Comparing concern over global warming to communism, Czech President Václav Klaus said he is ready to debate global warming with former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, according to a recent press release sent by the Czech government to American journalists.

 “President Klaus points what is increasingly obvious: the substantial costs of current environmentalist proposals to combat global warming far outweigh the benefits,” said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett in the release, “especially since none of those proposals will substantively reduce the likelihood of future warming.”

Klaus made his remarks at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. while presenting his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles-What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?

“My answer is, it is our freedom and, I might add, our prosperity,” Klaus said at the press conference. “The real debate should be about the costs and benefits of alternative human actions, about how to rationally deal with the unknown future… Like their predecessors, [environmentalists] will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea a reality. In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat-this time, [it’s] in the name of the planet. Structurally, it is very similar.”

Klaus is the co-founder of the Czech Republic’s Civic Democratic Party, the country’s largest politically conservative party. The president in Czech politics is generally second to the Prime Minister, and is not elected by a national vote. He has been an ardent opponent of environmentalism, which in campaign rhetoric Klaus said “should belong in the social sciences along with other ‘isms’ such as communism, feminism and liberalism.”

Klaus will meet this week with current Vice President Dick Cheney. There is no current plan for Gore to meet Klaus in debate.