FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Freedom, not climate, is at risk As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

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■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided ■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants ■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensusâ€?, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority

I have hinted before (in Czech press) that the Czech (my) president is an idiot. However, he is not a total idiot. Anybody who can call somebody else “a Malthusian pessimist” has to have at least read a book and Klaus has read more than a few. Everytime I read him I am puzzled by this strange combination of insight into the reality of social science and at the same time complete divorce from it. Such as when he forbids the politicization of science and at the same time exhorts scientists to take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinion:

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

So it is hard to say whether he makes some interesting points or just that some of his points are interesting. I definitely like the idea of opposing the "scientific consensus" or rather a more general "scholarly consensus" at pretty much every turn. That doesn't necessarily mean disagreeing with it but rather not invoke it as part of the evidence. Consensus is simply a rhetorical device and scientists have agreed on erroneous ideas more often than on those that withstood the test of time. Of course, academic consensus also plays a social and discursive role. Anybody who every taught first year undergraduates has to distinguish between interesting challenges to accepted doctrine based on freshness of perspective and annoying disruptions based on lazy ignorance. They're usually easy to spot (the former being much rarer) but there is no easy heuristic for these decisions (for instance, Godel's initial presentation of his theorem was almost completely ignored by the assembled mathematicians).

Moreover, if today’s vision of science as a process of hypothesis formation and challenge is an accurate depiction of actual practice (and it isn’t), any consensus must be purely provisional (see Dawkins’ cowardly insistence that there is a small degree of probability that there is a God).

So that bit is interesting and not often heard by a head of state. Of course, Klaus is/was all too happy to rely on the scholarly consensus of Thatcherian economics to shepherd in a semi-successful economic reform that resulted in a disgraced exit from office amid corruption allegations and his eventual transformation into a petty (or populist) nationalist.

But the paradox central to his column is worthy of consideration. Science never is and cannot be apolitical. There are elements of it that seem to be (e.g. mathematics) but they are all tied to essentially political considerations (e.g. mapping of variables onto the real world). Therefore, all of these decisions eventually have to be political. And the rhetoric of environmentalism is a perfectly valid part of political decision-making. As are decisions about which freedoms to curtail for the greater good. Klaus is only too happy to give complete freedom to economic agents but not when they interfere with the rights of the nation(alistic) state, for example, he favors great restrictions on migration. So I say, it serves him and his rich buddies right if they are forced to negotiate with the rabble of global environmental movement.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the global warming science proved to be inaccurate and the consensus just another example of how easy it is to be for the majority to be wrong. However, it seems that most of the proposals of the green lobby make sense independently of the global warming scare: renewable energy sources, sustainable development,  recycling, the occasional hug to a tree. And their promotion could spur just as much economic growth as oil subsidies. So the conclusion is: let us oppose “scientific consensus” but accept science in the political arena as a valid participant with the same rhetorical and other symbolic rights as all other political actors. That’s different than saying the practice of science itself must be political. Only that it becomes political when it becomes public. And since all scientific endeavor has a public dimension, there is a bit of politics even in the most innocuous bits of science. (Politics meaning ‘reflective’ of communal matters - whether internal or external to what is so strangely called the ‘scientific community’.)