RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr. Václav Klaus, first Prime Minister (1993–1998) and second President of the Czech Republic (2003–2013) and an economist who advocates free markets, delivered this speech at the conference of Association des Climato-réalistes, Musée Social, Paris, December 7, 2017. We are grateful for President Klaus’s permission to publish it here, and we commend him and thank God for his courageous, intelligent, and persevering defense of freedom and reason.

Ladies and gentlemen,

many thanks for the invitation and for the possibility to participate in this important gathering. It is great to be in France after many years and to see Paris as it looks in the era of mass migration.

I travel abroad almost permanently, but not to France. I don´t know whether it is my fault or something else. It may be partly caused by my inability to speak French, something I consider a great deficiency of mine, partly by the evident discrepancy between my views and the mainstream French thinking.

Nevertheless, I was in the last couple of years inspired by the works of several French authors, such as Michel Houellebecq, Pascal Bruckner, Pierre Manent, Alain Finkielkraut, not to speak about my old friends such as Pascal Salin. It gave me a new motivation to be in contact with France and its intellectuals.

I must admit that I was not – until very recently – aware of the French Association des Climato-réalistes, of its activities, and of its ability to organize such an important gathering as today´s one. Many thanks for bringing me here and for giving me a chance to address this distinguished audience.

The issue of climate alarmism, of man-made and human society endangering global warming has become one of my main topics as well as worries. I strongly disagree with the global warming doctrine which is an arrogant, human freedom and prosperity of mankind endangering set of beliefs, an ideology, if not a religion. It lives independently of the science of climatology. Its disputes are not about temperature, they are part of the “conflict of ideologies”.

My way of looking at this topic is based

– on a very special experience gained under the communist regime in which I spent two thirds of my life. This experience sharpened our eyes. We became oversensitive to all attempts to violate freedom, rationality and free exchange of views, we became oversensitive to all attempts to impose on us the dogmas of those who consider themselves better than the rest of us. In the communist era, we witnessed an irrational situation when science was at the same time promoted and prohibited, praised and celebrated, manipulated and misused. I have very similar feelings now;

– on my being an economist who has strong views about the role of markets and governments in human society and economy, about the role of visible and invisible hands in controlling our life and shaping our future and who considers the politically based interventions in the economy connected with the ambitions to fight climate absolutely untenable;

– on my being a politician for 25 years of my recent life who has always been fighting all variants of green ideology, and especially its highlight, the global warming doctrine. I have been for many years intensively involved in the world-wide, highly controversial and heavily manipulated debate about global warming and about the role of human beings in it. I was the only head of state who dared to openly express a totally dissident view at the UN General Assembly already 10 years ago[1].

A new book, Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet, is available from MIT Press. The book touts the wonders of solar energy and tells us that there is an urgent need to invest trillions in more solar energy. The book is filled with outright errors. The author, Varun Sivaram, has a boundless faith in technical progress that he thinks will make solar cheaper and more practical.

Since solar cells and integrated circuits are both manufactured using silicon wafers, the author assumes that something like Moore’s Law must apply to solar cells. Moore’s law predicts the halving of the price of integrated circuits every 18 months or so. But integrated circuits become cheaper because they become smaller, taking less real estate on the wafer. However, solar cells don’t become smaller, because they need to collect sunlight, and the amount of energy they collect is proportional to the area they occupy. In any case, the cost of the silicon components of solar energy is rapidly becoming negligible. At least 75% of the cost is for mundane things like concrete, steel, power lines, land, etc.

Solar has the huge problem that it doesn’t work at night. It doesn’t work during the day if it is cloudy. Even the sunniest city in the USA, Yuma, Ariz., has 50 cloudy days a year. If there were a cheap and scalable method of storing electricity, the prospects for solar would be better. But the best method of storing electricity, pumped storage, is expensive and dependent on favorable terrain. Neglecting many costs, utility-scale solar farms cost about $2,200 per kilowatt of nameplate capacity. Under favorable conditions, the average power produced is about 25% of nameplate capacity. If a realistic computation of the unsubsidized cost of electricity is made, solar electricity costs 12 cents per kWh, under good conditions in sunny locations. Natural gas can deliver electricity for less than 5 cents.