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Notes for Zürich: Davos, Global Warming and Communism Are Close Relatives

English Pages, 19. 1. 2026

President Taylor, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Many thanks for organizing the first meeting of the World Prosperity Forum. Many thanks for giving me the floor and the opportunity to address this distinguished audience.

Before attempting to discuss how to succeed in building – to quote from your invitation letter – “a freedom-based and prosperity-based alternative” to the current world run by globalists and progressivists who have been gathering every year at the end of January in Davos, at the World Economic Forum for the last more than three decades, allow me to say a few words about my relations with the Davos Forum.

I find the idea of organizing this new gathering during the days of the Davos Forum and not far from Davos an excellent one. The Davos Forum in the style of Klaus Schwab needs an alternative. Some of us have been waiting for such an alternative already for a long time. This “waiting” has, for someone like me, a very special history.

I am a – sort of – Davos veteran. I entered politics in November 1989, in the moment of the fall of communism in my country, former Czechoslovakia. A few days later, I became Minister of Finance in the first non-communist government, who was responsible both for getting rid of the old, irrational, non-functioning communist central planning, and for building the institutions of a free market economy after 40 years of communism. The most difficult task was the transition.

The invitation to attend the Davos Forum thirty-six years ago, in January 1990, just a few weeks after entering the newly formed government and after the revolutionary opening of borders to the West, was something almost unimaginable before. I was given the opportunity to see, meet and talk with famous Western politicians and economists for the first time in my life. I can afford to say that some of us were prepared for that.

An additional benefit of this trip of mine was seeing the beauty of snow-covered Davos. For someone like me, who had been dreaming all my life of one day getting a chance to ski in the Alps, it was unforgettable.

During my first visit there, I also participated on the main stage of the Davos Forum in a debate – or rather, a fundamental dispute – with the well-known American economist, very leftist Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz (later a Nobel laureate) who asked me – and expected a positive answer – whether we intended to build a “Third Way” system of society and economy. To the shock of Professor Stiglitz and the moderator of the debate, the boss of Davos, Klaus Schwab, my answer was very clear and straightforward: we are not interested in the Third Way, because the Third Way is the fastest way to the Third World.

This quote of mine was, for many years, the opening sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the topic Third Way. I repeatedly stressed that we were interested in the First Way, in capitalism.

That exchange of views was the first in my many conflicts in Davos. My frustration culminated in 2005, when – after 16 visits to the Davos Forum – I finally said to myself ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. After returning to Prague, I wrote and published a very critical article about the progressivist Davos Forum with the provocative title “Homo Davosensis”. Klaus Schwab never forgave me for this. From that moment on, I was no longer invited there.

When I heard that the Heartland Institute planned to initiate an alternative, the World Prosperity Forum, I became convinced that the advocacy of the First Way, of capitalism, must be one of the fundamental ideas of the whole project. Already in 1990, I said that we wanted market economy without adjectives, without the adjectives “social” and “green”, because these adjectives more or less deny the original meaning of the whole idea of market economy (as we understood it through studying Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and similar authors).

Mentioning the adjective “green” brings me to the Heartland Institute, one of the crucial institutions fighting the idea of man-made global warming and climate alarmism. More than a decade ago, I attended several Heartland conferences – I remember Chicago and New York City – and made speeches there. It was at a time when the fight with the global warming doctrine was still undecided. That moment is, to my great regret, over now. We must admit that we are not on the winning side of the debate. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we should surrender and stop fighting. On the contrary. That’s the reason why we are all here, I suppose.

Last December, I accepted the position of President of Clintel, another institution which is in total disagreement with the IPCC. I know that we, Clintelers, and our colleagues at the Heartland Institute are in the same boat. I came here today to officially express my, and I believe our, interest in friendly and productive cooperation. Clintel, with its several national groupings, has succeeded in creating a very promissing international network.

 Like Heartland, we try to contribute to answering the fundamental questions of our era:

1. Are men (and women) responsible for the current increase in temperatures worldwide (and for the increase in the average global temperature, if that concept is meaningful and worth studying at all)?

2.  Is the statistically measured temperature increase of recent decades proof of a long-term trend, and does it really endanger the future of mankind?

3.  And – if these two hypotheses are valid and justified – is there anything, and especially is there anything meaningful, that mankind can do about it (meaningful understood as bringing more benefits than costs)?

