, The Heartland Institute, 19 South LaSalle Street #903, Chicago, Illinois 60603, USA.

Full Delegate	US $720	490 Euro
Students	US $360	245 Euro
Panels Only (no meals)	US $360	245 Euro

Full delegates, media, and students receive:

• program updates by email prior to the event
• tickets for five meals (plenary sessions)
• admission to all panels
• conference proceedings manual
• all session refreshments

Panels Only registrants receive all the benefits above except the five meals.

Elected officials: Free admission and travel and hotel scholarships are available to elected officials. Please direct inquiries to Brian Costin, assistant government relations director, at bcostin@heartland.org.

Journalists: Free admission is available to qualified journalists. Please direct inquiries to Tammy Nash, media relations manager, at tnash@heartland.org.

Online registrants will receive immediate confirmation via email. If registering by written form, confirmation will be emailed (if address provided) within 72 hours of receipt. Registrations cancelled prior to 5:00 pm (CST) on February 16, 2009 are subject to a $100 cancellation fee. Registrations are non-refundable after 5:00 pm (CST) on February 16, 2009.

For more information, contact Nikki Comerford, events director at The Heartland Institute, at ncomerford@
 heartland.org, or call 312/377-4000.

=================———————————–

Vaclav Klaus, President of The Czech Republic, Sets The Timing For The Heartland Institute’s New York Climate Change Conference, He May Yet Become, Personaly, A Serious Impediment On The Road To Copenhagen.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 9th, 2008

by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

We were surprised to learn that the current President of The Czech Republic, Mr. Vaclav Klaus, will be the 7 a.m. speaker at the final Breakfast meeting of the Heartland Institute’s Climate Change Skeptics’ meeting, in New York City, Tuesday, March 4, 2008.We knew that in September 2007, at the Climate Change meeting called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Czech President was the only Head of State to criticize the UN for its approach on climate change.

Now this is something that should worry us. The Czech Republic will hold onto the EU Presidency for the January 1. 2009 to the June 30, 2009 period. And this is right in between the 2008 COP 14 of the UNFCCC in Poznan and the COP 15 of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen. We already expressed our worries last week after the release of information about Czech opposition to some of the most important climate change fighting measures envisioned by the EU.

http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2008/03…

Now, further, as after the present Slovenian EU Presidency, there comes the French Presidency, that ends on December 31, 2008 and covers thus the December Poznan meeting, that was supposed to prepare the material that will then move to the the December 2009 Copenhagen meeting.

We already wrote about the fact that the US Presidential elections occur in November 2008, so by December 2008 there will be a totally lame US Administration that will just tread time until the President-in-Waiting, or the President-Elect takes over. As Poznan is supposed to bring in to the negotiation circle the US – this simply is impossible because the President elect will not be able to have any meaningful role in these negotiations.

We suggested thus earlier that a solution could be the postponement of the Poznan meeting until March, at least. This because what we learned from the experience with the change of government in Australia – where the new Prime Minister came to Bali and managed real change, and speeded-up the process there.

But now we stand corrected – a Czech Presidency of the EU in March 2008 is now a guarantee for a non-performing EU.

So, we stand now corrected about the idea of postponing Poznan, while still being right about a projected non-performing Poznan. Obviously, except if President Bush does experience indeed a true change of heart on matters of oil, the National and Global Interest, and climate change.

After the Czechs, the EU Presidency passes to Sweden – which will be at the head of the EU delegation in Copenhagen – but having limped along till June 30, 2008, can the EU, the motor on climate change activities at the UN, be able to pull out in five months the agreed text that is needed in order to have a post-2012 roadmap on global activities to reduce CO2 emissions?

Let us hear what the Czech President said on the subject of climate change in previous fora:

7.9.2007 – At the Ambrosetti Forum,Villa d’Este, Italy. “Global Warming Hysteria or Freedom and Prosperity?”

One can tell – with a high degree of confidence – what topics are expected to be raised here, this morning when it comes to discussing the key challenges of today’s world. The selection of the moderator and my fellow-panelists only confirms it. I guess it is either international terrorism or poverty in Africa. Talking about both of these topics is necessary because they are real dangers but it is relatively easy to talk about them because it is politically correct. I do see those dangers and do not in any way underestimate them. I do, however, see another major threat which deserves our attention – and I am afraid it does not get sufficient attention because to discuss it is politically incorrect these days.

The threat I have in mind is the irrationality with which the world has accepted the climate change (or global warming) as a real danger to the future of mankind and the irrationality of suggested and partly already implemented measures because they will fatally endanger our freedom and prosperity, the two goals we consider – I do believe – our priorities.

We have to face many prejudices and misunderstandings in this respect. The climate change debate is basically not about science; it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature; it is about the concept of human society. It is not about nature or scientific ecology; it is about environmentalism, about one – recently born – dirigistic and collectivistic ideology, which goes against freedom and free markets.

I spent most of my life in a communist society which makes me particularly sensitive to the dangers, traps and pitfalls connected with it. Several points have to be clarified to make the discussion easier:

1. Contrary to the currently prevailing views promoted by global warming alarmists, Al Gore’s preaching, the IPCC, or the Stern Report, the increase in global temperatures in the last years, decades and centuries has been very small and because of its size practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities. (The difference of temperatures between Prague where I was yesterday and Cernobbio where I am now is larger than the expected increase in global temperatures in the next century.)

2. As I said, the empirical evidence is not alarming. The arguments of global warming alarmists rely exclusively upon forecasts, not upon past experience. Their forecasts originate in experimental simulations of very complicated forecasting models that have not been found very reliable when explaining past developments.

3. It is, of course, not only about ideology. The problem has its important scientific aspect but it should be stressed that the scientific dispute about the causes of recent climate changes continues. The attempt to proclaim a scientific consensus on this issue is a tragic mistake, because there is none.

4. We are rational and responsible people and have to act when necessary. But we know that a rational response to any danger depends on the size and probability of the eventual risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. As a responsible politician, as an academic economist, as an author of a book about the economics of climate change, I feel obliged to say that – based on our current knowledge – the risk is too small and the costs of eliminating it too high. The application of the so called “precautionary principle,” advocated by the environmentalists, is – conceptually – a wrong strategy.

5. The deindustrialization and similar restrictive policies will be of no help. Instead of blocking economic growth, the increase of wealth all over the world and fast technical progress – all connected with freedom and free markets – we should leave them to proceed unhampered. They represent the solution to any eventual climate changes, not their cause. We should promote adaptation, modernization, technical progress. We should trust in the rationality of free people.

6. It has a very important North-South and West-East dimension. The developed countries do not have the right to impose any additional burden on the less developed countries. Imposing overambitious and – for such countries – economically disastrous environmental standards on them is unfair.

No radical measures are necessary. We need something “quite normal.” We have to get rid of the one-sided monopoly, both in the field of climatology and in the public debate. We have to listen to arguments. We have to forget fashionable political correctness. We should provide the same or comparable financial backing to those scientists who do not accept the global warming alarmism.

I really do see environmentalism as a threat to our freedom and prosperity. I see it as “the world key current challenge.”

Václav Klaus, Ambrosetti Forum,Villa d’Este, Italy.

24.9.2007 – Notes for the speech of the President of the Czech Republic at the UN Climate Change Conference called for by the UNSG Ban Ki-moon ahead of the UNGA General Debate That Started The Following Day.

Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

Responsible politicians know that they have to act when it is necessary. They know that their duty is to initiate public policy responses to issues that could pose a threat to the people of their countries. And they know that they have to form partnerships with colleagues from other countries when a problem cannot be confined to national boundaries. To help doing it is one of the main reasons for the existence of institutions such as the United Nations.

However, the politicians have to ensure that the costs of public policies organized by them will not be bigger than the benefits achieved. They have to carefully consider and seriously analyze their projects and initiatives. They have to do it, even if it may be unpopular and if it means blowing against the wind of fashion and political correctness. I congratulate Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on organizing this conference and thank him for giving us an opportunity to address the important, but one-sidedly debated issue of climate changes. The consequences of acknowledging them as a real, big, imminent and man-made threat would be so enormous that we are obliged to think twice before making decisions. I am afraid it is not the case now.

Let me raise several points to bring the issue into its proper context:

1. Contrary to the artificially and unjustifiably created world-wide perception, the increase in global temperatures has been – in the last years, decades and centuries – very small in historical comparisons and practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities.

2. The hypothetical threat connected with future global warming depends exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon undeniable past experience and its eventual trends and tendencies. These forecasts are based on relatively short time series of relevant variables and on forecasting models that have not been proved very reliable when attempting to explain past developments.

3. Contrary to many self-assured and self-serving proclamations, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of recent climate changes. An impartial observer must accept the fact that both sides of the dispute – the believers in man’s dominant role in recent climate changes, as well as the supporters of the hypothesis about their mostly natural origin – offer arguments strong enough to be listened to carefully by the non-scientific community. To prematurely proclaim the victory of one group over another would be a tragic mistake and I am afraid we are making it.

4. As a result of this scientific dispute, there are those who call for an imminent action and those who warn against it. Rational behavior depends – as always – on the size and probability of the risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. As a responsible politician, as an economist, as an author of a book about the economics of climate change, with all available data and arguments in mind, I have to conclude that the risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it too high and the application of a fundamentalistically interpreted “precautionary principle” a wrong strategy.

5. The politicians – and I am not among them – who believe in the existence of a significant global warming and especially those who believe in its anthropogenic origin remain divided: some of them are in favor of mitigation, which means of controlling global climate changes (and are ready to put enormous amounts of resources into it), while others rely on adaptation to it, on modernization and technical progress, and especially on favorable impact of the future increase in wealth and welfare (and prefer spending public money there). The second option is less ambitious and promises much more than the first one.

6. The whole problem does not only have its time dimension, but a more than important spatial (or regional) aspect as well. This is highly relevant especially here, in the UN. Different levels of development, income and wealth in different places of the world make world-wide, overall, universal solutions costly, unfair and to a great extent discriminatory. The already developed countries do not have the right to impose any additional burden on the less developed countries. Dictating ambitious and for them entirely inappropriate environmental standards is wrong and should be excluded from the menu of recommended policy measures.

My recommendations are as follows:

1. The UN should organize two parallel IPCCs and publish two competing reports. To get rid of the one-sided monopoly is a sine qua non for an efficient and rational debate. Providing the same or comparable financial backing to both groups of scientists is a necessary starting point.

2. The countries should listen to one another, learn from mistakes and successes of others, but any country should be left alone to prepare its own plan to tackle this problem and decide what priority to assign to it among its other competing goals.

We should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism. Therefore, let’s vote for adaptation, not for the attempts to mastermind the global climate.

Václav Klaus, Climate Change Conference, United Nations, New York, September 24th, 2007

26.9.2007 – Statement by H.E. Mr. Václav KLAUS President of the Czech Republic at the General Debate of the 62nd Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Mr. Chairman,

Allow me to congratulate you on your election as President of the 62nd Session of the General Assembly. I also welcome the highly respected Secretary General at his first opening session of this Assembly.

I would like to start with saying that my country is proud to be one of the founding fathers of the United Nations in its current form. The Czech Republic, a successor state of Czechoslovakia, has been actively participating in all kinds of UN activities in the past and it will continue to do so in the future.

We take part not only in the work of the United Nations itself, but also of its specialized organizations and agencies such as UNESCO, UNDP, FAO, WHO, International Atomic Energy Agency, and many others. We have always supported any meaningful initiative, which leads to the increase of stability and prosperity of the world.

I am proud to confirm that the Czech Republic has the ambition to be elected to the Security Council as a non-permanent member in the period 2008-2009. I believe that we can be trusted by the majority of Member States and that we do deserve their votes.

We are convinced we have already demonstrated our devotion to freedom, democracy, international cooperation, economic development and respect for sovereignty of countries belonging to this community of nations. My country served in the Security Council in 1994 and 1995 when I was Prime Minister. We tried to do our best. We were predictable and committed to hard work. Now, as President of the Czech Republic I can assure you that we will do even a better job.

We have always recognized the principal responsibility of the UN Security Council for maintaining international peace and security. Since the 1990’s, the Czech Republic has contributed to more than 20 UN peace-keeping missions and UN mandated operations in the Balkans, Asia and Africa. We deeply believe in the prevention and non-violent resolution of disputes and conflicts. This can be proved by our own behavior – by the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Over the last years, we have multiplied our official development assistance.

