By Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic

The full speech is now available at this link. And also at Klaus’s own site along with his other addresses to the UN and other meetings here.  If you do nothing else today read the full inspiring speech from the only leader of a major world country that ‘gets it”. A brief except is below.

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.

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.

Vaclav Klaus is president of the Czech Republic. These remarks were delivered at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 4, 2008.

By Richard S. Courtney for SPPI

This paper reviews effects of large use of biofuels that I predicted in a paper published in August 2006 prior to the USA legislating to enforce displacement of crude oil products by biofuels. The review indicates that policies (such as that in the EU), subsidies and legislation (such as that in the USA) to promote use of biofuels should be reconsidered. The use of biofuels is causing significant problems but providing no benefits except to farmers. Biofuel usage is a hidden subsidy to farmers, and if this subsidy is the intended purpose of biofuel usage then more direct subsidies would be more efficient. But the problems of biofuel usage are serious. Biofuel usage is damaging energy security, reducing biodiversity, inducing excessively high food prices, and inducing excessively high fuel prices, while providing negligible reduction to greenhouse gas emissions.

To put the situation in words anybody can understand, they write that “filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn, which contains enough calories to feed one person
for a year.

All these effects were predicted in my paper on the use of biofuels that was published in August 2006 and can be seen here. My 2006 paper also predicted objections from environmentalists if large use of biofuels were adopted although this then seemed implausible because many environmentalists were campaigning for biofuels to displace fossil fuels. But this prediction has also proved to be correct. See full story here.

By Eric Kelderman, Stateline.org Staff Writer

Coal-producing states that supply nearly half of the nation’s electricity are feeling squeezed as efforts to combat global warming outpace technology needed to make the nation’s most abundant fossil fuel burn more cleanly. While coal is mined in 26 states, more than two-thirds of it comes from Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. West Virginia employs the most miners, more than 20,000 in 2006. Nearly 18,000 coal miners worked in Kentucky that year and more than 5,800 in Wyoming.

Now, governors and other officials from major mining states are intensifying calls to expand technologies to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from coal power, including a method that turns carbon dioxide into a synthetic natural gas, called gasification, or to store the emissions underground, through a process called sequestration. “Whether you believe in global warming or not, the political and economic realities have changed, and Wyoming needs to adapt to those changes,” said Gov. Dave Freudenthal (D), after signing two bills to establish new rules governing sequestration in his state, which produces more than 38 percent of the nation’s coal. Industry advocates and politicians in large mining states acknowledge that environmental concerns have made it tougher to build new power plants. But coal’s abundance and low cost ensure it will be needed to meet the nation’s growing demand for electricity, they argue.

Coal is now burned in more than 600 plants to generate 49 percent of the country’s current electricity, with the largest amounts of that fuel consumed in the upper Great Lakes and Southeastern states, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. The National Mining Association (NMA) projects that the amount of coal mined this year will approach the 2006 record of 1.16 billion tons. Although 150 new coal-fired power plants were proposed between 2000 and 2006, the bulk of those projects has been delayed or canceled, according to an October 2007 report by NETL. In 2007, proposals for 59 coal plants were scrapped in 24 states, either by state regulators concerned about the effects of carbon-dioxide emissions or by power companies worried about the future costs of pollution, according to data from the Sierra Club. More than 36,000 megawatts of electricity was scheduled to come from new coal-fired power in 2007 - enough to power roughly 36 million homes, just 4,500 megawatts was actually produced, NETL found. Read more here.

Icecap Note: With these delays or cancellations, we are more likely to increase our dependence on foreign oil imports as the newer alternative energy technologies are unlikely to be able to meet our needs anytime soon. Conservation can only take us so far and nuclear power is not in the environmentalists’ vocabulary.