 Clintel, in the words of its founder and first president, Prof. Berkhout, has proclaimed that “there is no climate emergency”, which has resonated all over the world.

 I myself – an economist and econometrician who became a politician at the moment of the fall of communism – published a book with the title “Blue Planet in Greens Shackles” already in 2007. I believe in the strength and productiveness of economic theory in explaining human behaviour and in offering important guidance on how to rationally organize an economic system and on how to compose economic policy. I am convinced of the irreplaceable significance of markets, as well as of the fundamental role of prices, on condition they reflect the crucial concept of scarcity, in human decision-making.

The economic way of thinking has been attacked throughout human history from many sides and angles, but the most dangerous recent attack – as regards our topics – came with the birth of green ideology, of environmentalism. This attack – of course repeated in various forms many times throughout human history – came together with the activities of the Club of Rome and its infamous Limits to Growth at the end of the 1960s. 

As someone who lived in the communist Czechoslovakia at that time, I immediately felt the enormous danger hidden in these ideas and saw them, in many respects, as a threat similar to communism. From that moment on, I became a resolute critic of this ideology (or perhaps religion) which has no relation to science. 

The green ideology found its best and most promising weapon against freedom and prosperity in the promoting of the hypothesis of dangerous global warming allegedly caused by irresponsible human behaviour. (Irresponsible in the eyes of our opponents.) 

This alarmist doctrine received a new impetus with the creation of the IPCC (International Panel for Climate Change) in 1988, which guarantees international political (and, of course, even more importantly, financial) backing for the whole green movement. 

Since that moment, the whole world (and especially its Western part) has been moving in one direction only – toward the victory of the global warming ideology, toward the merciless suppression of its opponents, and toward a historically unprecedented direct transformation of this ideology into government policy. These processes culminated in the official acceptance of the Green Deal as a fundamental doctrine of the European Union.

 Where are we now?

On the one hand, the critics of climate alarmism are, for many reasons, more silent and less visible these days than in the past. In addition to it, the generations of our children and grandchildren (indoctrinated already in elementary schools) have never experienced anything other than the official glorification of the alarmist climate doctrine and the arrogant ridiculing of anyone who dares to oppose it.

On the other hand, we are witnessing growing criticism of the destructive consequences of the Green Deal, of the unprepared “energy transition”, of the blocking of nuclear power plants and of the banning of combustion engines. As a result, people are becoming increasingly aware of these consequences. The recent activities undertaken in the U.S. by President Trump and his Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, are of great significance. 

I myself tried to address these developments at the worst moment in 2017 in my book “Will We Be Destroyed by Climate, or by Our Fighting the Climate” (Cosmopolis, Grada, Prague, in Czech). The fact that I didn’t attempt to publish this book abroad or in a foreign language indicated not only my persuasion that everything relevant had already been said (on both sides of the debate), but to some extent also my partial resignation resulting from the fact that in our countries we were evidently losing ground. Hopefully, we are now moving toward a more optimistic stage.

I interpret – rightly or wrongly – the Heartland Institute’s initiative to establish the World Prosperity Forum as a signal that the institute wants to pay more attention to the economic side of the matter. This is something I strongly support. 

We must insist that one crucial aspect of the whole global warming debate relates to the economic issues and to the fundamental principles of economic science. Economists should discuss the role of prices in decision-making (and the distortions caused by government-dictated prices), the role of discounting in any meaningful analysis and forecasting, the environmental Kuznets curves, and of course, the infamous energy transition. Last but not least, we are confronted with the very problematic “emission allowances”, which non-economists understand as a meaningful contribution of economists to the whole issue, which it is, of course, not. In reality, trading with emission allowances is a state-controlled administrative rationing system which only pretends to be market friendly.  It is frustrating that no one discusses these topics substantially anymore. Not even my fellow economists. 

There is – and that is another dimension of the whole issue – no doubt that climate alarmism is not about excesses of climate, but about man, about human society, about our freedom and prosperity. It is a secular ideology, a new political religion. It reflects an arrogant Western way of looking at the world, based on the thinking and way of life of affluent societies (in the old Galbraithian sense). 

As I asked in the subtitle of my Blue Planet in Green Shackles almost twenty years ago, “What is Endangered, Climate or Freedom?” I am convinced that climate is, more or less, OK. I believe that many of us here see it the same way. 

 Václav Klaus at the World Prosperity Forum, Zürich, January 20, 2026