In the last 18 years, the Czech Republic has been undergoing a radical and dynamic development which was made possible by the fall of communism and by our rapid departure from that oppressive, inhuman and inefficient political, social and economic system. Our profound transformation strategy – based on the acceptance of political pluralism, parliamentary democracy and market economy – was successful.

A further important impetus to our development was our approaching the European Union and the entry into it three years ago. Today, the Czech Republic is a full-fledged member of the Union and will hold the EU Presidency in the first half of 2009. It might be of interest to this forum that the slogan of the Czech Presidency is “Europe without barriers”. This means both internal and external barriers of the Union. I fully support this concept as I strongly believe in the need of removing barriers that hinder economic progress, especially of developing countries.

Mr. Chairman, we consider the United Nations to be an extremely important and in fact irreplaceable platform. There is no substitute for it in the current world. It is a platform for meetings and consultations, for dialogue and – eventually – for reaching agreements on treaties among nations sharing the same or similar values and political stances.

This unique platform is based on the plurality of views of 192 Member States and on our mutual respect towards their, sometimes differing positions. The ambition of the UN is not, and should never be, searching for one obligatory, unitary view imposed by some of us on those who disagree.

I did not use the term platform by chance and without any purpose. By saying that, I implicitly object to the alternative concept, to the concept of global governance which is based on the indefensible idea that the world can be “globally governed”, masterminded, controlled, managed and/or even planned. To aspire to do that is something we can never accept. It is an ambition based on the “abuse of reason” and on the “pretence of knowledge”. Democracy is something else.

There are some among us who prefer the operational efficiency (or the ability to act) of this organization to the recognition of the existence of different views. They want to make decisions in an easier and faster way. Our communist past tells us that we should not do that. We also want the UN to be reasonably operational. But we categorically oppose that it happens at the expense of individual Member States. And we have to respect views of individual countries regardless of their size. It is crucial that every Member State has equal status and that its voice is not ignored.

We have to go forward. The UN needs changes. We do support the UN reform because this organization should reflect the current situation in the world more than the situation of the era when the UN was founded. Some changes are inevitable and we should discuss them seriously.

To our great regret, we are – in the current world – witnessing many cases of the lack of freedom and democracy. Our task for the future is to minimize them. I do not see and hear the terms freedom and democracy here and elsewhere as much or as often as they deserve. We hear other words more frequently – aid, government initiatives and interventions, social justice, positive rights, environment, resources, climate, solving of problems, facing the threats, global challenges, etc.

Here we have to be very careful. We should support meaningful activities, not programs which in effect put constrains on local development. We should use natural resources efficiently and protect the environment but not in a way that restricts human activity and harms economic development. We would help global development more by reducing barriers than by providing more conditional aid. Reduction of protectionism and lowering of export subsidies is a far more efficient way for helping developing countries than anything else. We should not allow that developing countries are prevented from their own economic growth by additional burdens imposed upon them they will not be able to bear.

At the Conference on Climate Change the day before yesterday, I resolutely warned against the unjustified alarmism of global warming activists and their fellow-travelers in some governments and international organizations, but even this potential problem, as well as any other, can never be solved without relying on freedom, free markets, free trade and other attributes of free society.

To preserve environment is very important but we have to be more modest in our attempting to control the complexities of the world.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished colleagues, let’s use the potential of this organization as much as possible. Let’s cooperate, let’s listen to each other, let’s negotiate to the last possible moment, let’s try to understand the others. The Czech Republic tries to follow those rules.

Václav Klaus, UN, New York, September 26, 2007

28.9.2007 – at the Council for National Policy Conference, Salt Lake City.
“What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?”

Thank you very much for the invitation to this important gathering. Thank you for giving me a chance to address this very distinguished audience.

I have to start on a personal note. This is not my first visit of Salt Lake City. I spent here two hours in one beautiful spring morning in May, 1969. After studying during the spring term at Cornell University I boarded a Greyhound bus and spent 20 days traveling across the United States. I was here in jeans and with long hair. I had breakfast here somewhere, walked around, visited the temple and boarded the bus again with the next stop Reno.

I did not expect to come here again and especially in the position I hold now. It was in the dark communist days. It was at the end of the short but promising era of the Czechoslovak Prague Spring and it was my first and at the same time last visit to your beautiful country for the next 20 years. The collapse of communism in November 1989 changed everything. Freedom and democracy which followed as a result of our radical systemic change made us a totally different country, free and prosperous, member of the European Union and NATO, and a good friend and close ally of the United States of America.

I used the term “communism collapsed” not without purpose. I know that there are – both here and elsewhere – many people who claim that they defeated communism. As an integral part and active player of that process, I would dare to argue that communism melted down and would add that the meltdown was accelerated by the strong stances of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who refused to compromise with the Soviet Union. What helped us was their policies, not the soft, so called peace-policy of our West European neighbors.

I have had tens, if not hundreds of speeches in your country after that. At the beginning, my topics were communism and how to get rid of its legacy. The transition from communism to a free society is over, and not only in my country. One may have reservations about developments in some of the former communist countries but I strongly disagree with attempts to look at those countries with a misleading optics of fighting communism there now. To trivialize the multifaceted and multidimensional post-communist transition in such a way is a serious fallacy.

My second topic, if not obsession, used to be (and still is) Europe and the European Union, something not sufficiently understood here. After almost half a century of communism the Czech Republic wanted to be again a normal European country, which means – these days – to be a member of the European Union.

This is what we accepted and both our gradual approaching the EU during the first fifteen years after the fall of communism and our entry into it three years ago represented an integral part of our radical political, social and economic transformation. Nevertheless, our communist experience made us sensitive to all kinds, forms, manifestations and aspects of the suppression of freedom and democracy in the name of allegedly “higher” goals and due to it we find that the EU unification project itself – an almost holy and sacred goal which explains, justifies and excuses everything – not only a blessing. The currently politically correct approach, I call Europeism, does not see it and tries to create a brave new world without nations, without borders, without politics, without a “demos” (which means without authentic citizens) and – as a result of it – without democracy. I see it as a big problem.

Today, I intend to discuss another “high and holy” issue. I want to speak about supposed devastating climate changes, about consequences of global warming and about our responses and reactions to them. Some people try – consciously or subconsciously – caricature people like me and accuse those of us, who dare to speak about it differently than is now politically correct, of talking about things we do not understand and are not experts on. They are wrong. People like me do not try to enter the field of climatology, do not try to better measure global temperature, and do not try to suggest alternative scenarios of the future global climate fluctuations (based on different, but equally speculative and unreliable forecasting models). In my argumentation I don’t talk about climatology but about environmentalism, about an ideology which puts nature and environment and their supposed protection and preservation before and above freedom.

It may sound surprisingly but I have the feeling that I have not changed the subject of my talks in the last 18 years. Talking about communism, talking about Europeism and talking about environmentalism is more or less, structurally, similar if not identical. The issue is always freedom and its enemies. Those of us who feel very strongly about it can never accept

– the irrationality with which the current world has embraced the climate change (or global warming) as the main threat to the future of mankind, as well as

– the irrationality of proposed and partly already implemented public initiatives because they will fatally endanger our freedom and prosperity, the two goals we consider – I do believe – our priorities.

After spending the whole day at the UN Climate Change Conference on Monday and two following days at the General Assembly I know what I am talking about.

The problem is that we are confronted with many prejudices, misunderstandings and now already also vested interests. As I said, the climate change debate is basically not about science; it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature; it is about the concept of human society. It is not about scientific ecology; it is about environmentalism.

I would summarize my position on these issues in the following way:

1. Contrary to the currently prevailing views – promoted by global warming alarmists, Al Gore’s preaching, the IPCC, or the Stern Report – the increase in global temperatures in the last years, decades and centuries has been very small and because of its size practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities. (The today’s difference of temperature between Prague and Salt Lake City is almost 30 degrees Fahrenheit, which is much more than even Al Gore promises as regards the whole next century temperature increase.)

2. The available empirical evidence is not alarming. The arguments of global warming alarmists rely exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon past experience. Their forecasts are based on experimental simulations of very large forecasting models that have not been found very reliable when explaining past developments.

3. The whole debate is, of course, not only about ideology. The problem has its important scientific aspect but it should be stressed that the scientific dispute about the causes of recent climate changes continues. The attempt to proclaim a scientific consensus on this issue is a tragic mistake, because there is none.

4. We are rational and responsible people and know that we have to act when necessary. But we should know that a rational response to any danger depends on the size and probability of the eventual risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. As a responsible politician, as an academic economist, as an author of a book about the economics of climate change, I feel obliged to say that – based on our current knowledge – the risk is too small and the costs of eliminating it too high. The application of the so called “precautionary principle,” advocated by the environmentalists, is – conceptually – a wrong strategy.

5. The deindustrialization and similar restrictive policies will be of no help. Instead of blocking economic growth, the increase of wealth all over the world and fast technical progress – all connected with freedom and free markets – we should leave them to proceed unhampered. Economic growth, increase of wealth and technical progress represent the solution to the consequences of eventual climate changes, not their cause. We should promote adaptation, modernization, technical progress. We should trust in the rationality of free people.

6. This issue has a very important North-South and West-East dimension. The developed countries do not have the right to impose any additional burden on the less developed countries. Imposing overambitious and – for such countries – economically disastrous environmental standards on them is unfair and discriminatory.

No radical measures are necessary. Famous Czech writer of the early 20th century Jaroslav Ha?ek, whose book “The Good Soldier Schweik” is known world-wide, made a good point saying: “To chce klid”. The Americans would probably say “Take it easy” or “Let’s be cool” or “Calm down!”. What the world needs now is to remain “quite normal”. It requires, however, to get rid of the one-sided monopoly, both in the field of climatology and in the public debate. We have to listen to arguments. We have to forget the destructive, but currently so fashionable dictate (if not tyrany) of political correctness. We should provide the same or comparable financial backing to those scientists who do not accept the global warming alarmism.

When I spoke at the UN conference on climate change on Monday morning, I concluded my speech by saying: “We should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism. Therefore, let’s vote for adaptation, not for attempts to mastermind the global climate.” There is nothing to add to it. Especially to this audience.

Václav Klaus, Council for National Policy Conference, Salt Lake City, September 28, 2007

7.11.2007 – At the Chatham House, London . “The Other Side of Global Warming Alarmism.”

Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to address this distinguished audience. I would like to start by stressing how glad I am to be for the first time in the well-known Chatham House which has been the place of so many important talks and discussions in the whole 87 years of its existence.

My speeches here in London have been in the past years connected with two topics. The first one was the end of communism and our way of getting rid of its legacy. The second one was the European integration.

The transition from communism to a free society is over, and not only in my country. We may have reservations about developments in some of the former communist countries but I disagree with the attempts to look at those countries with a misleading optics of fighting communism there even now. It is a mistake and I am afraid a slightly snobbish position as well.

My second topic here used to be Europe and the European Union. Whereas the first issue is more or less closed because communism is over, the second issue is here with us. It has not faded away. On the contrary, with treaty after treaty, with summit after summit, the danger of creating a brave new world of a post-democratic European supranationalist entity is getting more and more acute.

After almost half a century of communism the Czech Republic had a strong desire to be a normal European country again. We understood and accepted that it requires – these days – to become a member of the European Union. Nevertheless, due to our experience with the suppression of freedom and democracy in the name of allegedly “higher” goals, we consider the current European unification project itself – again an almost holy and sacred goal which explains, justifies and excuses everything – not only a blessing.

The recent embracement of the so-called Reform Treaty, which is in all important aspects identical with the old Constitutional Treaty, is a defeat for all true European democrats and should be interpreted as such. The down-playing of its true essence is intellectually unacceptable and morally inexcusable.

Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming. The recent awarding of Nobel Prize to the main apostle of this hypothesis was the last straw because by this these ideas were elevated to the pedestal of “holy and sacred” uncriticisable truths.

It became politically correct to caricature us, who dare to speak about it, as those who are talking about things they do not understand and are not experts on. This criticism is inappropriate. People like me do not have ambitions to enter the field of climatology. They do not try to better measure global temperature or to present alternative scenarios of the future global climate fluctuations.

