Is Environmentalism a Bigger Threat than Global Warming?

Washington, D.C., May 27, 2008—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is proud to announce a provocative new book on environmental policy, Blue Planet in Green Shackles by Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic. President Klaus makes the case that policies being proposed to address global warming are not justified by current science and are, in fact, a dangerous threat to freedom and prosperity around the world.

Klaus argues that the environmental movement has transformed itself into an ideology that seeks to restrict human activities at any cost, while pursuing an impossible utopian dream of a perfectly “natural” world. The supposed threat of human civilization against a fragile Earth has become an article of faith, especially in the realm of global warming activism.

“The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism,” writes Klaus. “It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”

The publication of Blue Planet in Green Shackles – What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? continues the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s history of fighting alarmist climate policies. CEI has long argued that whatever challenges future climate changes might bring, the worst possible response is to restrict human freedom and slow economic growth and innovation.

“Today, the global warming debate raging in both the United States and Europe has metastasized into cultural warfare against economic liberty,” writes CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. in the book’s foreword. “For that reason, pro-freedom voices are needed to reframe the debate to show how a free people can better address the challenges facing Western civilization. To that end, we are proud to publish Blue Planet in Green Shackles.”

About the author: Since 2003, Václav Klaus has served as President of the CzechRepublic. Previously he served as the country’s Finance Minister and Prime Minister, presiding over the peaceful post-communist separation of the Czechoslovak Federation into the modern Czech and Slovak Republics. Klaus holds a Ph.D. in economics from Czech Academy of Sciences.

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more information about CEI, please visit our website at www.cei.org.