They need not do it because the climate change debate is basically not about science; it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature; it is about the concept of human society. It is not about scientific ecology; it is about environmentalism, which is a new anti-individualistic, pseudo-collectivistic ideology based on putting nature and environment and their supposed protection and preservation before and above freedom. That’s one of the reasons why my recently published book on this topic has a subtitle: “What is Endangered, Climate or Freedom?”.

When we look at it in a proper historical perspective, the issue is – once again – freedom and its enemies. Those of us who feel very strongly about it can never accept

- the irrationality with which the current world has embraced the climate change (or global warming) as a real danger to the future of mankind, as well as

- the irrationality of proposed and partly already implemented etatist and dirigistic measures because they will fatally endanger our freedom and prosperity, the two goals we consider – I do believe – our priorities.

My position can be summarized in the following way:

1. Contrary to the currently prevailing views – promoted by global warming alarmists, by Al Gore’s preaching, by the IPCC, or by the Stern Report – the increase in global temperatures in the last years, decades and centuries has been very small and because of its size practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities. For most of the Earth’s history (95% of it), the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. In addition to it, using history again, it has been proved that the consequences of modest warming have been mostly positive, not negative.

2. The arguments of global warming alarmists rely exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon serious analysis and extrapolation of past trends or upon undeniable conclusions of natural sciences. The available empirical evidence is not alarming. The highly publicized forecasts made by some leading environmentalists are based on experimental simulations of very complicated forecasting models that have not been found very reliable when explaining past developments. They were mostly done by software engineers, not by scientists themselves.

3. The debate has its important scientific side connected with the dispute whether the current mild warming is man-made or natural. Let’s listen to the scientists but one thing is and becomes evident more and more: the scientific dispute about the causes of recent climate changes continues. The attempts to proclaim a scientific consensus are self-debilitating. There is none. More and more scientists, on the contrary, dare to speak out about it.

4. The issue has an important economic aspect which requires the application of a standard cost-benefit analysis. A rational response to any danger depends on the size and probability of the eventual risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. I feel obliged to say that – based on my knowledge – I find the risk too small and the costs of eliminating it too high. The application of the so-called “precautionary principle,” advocated by the environmentalists, is – conceptually – a wrong strategy, because human civilization cannot exist in a regime of the precautionary principle.

5. The deindustrialization and similar restrictive policies will be of no help. Instead of blocking economic growth, the increase of wealth all over the world and fast technical progress – all connected with freedom and free markets – we should leave them to proceed unhampered. They represent the solution to any eventual climate changes, not their cause. We should trust in the rationality of men. We should never forget that the government failure is always much bigger than the market failure. We should not believe more in Al Gore than in the omnipotence of the Soviet or Czechoslovak central planners. Fifty- or hundred-year plans of the current environmentalists will not be any better than the five-year plans which liquidated the economic freedom (and the economic efficiency connected with it) in the centrally planned economies of the past.

6. The global warming issue has a very important North-South and West-East aspect as well. Environmental quality is a luxury good and demand for it increases with income and wealth. The developed countries had to go along the path of the environmental Kuznets curve in the past and do not have any right to prematurely impose their current overambitious environmental standards upon less developed countries, because that would lead to an economic disaster there.

The only conclusion is that no radical measures are necessary. Famous Czech writer of the early 20th century Jaroslav Ha?ek, whose book “The Good Soldier Schweik” is known world-wide, made a point with saying: “To chce klid”. The Englishmen would probably say “Take it easy”.

I lived most of my life in an oppressive and very unproductive political, economic and social system called communism. It was impossible to “take it easy”. Now I live in a system based on the ideology of Europeism which prefers supranational institutions with their post-democracy to the good old democratic institutions in a well-defined constitutional sovereign state. It is difficult to “take it easy” again. And we are moving – very rapidly – to the era of environmentalism in which environment (or perhaps the irrational claims of environmentalists) is placed ahead of men and their freedom. We can take the global climate changes easy, but the climate propaganda and new wave of dangerous indoctrination of the whole world not.

Václav Klaus, Chatham House, London, 7 November 2007

4.3.2008 – Notes for the speech at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 4, 2008 – that is the Heartland Institute’s New York event – the subject, the speech, and the timing that got us involved.

“From Climate Alarmism to Climate Realism.”

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,

I would like first of all to thank the organizers of this important conference for making it possible and also for inviting one politically incorrect politician from Central Europe to come and speak here. This meeting will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the moving away from the irrational climate alarmism to the much needed climate realism.

I know it is difficult to say anything interesting after two days of speeches and discussions here. If I am not wrong, I am the only speaker from a former communist country and I have to use this as a comparative – paradoxically – advantage.

Each one of us has his or her experiences, prejudices and preferences. The ones that I have are – quite inevitably – connected with the fact that I have spent most of my life under the communist regime. A week ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: “Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.” What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism.

This fear of mine is the driving force behind my active involvement in the Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who in September 2007 at the UN Climate Change Conference, only a few blocks away from here, openly and explicitly challenged the current global warming hysteria. My central argument was – in a condensed form – formulated in the subtitle of my recently published book devoted to this topic which asks: “What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” My answer is clear and resolute: “it is our freedom.” I may also add “and our prosperity.”

What frustrates me is the feeling that everything has already been said and published, that all rational arguments have been used, yet it still does not help. Global warming alarmism is marching on. We have to therefore concentrate (here and elsewhere) not only on adding new arguments to the already existing ones, but also on the winning of additional supporters of our views. The insurmountable problem as I see it lies in the political populism of its exponents and in their unwillingness to listen to arguments. They – in spite of their public roles – maximize their own private utility function where utility is not any public good but their own private good – power, prestige, carrier, income, etc. It is difficult to motivate them differently. The only way out is to make the domain of their power over our lives much more limited. But this will be a different discussion.

We have to repeatedly deal with the simple questions that have been many times discussed here and elsewhere:

1) Is there a statistically significant global warming?

2) If so, is it man-made?

3) If we decide to stop it, is there anything a man can do about it?

4) Should an eventual moderate temperature increase bother us?

We have our answers to these questions and are fortunate to have many well-known and respected experts here who have made important contributions in answering them. Yet, I am not sure this is enough. People tend to blindly believe in the IPCC’s conclusions (especially in the easier to understand formulations presented in the “Summaries for Policymakers”) despite the fact that from the very beginning, the IPCC has been a political rather than a scientific undertaking.

Many politicians, media commentators, public intellectuals, bureaucrats in more and more influential international organizations not only accept them but use them without qualifications which exist even in the IPCC documents. There are sometimes unexpected and for me unexplainable believers in these views. Few days ago, I have come across a lecture given by a very respected German economist (H. W. Sinn, “Global Warming: The Neglected Supply Side, in: The EEAG Report, CESifo, Munich, 2008) who is in his other writings very critical of the German interventionist economic policies and etatist institutions. His acceptance of the “conventional IPCC wisdom” (perhaps unwisdom) is striking. His words:

- “the scientific evidence is overwhelming”;

- “the facts are undeniable”;

- “the temperature is extremely sensitive to even small variations in greenhouse gas concentration”;

- “if greenhouse gases were absent from the atmosphere, average temperature of the Earth’s surface would be -6 °C. With the greenhouse gases, the present average temperature is +15 °C. Therefore, the impact of CO2 is enormous”;

- he was even surprised that “in spite of all the measures taken, emissions have accelerated in recent years. This poses a puzzle for economic theory!” he said.

To make it less of a puzzle, let me make two brief comments.

As an economist, I have to start by stressing the obvious. Carbon dioxide emissions do not fall from heaven. Their volume (ECO2) is a function of GDP per capita (which means of the size of economic activity, SEA), of the number of people (POP) and of the emissions intensity (EI), which is the amount of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. This is usually expressed in a simple relationship which is, of course, a tautological identity:

ECO2= EI x SEA x POP

but with some assumption about causality it can be turned into a structural equation. What this relationship tells is simple: If we really want to decrease ECO2 (which most of us assembled here today probably do not consider necessary), we have to either stop the economic growth and thus block further rise in the standard of living, or stop the population growth, or make miracles with the emissions intensity.

I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against the past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to go ahead and to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the, from above orchestrated, change just now – especially with arguments based on such an incomplete and faulty science as is demonstrated by the IPCC. Human wants are unlimited and should stay so. Asceticism is a respectable individual attitude but should not be forcefully imposed upon the rest of us.

I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniac ambitions, want to regulate and constrain the demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to think about or experiment with. Without resisting it we would find ourselves on the slippery “road to serfdom.” The freedom to have children without regulation and control is one of the undisputable human rights and we have to say very loudly that we do respect it and will do so in the future as well.

There are people among the global warming alarmists who would protest against being included in any of these categories, but who do call for a radical decrease in carbon dioxide emissions. It can be achieved only by means of a radical decline in the emissions intensity. This is surprising because we probably believe in technical progress more than our opponents. We know, however, that such revolutions in economic efficiency (and emissions intensity is part of it) have never been realized in the past and will not happen in the future either. To expect anything like that is a non-serious speculation.

I recently looked at the European CO2 emissions data covering the period 1990-2005, which means the Kyoto Protocol era. My conclusion is that in spite of many opposite statements the very robust relationship between CO2 emissions and the rate of economic growth can’t be disputed, at least in a relevant and meaningful time horizon. You don’t need huge computer models to very easily distinguish three different types of countries in Europe:

- the EU less developed countries – Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain – which during this very period tried to catch up with the economic performance of the more developed EU countries. Their rapid economic growth led to the increase of their CO2 emissions in 15 years (in which they signed Kyoto) by 53%;

- the European post-communist countries which after the fall of communism went through a fundamental, voluntarily unorganizable transformation shake-out and an inevitable radical economic restructuring with the heavy industry disappearing (not stagnating or retreating) practically over night. Their GDP drastically declined. These countries decreased their CO2 emissions in the same period by 32%;

- the “normal” EU, slow-growing if not stagnating countries (excluding Germany where it’s difficult to eliminate the impact of the fact that the East German economy almost ceased to exist in that period) increased their CO2 emissions by 4%.

The huge differences in these three figures – +53%, -32% and +4% – are almost fascinating.

And yet, there is a dream among European politicians to reduce CO2 emissions for the entire EU by 30 per cent in the next 13 years (compared to the 1990 level). What does it mean? Do they assume that all countries would undergo a similar economic shock as was experienced by the Central and Eastern European countries after the fall of communism? Now in the whole of Europe? Do they assume that European economically weaker countries would stop their catching-up process? Or do they intend to organize a decrease in the number of people living in Europe? Or do they expect a miracle in the development of the emissions/GDP ratio, which would require a technological revolution of unheard-of proportions? With the help of a – from Brussels organized – scientific and technological revolution?

What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.

This brings me to politics. As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory (between Mises and Hayek on the one side and Lange and Lerner on the other), the arguments we had been using for decades – till the moment of the fall of communism. Then they were quickly forgotten. The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travelers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same “fatal conceit.” To my great despair, this is not sufficiently challenged neither in the field of social sciences, nor in the field of climatology. Especially the social sciences are suspiciously silent.

The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong, in their own ability to assembly all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office (CCCRO) equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility to give adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions and in the non-existence of an incentive problem (and the resulting compliance or non-compliance of those who are supposed to follow these instructions).

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. Now it concerns the whole mankind, not just the citizens of one particular country. To discuss this means to look at the canonically structured theoretical discussion about socialism (or communism) and to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom. This should be the main message of our conference.

Václav Klaus, Notes for the speech at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 4, 2008

http://www.klaus.cz

I went to the very early Heartland breakfast, and to a follow up interview with President Klaus, out of plain curiosity – will I understand the way the mind of this person, trained in economics, works. He came now to New York, and I was told that the timing of the conference was set in effect according to his schedule and not according to the present political season in the US. I also noted that he spoke in Salt Lake City – one of the hubs of the right wing movement that feeds the Heartland Institute – so I knew already that President Klaus is close to the American right.

The President said that the chairman of the Czech Green Party criticized him for his statement at the UN. It sounded like he was proud of having stuck it to his Greens. So be it. But then he reminded me of those Jews in the Spain of the Inquisition who switched to Christianity and became among the most cruel Inquisitors.

It seems that having lived under the communist system he learned values of liberty, capitalism, and free enterprise, to the point that he demands for the industry the liberty to pollute and for the industry the freedom to go on unregulated.

He is thus a perfect fit to much of the US right, and a hero to the audience at Heartland. Having also started my life behind the Iron curtain, I wonder thus where Mr. Klaus lost his humanity when crossing abruptly from the communist world to the free world. Those that did it at lower pace probably had more time to adjust.

Saying that economic growth is “uber alles”strikes me rather as a communist/fascist idea and trying to work for a cleaner world is rather the real liberating and liberated way of the west. Now, what kind of an argument is it to look at the unregulated Europe and find its warts – the whole idea of the proponents of developing alternatives to the polluting economy is that this will allow for future growth, while sticking to the old ways will inhibit this growth.

Going clean is not only good for you, but actually makes you profit from this – he is an economist – why does he not take a class with the likes of Al Gore or Jim Hanson, Bob Watson or Amory Lovins. What did he come back with from his trip to Chatham House – did he just lecture there like at the UN, or he staid for the discussion too? At Heartland I took a photo of him picking up literature from co-minded folks – does he also listen to those that disagree with him, and are capable to discuss with him point-by-point?

Dr. Klaus thinks all the opponents are political populists – looking for power, prestige and income. He does not want “their power over our life!”

He hates the fact that people believe in the IPCC conclusions.

So – the impact of CO2 is enormous because it impacts the development of the developing countries.

He finds that the people that follow Malthusian tenets want to restrict us also demographically. To him the freedom to have children is an indisputable human right. No further thoughts are needed by him to look into population numbers.

On an industrial revolution he thinks of Brejnev – that is where his credo left him. irresponsibility, wishful thinking when believing in the ability of changing the nature of things – from personal experience he draws ideas from the market debates of the 1930’s. He wants to see more social sciences involved in these matters.

Those he calls “they” – believe in Central Regulatory Emissions’ Institutions with compliance and non-compliance – and you have to obey these institutions. We see the wheels in his mind turn faster and faster – one must escape this control.

So – listen you nincompoops – it is not about climatology – it is about freedom – this is here the main issue for those that lived in communist countries.

Others from communist countries who were mentioned among the Heartland speakers were Russians Yuri Israel and Andrei Illarionov – both known opponents of the concept of man induced climate change. We know both of them from years ago. Yuri Israel is a very good hydrologist who was head of the Soviet water institute, and later headed the Russian academician’s Moscow event to evaluate the idea if climate change is human caused. He Is a member of the IPCC; and Illarionov who was the economics holdout who advised Putin not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, was eventually overruled, and came nevertheless to lecture at the Washington Press Club saying that the KP is not good for Russia. We remember that meting as one of the strangest Russian shows we ever saw.

We managed to interview Dr. Klaus. His answers were as per above script, but when I asked him about the EU Presidency in 2009. He said that policy comes from the EU Parliament (did he mean the commission?), so it is not for him or for the Czech Republic to decide; also, in the Czech Republic decissions are taken by Parliament. What I liked here was that he did not remember who comes after the Czechs (that is Sweden) – so I can say that the EU Presidency is not yet on his front-burner. If that is the case, can we assume that the whole issue of climate change is really only sort of an ego-trip to the west? All what we can do is thus wait to see next year, but worry about Czechs.

 The following is the actual speech by President Klaus in front of a room full at the Heartland Institute Meeting’s Opening Dinner where he also distributed his book: “BLUE PLANETin GREEN SHAKLES: What Is Endangered – Climate or Freedom?”

He was introduced by Jodeph Bast – the Founder of this right-wing lobbyingFoundation, and was followed by MIT Meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen whose topic was: “Climate Alarm: What Are We Up Against, and What to Do.”

The problem with Heartland is that it attacks everyone for not being scientific enough – but they themselves are as far away from today’s science as the dinosauri are from genetic engineering products. We really would not complain if the meeting were held in scientific terms, but that was not the case. I observed political reverence before a “leader”   in the way how these State officials, and some just plain farming or oil and auto interests, stood up and applauded – to what? To another non-scientist with heavy baggage from years of working under oppressing regimes? Why Professor Lindzen was part of this show we do not dare to write – we honestly do not know, but we had enough life experience with MIT Professors who stood in for much other things that were not exactly science. We once even clashed with one such “Emeritus” Professor in a Congressional hearing that made history – as I had the opportunity to correct his misrepresentations by going into Thermodynamics 101.

The problem is that science – by nature – does not stand on 100% certainty. There always will be angles that can yet be researched – but from pointing out such needs – to jumping at negation of whole subjects – is like moving onto the platform of religious ideology based on a truth that has nothing whatsoever to do with science. In the end – even trained scientists that end up speaking for these ideologues simply end up forfeiting their scientific standing. At least one must acknowledge that they used their scientific knowledge to link to the dinosauri rather then make the effort to research a little further.

Oh well, let us see what President Klaus said, and let us note that we wish we had a verbatim of the following Q&A period. The cheer that evolved was anything but not science. He said the Czech Government is trying to slow down the money spending on climate change. This was an answer about funding China’s reduction of CO2 emissions.

He also mentioned that he spent one hour with the Japanese head of State who told him for half an hour about the great Japanese science and technologies that can help in matters of climate change, but then asked him if the Czech Republic has Permits to sell? Japan does not fulfill its Kyoto Protocol obligations with all that technology they have – tremendous hand-claps from the audience!

Another interesting exchange happened when he was asked – “Since Global Warming is a political phenomenon – not a scientific issue – how can we buy back the politicians?” He answered “I am not so skeptical thinking that it is only about money – I think one must just have the wrong views.” You see – in the Czech Republic only 11% believe in man made global warming – they just reelected me for a second term!

Klaus also stressed that environmentalism is a new religion – it is a question of ideology and therefore it is difficult to repudiate it. He further mentioned globalism-environmentally as an enemy!

Joseph Bast said that Richard Epstein who was a colleague of Obama’s at the School of Law in Chicago said of Obama that he was a good listener but in all those years never saw him change his mind once. I thought – Right On!

Joseph Bast noted that 50 State legislators were present there in the room – I sat between Oklahoma and Alaska but overheard that they were flown in by Heartland. Nice, but really Rush Limbaugh has now only an 11% approval rating. The Joseph Bast complaint was that it is difficult to take on climate change in Europe – but also here in the US.

Joseph Bast may indeed be right that IPCC documents do not represent science but politics – we also think so – but our complaint is in the opposite direction – it is politics that toned down the science – so the IPCC was not forthcoming enough. Just think how President Bush ousted its first head – the British/American Chief Scientist of the World Bank, in order to install a non-scientist working with Indian industrial interests. To imply that Al Gore, Tony Blair, or Kofi Annan are just simple talking heads is really not scientific – they just happen to have been convinced that what Heartland stands for is wrong for humanity.

Richard Lindzen was not completely confortable with the audience as it showed when he noted that “being skeptical of global warming does not make one a good scientist – or the other way.” So why does he deride our hero Jim Hanson?

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No Progress in the Climate Change Debate – said European President / Czech Republic President Václav Klaus to the
2009 Heartland Institute International Climate Change Conference, Marriott Marquis Hotel, New York, March 8, 2009

“When preparing my today’s remarks, I took into my hands – looking for an inspiration – my last year’s speech here, at the Heartland Institute’s Conference. It did not help much. It is evident that the climate change debate has not made any detectable progress and that the much needed, long overdue exchange of views has not yet started. All we see and hear are uninspiring monologues.

It reminds me of the frustration people like me felt in the communist era. Whatever you said, any convincing and well prepared arguments you used, any relevant data you assembled, no reaction. It all fell into emptiness. Nobody listened, especially “they” did not listen. They didn’t even try to argue back. They considered you a naive, uninformed and confused person, an eccentric, a complainer, someone not able to accept their only truth. It is very similar now.

A few weeks ago, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I spent three hours at a closed session of about sixty people – heads of states and governments with several IPCC officials and “experts” like Al Gore, Tony Blair and Kofi Annan. The session was chaired by the Danish Prime Minister because its main topic was how to prepare the new Kyoto, the December 2009 UN-Copenhagen summit.

It was a discouraging experience. You looked around in vain to find at least one person who would share your views. There was no one. All the participants of the meeting took man-made global warming for granted, were convinced of its dangerous consequences and more or less competed in one special discipline – whether to suggest a 20, 30, 50 or 80% CO2 emissions cut as an agreed-upon, world-wide project. It was difficult to say anything meaningful and constructive. Among other things I tried to turn their attention to was the argument that they made such radical proposals even though their own countries had not fulfilled even the relatively modest Kyoto Protocol obligations. There was no reaction to that. After the session, one friendly looking president of a relatively large non-European country told me that he had never heard anything like my views, but was interested and wanted to hear more. I gave him my book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”*

Nevertheless, we have to continue speaking to those people because they have a very strong voice in popularizing the global warming alarmism and in making decisions with far-reaching consequences. I try to do it permanently. The politicians are, however, not alone. They succeeded in creating incentives which led to the rise of a very powerful rent-seeking group. Very much like the politicians, these people are interested neither in temperature, CO2, competing scientific hypotheses and their testing, nor in freedom or markets. They are interested in their businesses and their profits – made with the help of politicians. These rent-seekers profit:

·           from trading the licenses to emit carbon dioxide;

·           from constructing unproductive wind, sun and other similar equipments able to make only highly subsidized electric energy;

·           from growing non-food crops which produce non-carbon fuels at the expense of producing food (with well-known side effects);

·           from doing research, writing and speaking about global warming.

It is always the same story with the same results. On the one hand, a highly concentrated and easily organized rent-seeking group and, on the other, widely dispersed, and therefore politically unorganizable individuals, the usual silent majority. I am frustrated that the economists and other social scientists do not try to enter the current debate. For us, in the former communist countries, the discovery of the works of the public-choice school scholars was a revealing experience. I somewhat naively assumed that their views belonged to the “conventional wisdom” in the Western world. This was not and is not true.

How to educate and enlighten those who make decisions? The politicians – hopefully – sometimes look at the very condensed versions of the IPCC’s Summaries for Policymakers but these documents do not represent science, but politics and environmental activism. It is difficult to change their minds. They did fully subscribe to the idea that the IPCC publications represent “the” climate science. We know that is not true and that there is no scientific discipline of climate science. Climate is such a complex system that it has no “science” of its own. There are, of course, very respectable sciences that deal with some parts of it. And they tell us quite persuasively that:

1. there is no one unique, unprecedented climate change just now, but permanent climate changes. The climate system of our planet has a significant internal variability. The past data are in this respect quite convincing;

2. the current climate changes cannot be subsumed under the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. This claim is based exclusively on the results of experiments with the very imperfect computer models;

3. the Earth’s climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is lower than is assumed by the IPCC. For a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration the global average surface temperature will increase not more than by about 0,5 °C;

4. there is no fixed and stable relationship between measured temperature and CO2 emissions. The believers in this hypothesis are not able to explain why the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased from 1976 to 1998 and decreased from 1998 to the present, irrespective of the fact that the people have been adding increasing amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere.

I would be able to continue presenting further arguments of that kind but this is not a field in which I do possess any comparative advantage. Perhaps in Davos, but not here. I am, therefore, looking forward to new ideas, arguments and data coming out of this conference.

Let me make a few short comments from “my” fields.

I am puzzled by the environmentalists’ approach to technical progress. On the one hand, there is a huge difference between our technology optimism, based on our belief in secular improvements in technology on condition the free and unregulated, unconstrained, unmanipulated economic system makes them possible, and environmentalists’ technology skepticism along traditional Malthusian lines. On the other hand, the environmentalists are, at the same time technology naivists who freely and irresponsibly operate with miraculous technologies which have only one defect: they have not yet been invented. This is an apparent schizophrenia on their side. They should tell us how it really is. I am afraid they are not so naive as they pretend to be. They, probably, “only” do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back. In that case technologies are unimportant.

Their attack on today’s technologies is an irrational practice with fatal consequences. As far as I know the existing and functioning technologies had never been abandoned before they were genuinely replaced by better ones. There arises – for the first time in history – a threat that the old technologies will be abandoned before new technologies become available. This should also be explained to the politicians in alternative “summaries for policymakers”, but they should be written by economists. We should also tell them that there is no known and economically feasible method or technology by which industrial economies can survive on expensive, unreliable, clean, green, renewable energy.

Another issue which bothers me is the exceptional absence of rational thinking as regards intertemporal decision making, especially when time-horizons are so long as in this case. The despotically ruling, politically correct aprioristic moralism (based on the disagreement with the infamous Keynes’ dictum “in the long run, we are all dead” or with the not less famous Madame De Pompadour’s maxim – “après nous le déluge”) is basically flawed. The questions which need to be answered are serious and non-trivial. Should we make radical decisions now? Should we tax today’s generations to benefit future generations? Should we be generously altruistic? Should we give preference to future generations and not to the people living in undeveloped countries today? My answer is no. We could have made such far-reaching decisions only on the absolutely unrealistic assumption that we know all relevant parameters of the future economic system, including the level of wealth and technology, and that we know all the parameters in an adequately discounted form. The controversy about Nicolas Stern’s and Ross Garnaut’s irrationally low discount rates used in their very influential models suggests that such transfers are not justifiable.

To conclude, it is evident that the environmentalists don’t want to change the climate. They want to change us and our behavior. Their ambition is to control and manipulate us. Therefore, it should not be surprising that they recommend „preventive”, not „adaptive” policies. Adaptation would be our voluntary behavior which is not what they aim at. They do not want to recognize that – to quote Nigel Lawson – “the capacity to adapt is arguably the most fundamental characteristic of mankind” and that our “adaptive capacity is increasing all the time with the development of technology”   **.

The environmentalists speak about “Saving the Planet”. From what? And from whom? One thing I know for sure: we have to save it – and us – from them.”

7. 3. 2009

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* Blue Planet in Green Shackles, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, May 2008. It has been published already in eight languages. In a week from now, the Italian edition will be launched in Milan.

**Nigel Lawson: An Appeal to Reason – A Cool Look at Global Warming, Duckworth Overlook, London, 2008, pp 39.

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ALSO, LET US NOTE THAT PRESIDENT OBAMA, WHILE ANNOUNCING TODAY, MONDAY MARCH 9th, THE REMOVAL OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SHACKLES ON STEM CELL RESEARCH, HE ALSO SAID THAT HIS APPOINTMENTS IN SCIENCE WILL GO ONLY TO SCIENTISTS AND NOT TO POLITICAL IDEOLOGUES. WE SUGGEST THE HEARTLAND PEOPLE TAKE THIS TO THEIR NOTICE.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2009

Q&A: World Social Forum is Not a Static Platform.
Terna Gyuse interviews ONYANGO OLOO, activist

CAPE TOWN, Jan 29 (IPS) – Onyango Oloo was the national coordinator of the Kenyan Social Forum in 2007 when the last global World Social Forum (WSF)took place in Nairobi. As another gathering of activists from around the world unfolds in Belem, Brazil, IPS asked Oloo for his views on the Forum’s past and future.

IPS: Two years on from Nairobi, how would you evaluate the last WSF? What were the successes? What were the shortcomings?

Oloo: WSF Nairobi 2007 was a groundbreaking event. The fact that it took place at all given its myriad challenges, was definitely an indicator of success. We were able to bring thousands of activists from around Africa and across the world together on Kenyan soil.

Issues to do with climate change, food sovereignty, awareness about GMOs, South-South solidarity, campaigns against the EPAs to cite a few were foregrounded and later on became a basis of pan-African initiatives across the continent. Locally, the emergence of the Kenyan gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community was a dramatic manifestation how the WSF can strengthen the struggles of marginalized social groups.

One of the key shortcomings had to with locking poor communities out of the event. Another drawback was how elements within the organising committee fostered the privatisation and commercialisation of the WSF space. Unfortunately, corruption – which is endemic in Kenyan society – reared its ugly head at the 2007 event.

IPS: There were many who expressed disappointment after Nairobi, who suggested the WSF may have outlived its purpose as an alternative to the very different ideas and networking at the World Economic Forum, and has been domesticated into a trade fair for NGOs and the better-funded sections of civil society – what’s your view?

OO: While I sympathized with the essence of the sentiments described above, I do not fully share that pessimistic assessment.

As a social justice activist, I firmly believe that cynicism is a luxury we can ill afford. The World Social Forum is an arena of struggle, not just between the big imperialist forces and those working for fundamental transformation, but also of contestation within and among progressive forces. It is not a static platform.

From time to time, negative tendencies will appear in the WSF process. It is our responsibility to combat and transcend these reactionary tendencies within our movements and communities.

IPS: How has the WSF been good for African civil society?

OO: I strongly feel that activists should challenge the very definition of “African civil society”. Is it limited just to the NGO community and those organisations associated with the African petit-bourgeois elite? Or does it extend to embrace social movements, radical and revolutionary forces (some of them in the anti-establishment political arena) and other spheres?

I am conscious that I am pushing the envelope here since the WSF process is quite wary about including organised political actors [ie. political parties] within its milieu.

IPS: “Another world is possible” – it feels like a limited set of those possibilities have been absorbed into mainstream.

Africa is maybe just past the crest of a wave of elections, of the steady consolidation of bodies like the AU and regional bodies. The continent is in the relative aftermath of the IMF’s economic prescriptions to liberalise and privatise, cut back on government spending and instead recover costs from citizens-as-clients – the casualties of structural adjustment have been buried and now we see solid macro-economic numbers in Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa…

And it seems some of the passion and effectiveness of the Jubilee campaigns, of various pro-democracy movements, the urgent and organised demands for things like free anti-retrovirals has subsided.

Is this it? Are we already living in the other possible world? Who and how is pushing beyond this?

OO: As a slogan, “Another World Is Possible” is woefully inadequate with its core assumption that all possible worlds can only be better than the existing one.

Yet the experience of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Bush in the USA, Idi Amin in Uganda, Pinochet in Chile, Papa Doc in Haiti, Suharto in Indonesia and a slew of blood stained dictators and despots across the globe attests that for every utopia, there is a nightmarish dystopia waiting in the wings.

We need to define the contents and parameters of these other possible worlds.

It is a weakness of the WSF process that over the years it has valorised ideologically ambiguous terminology that seems, in my view, calculated to mollify the waffling liberals and right-leaning social democrats. What happened to old-fashioned terms like imperialism, socialism, revolutionary transformation and so on?

I am saying that the WSF will eventually lose relevance as long as it is unable to frontally confront global monopoly capitalism and suggest clear socialist alternatives and organize progressive humanity to defeat this imperialist monster.

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2009

Makers and Shakers of the Post-Crisis World.
Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jan 29 (IPS) – Of all the questions raised by the global economic crisis, one that is by no means insignificant may be answered this week: How will the pressure groups that influenced the policies that led to the present chaos adapt to the new world situation?

Clues to their behaviour will begin to be revealed from Wednesday, as the annual session of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a think-tank for the elite that looks to the interests of transnational companies and is regularly attended by executives, experts and government officials from rich countries, kicks off at the winter resort of Davos in Switzerland.

At first sight it would appear that nothing has changed, as the WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab has already forthrightly announced that the first goal of this Davos Forum will be “to assist the G20 process”. Schwab was referring to the group of more than 20 large and emerging economies which began examining ways of reforming the world’s financial architecture and policies to revitalise the global economy in Washington in November 2008. Leaders of the G20 are due to meet again on Apr. 2 in London.

Even more unambiguously, Schwab said “what we want is to allow business leaders and ’stakeholders’ such as trade unionists and non-governmental organisations to contribute to the G20’s goals.” This is sheer arrogance, Swiss academic Jean Ziegler told IPS.

It demonstrates that the Davos Forum will once again “be simply an exercise in cynicism, arrogance and blindness,” Ziegler said in an interview with IPS between sessions of the consultative committee of the United Nations Human Rights Council, meeting this week in Geneva.

Some 2,500 people are expected to attend the Davos Forum, over half of them representatives of the business community, but also members of governments, politicians, trade unionists, religious leaders and members of non-governmental organisations.

As happens every year, press accreditation is largely confined to journalists representing media that are in sympathy with the liberal (free market) ideology of the WEF.

The organisers of the Davos Forum have underscored the secrecy surrounding some sessions by prohibiting writers of press releases, who attend the closed meetings, from having any personal contact with journalists.

Schwab has recently been at pains to deny the idea that the WEF has an ideology, saying that the Davos Forum does not express opinions, it just provides a platform.

Neither did he accept that the Davos Forum has embraced certain economic dogmas, such as complete rejection of state intervention and regulations. It was individual participants at the meetings who promoted these ideas, he said.

Some programmes developed by the WEF have always called for a coordinated system of global regulation, he said.

At a press conference, Schwab expressed the view that “a reform of capitalism” is necessary. He said there was a need to return to certain values that had been lost in the past 10 years because of too much greed and too little regulation.

The WEF chairman acknowledged that after 39 annual meetings of the Davos Forum, this year’s session will be one of the most challenging and significant. Titled “Shaping the Post-Crisis World,” the central topic for debate is what kind of world the forum wants to see emerging when the crisis is over, and how to design it.

Ziegler criticised the conspicuous spending by WEF participants. For example, the delegates of UBS (United Bank of Switzerland) are staying in luxury hotels in Davos.

UBS was one of the financial institutions hardest hit by the crisis, so much so that the Swiss government had to bail it out to the tune of 64 billion Swiss francs (56.3 million dollars) to save it from bankruptcy.

“The Swiss taxpayer is paying for these luxuries. It’s disgusting,” Ziegler told IPS.

“Half the bankers and industrialists at Davos should have been sent to prison a long time ago,” he said. “All these years, the Davos Forum has provided the ideological basis for plundering the world.”

Twenty years ago, the Davos Forum was celebrating deregulation, headlong liberalisation of the markets, privatisations and the heyday of profit, Ziegler said.

Former president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn coined the phrase: “The end of history is a world government without a state,” which was roundly applauded by participants at the WEF, Ziegler said.

Their unrestrained neoliberal ideology has landed the world in its worst economic crisis since 1929, and those responsible are the very same people who are here at Davos squandering money, he concluded.

———-

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
29 January,  2009
=========================================================================

BAN Ki-MOON URGES LEADERS AT DAVOS TO FORGE ‘GREEN NEW DEAL’ TO FIGHT WORLD
RECESSION

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called on the world’s business and
other leaders to use the current economic crisis to launch a new Global
Compact entailing a “Green New Deal” that creates jobs and fights climate
change by investing in renewable energy and technological development.

“Climate change threatens all our goals for development and social
progress. Indeed, it is the one true existential threat to the planet,” he
told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in a speech that drew
parallels from the Global Compact of corporate responsibility launched 10
years ago by then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the same hall.

“On the other hand, it also presents us with a gilt-edged opportunity. By
tackling climate change head-on we can solve many of our current troubles,
including the threat of global recession. We stand at a crossroads. It is
important that we realize we have a choice. We can choose short-sighted
unilateralism and business as usual. Or we can grasp global cooperation and
partnership on a scale never before seen.”

Just as Mr. Annan had launched a Compact that sought to give a human face
to the global market, challenging business to embrace universal principles
and partner with the UN on big issues, such as the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) that seek to slash poverty, hunger, lack of access to health
care and education and a host of other social ills by 2015, so now the time
has came for what Mr. Ban called “Global Compact 2.0.”

“We live in a new era. Its challenges can all be solved by cooperation –
and only by cooperation,” he said, stressing how the earlier compact, the
world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, involves over 6,000
business participants in more than 130 countries, pioneering new standards
of “best practice” in human rights and labour law, helping to protect the
environment, fight against corruption and promote health, education and
infrastructure.

“Now, a new set of crises prompts a renewed sense of mission,” he declared.
“Our times demand a new definition of leadership – global leadership. They
demand a new constellation of international cooperation – governments,
civil society and the private sector, working together for a collective
global good.

“Some might say such a vision is naïve. That it is wishful thinking. Yet we
have inspiring examples proving the contrary,” he added, citing the
critical role of business in the 1960s Green Revolution that lifted
hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia, the global vaccination
campaign that eradicated smallpox by 1979, and solid progress in the fight
against AIDS, tuberculosis, polio and malaria.

“But we must break the tyranny of short-term thinking in favour of
long-term solutions. This will demand a renewed commitment to core
principles. A new Global Compact,” he added, noting new United States
President Barack Obama has made a clear commitment to re-energizing the
American economy by boosting the “green economy.”

Mr. Ban cited initiatives already underway under the old Global Compact,
such as “Caring for Climate,” the world’s largest business-led project on
climate change in which chief executives disclose their carbon emissions
and commit to comprehensive climate policies, and the “CEO Water Mandate”
advancing water stewardship through drip irrigation and water harvesting.

“The problem is that we have no coordinated global [water] management
authority in the UN system or the world at large,” the Secretary-General
said. “There is no overall responsibility, accountability or vision for how
to address the related problems of climate change, agricultural stress and
water technology.”

While in Davos, the Secretary-General also met, last night and today, with
a number of leaders. He discussed climate change and the Middle East peace
process with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

In addition, he discussed Haiti with former United States President Bill
Clinton. And in a bilateral meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon,
he talked about climate change, food security, the MDGs and Haiti.

 UNSG Ban Ki-moon and Diplomats accredited to the UN came Saturday January 24, 2009, to Park East Synagogue in New York City for a Holocaust Remembrance Day Service.

In November 1, 2005, 60 years since the creation of the UN in the aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust, the UN decided to designate January 27 as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. This year will be thus   thus the fourth year of such a   Commemoration and it will be held at the UN next week, while some at the UN will try to connect   these memorial events by holding parallel activities targeting the State of Israel for the recent invasion of the Gaza Strip and for the essence of its existence. As one example of this cloud over the UN, we posted   – www.SustainabiliTank.info posted:   http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2009/01….

With above in mind, nevertheless, the Park East Synagogue community, in the presence of Holocaust survivors, was proud to host the UNSG, four more UN officials, and the Diplomats that showed up – including the Diplomats from six European countries on whose territory the Holocaust was committed – Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Italy. The Ambassador to the UN from Rwanda, a non-Muslim African country came as he knows the impact of genocide from his own country’s experience. Also present were diplomats from Australia, Israel and the United States, and from the Latin American countries – Argentina, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Thus,14 countries out of the 192 Representations to the UN, showed up at this memorial service, but then, thinking of the WWII differences – seeing Germany, Russia, Israel, and the US sitting side by side, in the presence of survivors, and honoring the memory of the victims of the Holocaust in the presence of the UNSG, means that change is possible. Albeit, change through the UN maybe still very far off. There a great number of members may still take the position that Jews are not entitled to sit in the same bus with them, and when the issue is the Holocaust they will try to muddle it with “The question of Palestine.” January 26-27, 2009 will be just this sort of UN days. So what?

1. EU states monitor spread of civil unrest – 22.01.2009 – 20:17
—————————————————————————-
EU member states are “intensively” monitoring the risk of spreading civil
unrest in Europe, as riots over the economic crisis erupt in Iceland
following street clashes in Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Greece.
 http://euobserver.com/9/27460/?rk=1

2. Pressure on Prague won’t help ratify Lisbon, minister says – 22.01.2009 – 17:29
—————————————————————————-
Ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in the Czech Republic is a “domestic
democratic process,” and external pressure aimed at speeding up the process
is not helping, Czech deputy prime minister for European Affairs Alexandr
Vondra has said.
 http://euobserver.com/9/27456/?rk=1

3. EU continues to lag behind US on innovation – 22.01.2009 – 17:13
—————————————————————————-
The EU has made some headway in its bid to make itself more innovative and
boost its economy but is still lagging far behind the US and Japan, a new
report by the European Commission has shown.
 http://euobserver.com/9/27458/?rk=1

4. Banks ask ECB for help in eastern Europe – 22.01.2009 – 09:46
—————————————————————————-
In a fresh plea for aid from the European Central Bank, nine leading
international banks that operate in central and eastern Europe have joined
forces in asking for greater ECB help in the region.
 http://euobserver.com/9/27455/?rk=1

5. [Comment] Can Europe rise to Obama’s challenge? – 23.01.2009 – 08:52
—————————————————————————-
The inauguration of Barack Obama offers the opportunity for the European
Union to advance its collective interests by broadening and deepening the
transatlantic partnership.
But can Europe resolve its own internal differences, writes Peter Sain ley
Berry?
 http://euobserver.com/9/27463/?rk=1

6. [Comment] On the brink of a new era of gas supply stability – 23.01.2009 – 09:08
—————————————————————————-
Monday’s ground-breaking agreement to put the Russia-Ukraine gas trade on
the path to free market principles should put an end, once and for all, to
the spectre of a year-end gas crisis in Europe, writes Gazprom deputy chief
Alexander Medvedev.
 http://euobserver.com/9/27461/?rk=1

 UPDATED January 19, 2009:

Two days after Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, the country now says it plans to withdraw all of its forces by the time Barack Obama is sworn in as president on the condition that Hamas fighters hold their fire.

=================

From Arabian Business   - http://www.arabianbusiness.com/543845-is…

Israel halts Gaza offensive.
by AFP on Sunday, 18 January 2009

Israel held its fire in Gaza Sunday after declaring a unilateral ceasefire in its 22-day onslaught which has killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and levelled vast swathes of the Hamas-run enclave.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had said after a meeting of his security cabinet he was calling an immediate end to offensive operations but added that troops would stay in Gaza for the time being with orders to return fire if attacked.

“At two o’clock in the morning (local time) we will stop fire but we will continue to be deployed in Gaza and its surroundings,” Olmert said in a speech after the vote.

“We have reached all the goals of the war, and beyond,” he added.

An army spokesman confirmed at 2:00 am (0000 GMT) that the order to stand down had gone into effect.

Hamas had said in response to Olmert’s announcement that it would not accept the presence of a single soldier in the territory, while Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said the ceasefire should be followed by a full pull-out.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak acknowledged there was “no guarantee” that Hamas would stop firing rockets but said the army would hit back “severely.”

“The army will stay as needed and if Hamas continues to fire, the army will fire back severely and will be ready to follow and intensify its operations as necessary,” he said.

The response from Hamas, an Islamist group which has ruled Gaza since 2007 and is sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state, stopped short of an outright threat to continue the rocket attacks.

“We will not accept the presence of a single soldier in Gaza,” Fawzi Barhum, a Gaza-based Hamas spokesman, said, before restating the movement’s demands for a complete Israeli withdrawal and the opening of Gaza’s border crossings.

One of the main aims of the offensive has been to put a halt to rocket and mortar attacks but more than 30 projectiles were fired from Gaza on Saturday, including eight fired after Olmert’s announcement.

Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, who had been striving to broker a bilateral truce between Israel and Hamas, said only an unconditional ceasefire would suffice and called for all troops to leave the territory.

Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are to co-host a summit on Gaza in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh Sunday which will also be attended by a string of European leaders, the king of Jordan and UN chief Ban Ki-moon.

In the hours leading up to the security cabinet meeting, Israel kept lobbing shells into the densely populated urban area, while to the north in Beit Lahiya a UN-run school was set ablaze by bombs.

Two brothers, aged five and seven, were killed and another dozen people wounded in the attack, in which burning embers trailing smoke rained down on a school where some 1,600 people were sheltering, setting parts of it alight.

Ban called the fourth such attack on a UN-run school during the war “outrageous” and demanded a thorough investigation.

During the course of the war , schools, hospitals, UN compounds and thousands of homes all came under attack with the Palestinian Authority putting the cost of damage to infrastructure alone at 476 million dollars.

At least 1,206 Palestinians, including 410 children, have been killed since the start of Israel’s deadliest-ever assault on the territory on December 27, according to Gaza medics, who said another 5,300 people have been wounded.

Those slain in the war also include 109 women, 113 elderly people, 14 paramedics, and four journalists, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services.

Since the start of the operation 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or in rocket strikes. The army says more than 700 rockets and mortar rounds have been fired into Israel during that period.

The halt to the violence came after the Jewish state won pledges from Washington and Cairo to help prevent arms smuggling into Gaza, part of the Palestinians’ promised future state.

Although Egypt has not given any details about what assurances it has given Israel, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed a pledge on Friday promising “enhanced US security and intelligence cooperation with regional governments on actions to prevent weapons and explosive flows to Gaza.”

The ceasefire comes less than a month before Israel holds elections when Olmert, who formally resigned last autumn, is due to stand down.

The premier, whose reputation was badly damaged by a 2006 war in Lebanon seen by many Israelis as a disaster, said the Gaza war had “strengthened the deterrence of the state of Israel in the face of all those who threaten us.”

” Hamas received a hard blow. Its leaders are hiding. Many of its men have been killed. Dozens of tunnels have been bombarded. The ability to launch rockets into Israel has been reduced.”

————————–

Further, it became known that in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the leaders of Britain, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Jordan, Spain and Turkey, along with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, met to coordinate policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They gathered to back Egyptian efforts to turn a shaky ceasefire into a solid mutual agreement leading to Israeli withdrawal.

The above list of intervening powers includes the EU members – UK, France, Germany, Spain, as well as the present EU Presidency – the Czech Republic. Also Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. They will have to see how Egypt could effectively close its border with the Gaza Strip so there is no underground entree of weapon materials to the Gaza Strip. When this is achieved, they will go as in-between in what concerns Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank.

The open question will eventually be how to start direct negotiations between the combatants, and the clear need for Israel to negotiate also directly with the Hamas. This point will come eventually when the US will change its position in regard to the acceptance of Hamas at the negotiations’ table when Israel is present. The absence of the US from Sharm el-Sheikh made it possible to reach the temporary   result so far. An Obama Administration will perhaps reconsider US reluctance to talk to Hamas.

It seems that Olmert, Barak and Livni are at last able to agree to put an end to the Gaza horror. But, still no end to arrogance   as they speak of a “unilateral” cease-fire. “However unequal the parties, the fighting has to stop from two sides.   And, it is not with the United States that Israel must come to an   agreement. Israeli and Hamas were parties in war and have to be parties to the cease-fire.” One can not choose one’s neighbors says the Israeli Peace Movement spokesperson.

In the meantime, Hamas said today that it would cease fire immediately along with other militant groups in the Gaza Strip and give Israel, which already declared a unilateral truce, a week to pull its troops out of the territory. According to Israel there was still some shelling by Hamas after above announcement.

———-

Czech court green-lights EU Lisbon Treaty. {sort-off ?}
LUCIA KUBOSOVA

26.11.2008 @ 16:59 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The Czech constitutional court has unanimously ruled that the disputed parts of the Lisbon Treaty are in line with the Czech Constitution but, the judges have admitted they did not analyse the treaty as a whole, sparking speculation that the issue could be raised again by its critics in the country.

{The Lisbon Treaty does not change the fundamental direction of the EU – they said – But why did they not read the whole treaty so they can make a final judgement?? So now the game is not finished yet.}

In his closely watched verdict announced on Wednesday (26 November), Vojen Guttler, the presiding judge rapporteur, argued that the new reform treaty does not change the fundamental direction of the EU, nor does it harm the sovereignty of the member states.

He added that a new provision in the treaty that clears out the terms for countries that wish to leave the union is “the indisputable confirmation” of their sovereignty, while a transfer of powers to the EU level can only happen if it is approved by member states.

The statement contradicts the arguments put forward by President Vaclav Klaus on Tuesday (25 November) in his address to the judges during a public hearing. Reacting to the verdict, President Klaus commented that the court’s approach was “inexpert”, “subjective” and “political”.

“I regret to state that the Constitutional Court has not given appropriate response to my legal arguments. I expect a group of deputies or senators will raise these and more other arguments again,” he said in a statement.

The court itself pointed out that it was only reacting to the concrete questions received from senators earlier this year. Rapporteur Guttler said that if the judges had reviewed the treaty as a whole, they would not respect the right of other politicians or institutions to raise other issues.

But the chair of the Czech Senate, Premysl Sobotka, of the ruling centre-right Civic Democrat Party (ODS) said that it is “unlikely” that senators would address the constitutional court again, CTZ agency reported.

“At this moment, nothing is blocking the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in both parliamentary chambers” in the Czech Republic, Mr Sobotka added. The ODS party is divided on the issue however, with some deputies following the line of President Klaus, who argues that the ratification should only continue if the treaty is approved in Ireland.

***
Reactions in Brussels:

Meanwhile, some EU personalities in Brussels rushed to comment on the keenly awaited verdict of the Czech court.

“Today’s decision of the Court brings to an end the treaty ratification standstill in the Czech Republic,” said European Parliament president Hans-Gert Pottering and reminded Prague of its key role as the country chairing EU’s rotating presidency country in the first half of 2009.

“In this regard in the European Parliament we trust that the new EU Presidency will seriously contribute to push forward the ratification process,” he noted, adding that “ideally” this process should be finalised by the June elections of the EU assembly.

“The decision of the Czech supreme court is very welcome, although hardly a surprise,” commented Andrew Duff, a British Liberal MEP in the constitutional committee. He said that the interventions by both senators and President Klaus were “erratic”.

“Neither the Senate nor the President showed a sure grasp of the realities of the legal constitutional order of the EU, or of the fact that when the Czech Republic signed up to become a member state of the Union it was subscribing not only to the acquis communautaire [rules] of the past but also to all future obligations.”

Nigel Farrage, the leader of the UK’s eurosceptics in the EU legislature also said that the verdict came as no real surprise – although for different reasons.

“The pressure from the European Commission and the Czech government’s desperate need to fall in line with Brussels as it prepares to take over the Presidency made it a foregone conclusion,” he said in a statement.

The European Commission said it does not want to comment on various stages of the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in member states but its spokesperson added: “We are confident that the Czech parliament will honour the commitment which the country made when the treaty was signed.”

Austrian minister quits over EU referendum clause.
VALENTINA POP

25.11.2008   the EUobserver – Austria’s pro-European foreign minister Ursula Plassnik has refused to be part of the country’s new governing coalition because it did not rule out future referendums on EU treaties.

“I was not ready to serve as an EU warranty or fig leaf for a government where some of its members do not distance themselves enough from a fruitless and energy consuming alliance with EU-critical forces,” Ms Plassnik told Die Presse.

The minister’s center-right OVP party formed a “grand coalition” with the populist Social-Democrats (SPO) at the weekend, following two months of talks that locked Austria’s resurgent far-right factions out of power.

The new SPO chancellor, Werner Faymann, declined to insert a clause into the coalition pact guaranteeing that future EU treaties will be ratified through parliament instead of referendums, prompting Ms Plassnik’s departure, she explained.

Instead, the coalition signed up to a “self-destruct clause” under which the two parties can seek EU-wide or national referendums by mutual agreement. In case of disagreement, the government would be dissolved.

The OVP and SPO both officially want the Lisbon treaty – which was ratified by the Austrian parliament in May – to come into force.

But in tendering her resignation, Ms Plassnik recalled that Mr Faymann and the then SPO chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer in July wrote a letter to Hans Dichand, the editor of the tabloid Krone newspaper, pleading for national referendums on EU affairs.

“Future changes on the EU treaty, which touch upon Austrian interest, should be decided through a referendum in Austria. The same applies to a possible EU accession of Turkey, which would overstrech, in our view, the current EU structures,” they said, as part of the SPO election campaign.

“It is not about cutting ‘the people’ out. Mr Dichand [the editor of Krone] is not ‘the people.’ It is about explaining carefully and clearly the EU and its co-operation with Austria. The EU must not be chased as a scapegoat through the villages. This is false and brings Austria to a dead end. And Austria is no dead end country,” Ms Plassnik told Kleine Zeitung.

A coalition cannot assume governing responsibilty and have an “official pro-EU line,” but at the same time “enter a coalition with EU opponents,” she added. “It shouldn’t be the case that Austria becomes a risk country [in terms of future EU integration].”

The Austrian public is the most eurosceptic in the union – only 28 percent had a positive view of the EU in a June 2008 survey, the lowest among all 27 states.

The majority of Austrians also wanted a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, with 59 percent saying they wanted a popular vote in a Gallup poll in April 2008.

=============

Prague – It is inevitable for the Irish to vote on the EU Lisbon treaty in a referendum again, Dick Roche, Irish minister for European affairs, told CTK in Prague today.

He emphasised that the new referendum would take place only after careful negotiations with the EU removed objections and dispelled the apprehensions the Irish public feels about the reform treaty.
In a month Dublin is to disclose the main areas the Irish want to discuss with the EU in this connection, Roche said.
At the European Council meeting in December the Irish prime minister will propose a “road map” to identify the main areas we believe we have to discuss with our European colleagues in order to clarify the problems the Irish feel worried about, Roche said.
The complex negotiations will probably continue throughout the period of the Czech Republic’s EU presidency in the first half of 2009 and they could even be completed not before the start of the Swedish presidency, Roche said.
After the Irish apprehensions of the Lisbon treaty are dispelled, Ireland will see another referendum, Roche said.
He said the Irish government has not discussed the referendum’s date as it will be topical only after a final agreement with the EU is reached.
Roche said he personally hoped the process not to take more than a year.
One of the issues for the Dublin-EU discussion will be the proposed new size of the European Commission. Ireland insists on the principle of one commissioner from each member state, Roche continued.
The Lisbon treaty, nevertheless, contains a mechanism that enables to preserve this principle until 2014. Afterwards it will be possible for the EC to decide on an increase in the number of commissioners.
Dublin also objects to the EU’s liberal approach to abortion. Roche said Ireland respects it that other EU countries have a different approach, it is their right, Roche said.
He said the planned negotiations could bring about a declaration recognising Ireland’s different view in this respect.
The other problems Ireland considers important include the sovereignty of individual member countries in deciding on their own systems of taxes.
In this respect Roche said he believes that the Czechs and most small countries share a similar view.
He said the Irish also differ from most European countries by their strive for neutrality.
Other countries ensure their security by their participation in NATO. Ireland respects this, but it has a different view, Roche said.
He said he believes that a result can be achieved after all the worrying problems are analysed. The Lisbon treaty must not be approached with fear. It is necessary to assure the Irish that they rights will be guaranteed, he said.
The negotiations will last many months and they will require much good will. The discussion must not destroy the balance the other EU states have achieved, Roche pointed out.
In the Czech Republic, which is the last of the 27 EU countries not to have taken an official position on the Lisbon treaty so far, the document has been assessed by the Constitutional Court these days.
At the court’s public proceedings today, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, an ardent opponent of the treaty, said in his opinion the treaty is at variance with the Czech constitution.
Klaus previously said that if the court gave the green light to the treaty and if the Czech parliament ratified it, he would not sign it until it is ratified by Ireland.
Roche said he would not dare to comment on a political debate in the Czech Republic as it would be impolite.
He said the ratification process in an EU country should not be made conditional on the ratification elsewhere.
Roche said there will always be discussions about the balance between national sovereignty and the advantage to be a member of a bigger grouping.
The Irish do not have a feeling of being less Irish in the EU. The opposite is true, Roche said.
Author: ÄŒTK
=============

Irish parliament to debate second Lisbon referendum.
LUCIA KUBOSOVA

November 26, 2008, EUobserver – An Irish parliamentary committee is to debate a report arguing that a second referendum on the EU’s Lisbon treaty is legally possible.

The draft report, first seen by the Irish Times, has been discussed in a private session by the Subcommittee on Ireland’s Future in the EU and is due to be presented to the joint Committee on European Affairs on Thursday (27 November).

It argues that a second poll on the EU’s new reform treaty – following the debacle in June when the Irish voters rejected the document by a clear majority – would be preferable, suggesting a vote on the same text but accompanied by clarifying declarations on controversial issues.

One concrete issue of the kind likely to be considered is a protection of the country’s neutrality. Parliamentarians argued that a new procedure should be set up to boost national decision-making powers regarding military-related matters.

Also, they would like to see in an attached declaration assurance that all member states keep their commissioner – if other European partners agree with the move.

Under the Lisbon treaty, EU member states would take turns at having a representative in the commission, meaning that once every 15 years, each country would be without a commissioner for a period of five years, as the number of commissioners is scheduled to be reduced from 27 to 18 as of 2014.

Earlier this month, Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin hinted that his government is in talks with other governments and EU officials on the issue of the composition of the bloc’s executive.

But some insiders doubt this modification could be achieved, as it is one of the major elements of Lisbon’s institutional reform and was introduced parallel to similar changes for other institutions, notably the European Parliament.

Under the Lisbon treaty, the new EU legislature will have 750 members instead of the current 785.

However, if the new parliament is elected according to the currently applied Nice Treaty in June, its size will be reduced to 732. In such a case, the new commission – due to be appointed later this year – should also have fewer than 27 members.

Julian Priestley, the parliament’s former secretary general, believes that Ireland itself should face some “consequences” if there is no second referendum by mid-2009.

Speaking on Tuesday (25 November) at a debate on the next EU elections organised by the European Policy Center, he argued “it would be a mistake to get some kind of a fix around the clear provision of the Nice treaty.”

Mr Priestley rejected the possibility of having 26 commissioners and to not count the president of the commission as part of the team, stressing that the EU should respect the provisions of whatever treaty is in force.

“If Ireland is the only country that hasn’t ratified the Lisbon treaty and at least superficially prefers the Nice treaty, it should face the consequences of Nice and lose the commissioner,” he concluded.

Waiting for the verdict on Lisbon

Meanwhile, Prague is expecting a verdict from the Czech constitutional court on whether the EU reform plan is in line with the Czech constitution after a heated exchange between the country’s president and government officials in the courtroom on Tuesday (25 November).

The Czech Republic is the only country that has not yet voted on the Lisbon treaty. Despite this fact, the republic is preparing to take over the helm of the EU from France in January, when it assumes the six-month rotating EU presidency, and must then lead talks with Ireland on how to solve the institutional problem.

But top politicians in Prague are divided on the issue. While deputy prime minister Alexander Vondra praised the document and its improvements to the bloc’s functioning, President Vaclav Klaus strongly criticised it at a public hearing.

He argued that the democratically elected institutions in the Czech Republic would be weakened and that key conditions for the country’s EU membership – as stated when the citizens voted on entry in 2003 – would change due to the new treaty.

In a radio interview on Monday (24 November) President Klaus also indicated he might sign the treaty – if adopted by parliament – only after it is ratified in Ireland, echoing the stance of Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s minister for European affairs, Dick Roche, told the Czech CTK news agency that a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty is “inevitable,” adding that he hopes the whole process would not take more than a year.

Poland rejects French CO2 compromise as summit looms.
RENATA GOLDIROVA, November 20, 2008

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – Poland has given the cold shoulder to concessions offered by the French EU presidency on how the union’s power sector should reduce CO2 emissions.

“It does not solve the problem of electricity prices in a satisfactory way,” one Polish diplomat said on Wednesday (19 November) in response to the French proposal.

What will happen if the 11 December EU summit, the post-Poznan summit – fails to see agreement?

The concessions paper is aimed at addressing Warsaw’s key objection – against the buying of 100 percent of pollution permits under the union’s reformed emissions trading scheme (ETS), the cornerstone of the EU’s strategy against climate change.

Under the reform, EU governments would no longer give away permits to pollute to the power sector. Instead, the industry would be forced to buy the right to emit carbon dioxide by auction, with full auctioning expected to kick in from 2013.

To get Poland on board, the French EU presidency has offered a three-year long exemption from the regime to those countries that produce at least 60 percent of their electricity from coal and are poorly connected to the grids of other EU states.

Their plants could receive half of their pollution permits for free until 2016, France has suggested.

Poland – the chief opponent of the ETS reform – swiftly rejected the French ideas, however. It claims the changes would harm its economy, as almost 95 percent of the country’s energy production is based on coal.

***
Alternative suggestion:

Instead, Warsaw has tabled its own alternative to full auctioning – a so-called “benchmarking-auctioning approach” that suggests granting free allocations on the basis of actual production.

In practice, separate benchmarks would be set for each type of electricity production – hard coal, brown coal, natural gas and fuel oil – while free allowances would be granted “ex-post” based on actual emissions.

The system would reward best performers, a Polish diplomat said.

Starting from 2013, the base benchmark would be reduced by one percent each year – something that should put additional pressure on the power sector to modernise technologies.

Warsaw argues that its proposal helps address concerns about the level of electricity prices, while full auctioning is likely to see producers passing on the entire market price of allowances to consumers in the electricity price.

“In countries where coal is the main fuel for electricity production, the electricity price increases will be particularly visible due to a need to purchase a proportionately larger quantity of allowances at auctions,” the Polish paper says.

In addition, Poland suggests to promote development of clean coal technologies rather than to eliminate coal from electricity production. “The EU should treat coal as an energy source, which improves its energy security,” it says.

***

Another EU summit?

The 27-nation bloc has been in a race against time, trying to reach a deal on the ambitious package of green legislation in mid-December (11-12 December) when EU leaders are set to meet in Brussels .

“For the time being, we hope for an agreement on the 11th and the 12th. If there is no agreement, then we will see,” a French presidency spokeswoman told EUobserver.

 The EU Suffers From Not Having A Longer Term President – The Incoming First Half of 2009 Czech Presidency Starts Out With A Flap As Sarkozy And Blair Opt For Continuity In Dealing With The Global Financial Crisis. In Any Case, Czech President Vaclav Klaus Has Small Minority Views in Europe – He Even Does Not Believe In Human Caused Global Warming. Clouds Over The Czech Presidency.

France wants post-EU presidency financial summit.
PHILIPPA RUNNER, November 19, 2008,EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS

France has unveiled plans for a post-French EU presidency financial summit, despite the Czech Republic’s sensitivity over its upcoming chairmanship of the EU.

The Elysee Palace on Tuesday (18 November) formally announced an “international summit” to be held in Paris on 8 January, entitled “New World: Values, Development and Regulation,” continuing France’s ambition to create a “new model” for capitalism in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Mr Sarkozy – known for having a high-octane personality, is to chair another major international meeting.   The meeting is to bring together international leaders as well as intellectuals such as economist Joseph Stiglitz and philosopher Francis Fukuyama and will be co-chaired by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and former British PM Tony Blair.

The move comes after a G20 summit in Washington last weekend fell short of EU hopes to tighten global financial regulation.

The new Paris meeting is the latest in a long line of high-powered events organised by France since it took over the EU helm in July. An EU presidency normally hosts two EU summits, but Mr Sarkozy has already added one extraordinary Georgia war summit, one special financial crisis summit, a eurozone summit and a G4 financial summit.

***

French officials in October proposed that the eurozone should form an “economic government” led by Mr Sarkozy after the French EU presidency expires in December in order to maintain the “impetus, the energy” of the Elysee Palace’s efforts.

Mr Sarkozy and Mr Blair have also been floated as candidates for the Lisbon treaty-envisaged job of permanent EU president.

But the Czech Republic has resented any suggestions that a small, new EU state cannot lead the bloc in times of crisis.

Prague has also rejected MEPs’ accusations that it will be a lame duck presidency because it is split over ratification of the Lisbon treaty and because the ruling ODS party suffered defeats in local elections last month.

“Nobody can take the presidency away from the Czech Republic,” Czech deputy prime minister Alexandr Vondra said in October on the eurozone government idea.

Prague also plans to hold two extraordinary summits during its EU chairmanship, one on the Eastern Partnership of deeper integration with the EU’s post-Soviet neighbours and one to greet new US President Barack Obama.

French public policies minister Eric Besson toned down the language of the French president’s original statement on the 8 January event when talking to the Associated Press on Tuesday.

The meeting will be a “conference” not a summit, he said. “It’s not an operational and decision-making colloquium.”

——————-

Czech President, Vaclav Klaus came to the US in 2008 to back President Bush on his avoidance of dealing with climate change. He Spoke at that contrived Heartland Institute’s Anti-action New York City week. He even had the audacity to write to US Congress opposing Al Gore’s position on the issues please see:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54803

and our own

Vaclav Klaus, President of The Czech Republic, Sets The Timing For The Heartland Institute’s New York Climate Change Conference, He May Yet Become, Personally, A Serious Impediment On The Road To Copenhagen.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 9th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

What sort of a European meeting with President Obama does President Klaus think he wants to chair?

We hope that this brewing flap can open the eyes of Europe that time has come for a real EU Presidency.

And The Czech Republic deserves every little bit of the contraversary it has created:

“The EU cannot punish a country for having pluralist opinions” says the following Opinion column – but this is not the point – the point is that a minority of the EU should not be allowed to speak for the Union – and Vaclav Klaus is just the extreme example. We listened to him in New York and we know that he is a very fringe point of view, President of a complicated EU Member State – in no way President of the EU.

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[Comment] Prague is as capable as any capital of taking over EU helm
MAREK NEUMAN, The EUobserver, November 19, 2008

COMMENT – After a Hallowe’en working lunch, French president Sarkozy assured his Czech counterpart, prime minister Topolanek, that France in no way intends to sabotage the Czech Republic’s EU Presidency, which the country assumes on 1 January, 2009.

Despite this, recent weeks have witnessed a large amount of analysis and commentary by international media dwelling upon the question of whether the Czech Republic is a suitable country to lead the EU in times of crisis or whether an experienced administration, such as the French one, would not be a better option.


The EU cannot punish a country for having pluralist opinions.

Although the prospects of the Czech Republic being stripped of its presidency are at the very least hypothetical, the numerous comments certainly deserve further thought, since any such activity would clearly break with the long-established traditions governing the union.

Moreover, just by invoking this debate, are we not already deliberating about the possibility of creating a European Union of two classes?

***

There have been several arguments put forward by commentators as to why the Czech Republic might not be a suitable president of the EU for the upcoming six months, but the Czech Republic’s demography has been the overriding issue for a variety of pundits.

It is true that the country, with its population of roughly 10 million, is not one of the largest states, but neither does it belong into the group of European micro-states. However, as a closer look into the history of the rotating EU presidency shows that the size of a country has never been an issue for consideration until now.

Countries such as Belgium or Luxembourg have periodically held the EU chairmanship and have performed just as well – or just as badly – as any of the major European powers in terms of efficiency. Moreover, Slovenia, the first new EU member state to hold EU Presidency, which held the function at the beginning of this year, certainly did not let its demographic size be an obstacle. Indeed, Ljubljana handed over the baton to France largely to wide acclaim from the Brussels community.

In fact, it turns out that some of the major integrative steps in European integration have been advanced while these small countries have been at the helm, most notably the Maastricht Treaty under the leadership of Luxembourg.

Commentators have also claimed that the Czech Republic lacks the experience to lead the union through the financial crisis.

It is important to realize that the Presidency is to a large extent a representative function, which the respective country uses to move certain points up or down on the agenda. By no means does the existence of the EU Presidency imply that decisions will not be brought about collectively. Interestingly, thus far, the Czech Republic has been surprisingly lightly hit by the financial crisis and therefore might even have something to teach in terms of economic expertise to even the largest EU members.

Domestic difficulties

It is true that the Czech Republic is currently going through a bit of internal political turmoil and the current government is somewhat less than stable. However, by now, the main policy goals of the upcoming EU presidency are set and one can expect these to be followed up by whatever political party is in power during the first six months of 2009, since the proposed agenda goes beyond partisan issues.

Additionally, there are other EU members who are also experiencing domestic difficulties, not least of all Belgium, but it is questionable whether the ability of these countries to lead the EU would be disputed if it were their turn.

Finally, the international peanut gallery have repeatedly carped about the growing euro-scepticism among some parts of the Czech political elite.

While it is true that the Czech president, who refuses even to fly the European flag at Prague Castle, is a hardened eurosceptic, this has no bearing on the country’s ability to effectively perform its tasks while holding the EU presidency, since these would be performed by the rest of the government, not the head of state.

But even in the most extreme scenario, such as having a euro-sceptic party or coalition in power, the scheduled country still could not be denied its turn at bat. The EU cannot punish a country for having pluralist opinions if it wants to uphold the image of a democratic entity.

Nevertheless, this most extreme scenario is hardly likely to materialise in the Czech Republic in the next six months, since both major political parties are strongly in favour of further European integration and have proven to be so for the last five years of the country’s membership.

How long must a member state wait to prove its loyalty to the European “idea” before it can enjoy all rights that come from membership? In a community of pluralist, democratic states, the personal beliefs of one politician cannot be a litmus test for allowing a country to assume the presidency.

It is crucial to realize what is the true essence of the EU presidency. The bearer of the chairmanship essentially just outlines the overall agenda for the union for the next six months. Naturally, with the world currently fighting the most severe economic crisis in a century, no one needs to be worried that this issue would not figure high on the agenda of the next presidency term, whatever the country actually in “power.”

When the European Union’s big-bang enlargement process was completed in 2007, the European Union acknowledged that the individual countries were not only fulfilling the legal requirements of membership – the Copenhagen criteria, but were also able to perform all tasks of membership – the rotating EU presidency included. The right to hold the EU presidency is the executive zenith of the numerous duties and obligations that come with EU membership.

Were the Czech Republic indeed stripped of its treaty-based right, the European Union would both internally and externally be sending the message of a hierarchy of important and less important countries.

Not that such a scenario is remotely likely, but the very discussion that is currently occurring is already an acknowledgment of this two-tiered Europe.

Objectively, the Czech Republic is as qualified to lead the European Union from 1 January 2009 as any other EU member.

Marek Neuman is a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics.

President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary.

On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people.

Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 – so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology.

Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now.

Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there – all as part of his UN Ambassadorship.

Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians – and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria.

So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War?

He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated – something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on.

———

***

Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals.

By BILL KELLER
Published in The New York Times August 16, 2008

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

Related
Map
Russia Marches, Neighbors Check Their Cards (The New York Times, August 17, 2008)
Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China (The New York Tines, August 14, 2008)

Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism  www.ft.com August 12, 2008)

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.

In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment.

Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.

But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor.

This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.

The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises.

History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.

***

——————

The New Age of Authoritarianism.
By Chrystia Freeland
Published: August 12 2008 in The Financial Times.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.

It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.”

Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal – and possibly eternal – ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet – which was really the Russian – suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.

That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.

Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s.

For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment – China – is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.”

But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view – and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do.

In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”.

The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all.

But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength – and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society – an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”.

Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad – as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000.

Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.

 chrystia.freeland at ft.com

Georgia and the Ukraine made moves to get closer to the West – they applied to become members of NATO. Georgia also worked with Western Europe in order to help the EU with access to Azerbaijan and Central Asia petroleum and gas. Russia clearly did not regard this bypassing of its traditional authority over what it considers as its brood. At the UN they still are bunched as former CIS and other Eastern bloc friends. Georgia had to be punished and Ukraine had to be thought that its future may be of the same sort.

Now, did the Georgians think that the US will be more then a paper tiger? Lots of promise, social help – but militarily? Then – it really is not direct US interests, but rather EU interests. So, why would Russia not say to itself that showing the EU that the US is a paper tiger – nu – that is something that can also help loosen further the EU-US ties.

Will the US react by telling the Russians that their economy does not justify their being members of the G8? That would be a reasonable game-play, but who will pick this up in the US Presidential contests?

Aha! so here we go. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw honesty. Perhaps he was right of sorts and Putin has now provided a pay-back. Russia’s moves strengthen McCain in his competition with Obama.

Was this move intended to help the Republican’s in the Presidential competition, and a sign of an oil-hungry party in charge, that barks but does not bite, rather then a new force that would make the world less dependent on oil – and oil these days is indeed the only thing going for the present version of a degraded Russia. The future is bleak for Russia in a world that will be dominated by China and India with the billion-plus people, and their booming internal economies that by now whistle at Russia as there is very little except brute nuclear power that this country has to offer them. Oil – yes – but the oil to China and India will arrive by ship rather then by pipe – and if it is a pipe – that pipe will come from Central Asia and not Russia.

Do we think that National borders are holly? No! But then South Ossetia belongs together with North Ossetia to one Free Ossetia State – and that is clearly not what Russia wants. They did not let go of Chechnia either. So the question here is whose ox is being gored – and the ox will suffer just the same under this or another regime. The South Ossetians of Georgia had at least a chance at a new and better life. By playing the Russian cards they blew it and that is why the civilized world is on Georgia’s side. If this sort of game digs deep into the Ukraine, our best advise to the Ukraine government is to take the Czech example of friendly divorce, and let go of those eastern territories that want some more Russian punishment. Ukraine will then soon find out that they are better thereof – and the Russian Ukrainians will just be set back and have to start their lives anew.