Michelle Stirling: A tale of two Vaclavs, ‘climate cartel’ Carney vs trade deal Trump
In this opinion piece, Michelle Stirling explores the tension between climate policy and freedom, through the contrasting positions of Carney, Trump, and the ideas of Václav Havel and Václav Klaus.
Mark Carney and Donald Trump – Illustration By Western Standard
Michelle Stirling
Date: 27 January 2026
As Mark Carney preaches compliance at Davos, dissenters are rediscovering Havel’s courage and rejecting the climate cartel’s grip on freedom.
Carney, Davos, and the Paradox of Václav Havel
Former bank governor and UN Climate Finance Czar, Mark Carney, now Prime Minister of Canada, got something of a standing ovation for his speech at Davos this year. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has posted the full version on its website. Carney referenced an essay by Czech dissident Václav Havel called “The Power of the Powerless.”
Havel described how the Communist system stood so long because everyone complied, giving the example of a greengrocer putting a Communist sloganeering sign in the window every day “Workers of the world unite.” Havel pointed out that no one believed in the ideology or slogans, but people went along to get along; to not be harassed, cancelled, or disappeared. That power diminished as individuals refused to go along and started taking the signs down from their windows. Carney’s reference was clearly intended to spark other world leaders to not go along with the Trump administration’s trade tactics.
It is strange and embarrassing that Carney chose to invoke Havel’s work, which was dedicated to destroying the tyranny that crushed the lives and spirits of so many in Czechoslovakia, when under Soviet rule. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘climate cartel’ is dedicated to crushing the lives of ordinary citizens everywhere with unattainable net zero policies, War Measures Act limitations on freedoms, and imposing a personal carbon ration on you.
Climate Policy and Social Conformity
For almost 30 years since the first climate Conference of the Parties, rational people with dissenting views on climate or energy policies have lived in fear of being labelled a “climate denier” and socially ostracized, living in fear of being cancelled or fired if they dared question “The Consensus” or “The Science.”
In fact, it was President Trump, in the spirit of Havel’s greengrocer, who took the climate Communism sign down from the window of the world by withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement immediately upon his inauguration last year. As Havel wrote of the power of taking down the sign of Communism, now the so-called “climate cartels” tied to the Paris Agreement and exposed by a Republican House Judiciary Committee years-long investigation are collapsing. It seems Prime Minister Carney is still trying to prop them up.
Clintel President And Former Czech President Vaclav Klaus
Another Václav: Klaus and Intellectual Dissent
Just the day before Carney’s speech at Davos, I watched the live stream of another Václav – Václav Klaus, also a former President of the Czech Republic. Klaus is now the new president of CLINTEL, the climate intelligence network based in the Netherlands.
Established in 2019, CLINTEL wrote the World Climate Declaration (WCD), proclaiming that there is no climate emergency. The WCD now has over 2,000 signatories of international scientists and scholars. Klaus was speaking at the Heartland Institute’s “World Prosperity Forum” in Zurich, a new project meant to counter the globalist messaging of the WEF in Davos, with pro-free market inspiration.
Like Václav Havel, Václav Klaus, an economist, is also renowned for a modest but brilliant book written in 2007, “Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What is Endangered? Climate or Freedom?” It has been translated into 13 languages, and several editions have been printed.
Dr. Tim Ball, a Canadian climate scientist, wrote this review on Amazon in 2011, “Vaclav Klaus is the only leader from east or west to have well informed apolitical opinions about the exploitation of environmentalism as a political agenda. As he said in a speech in New York I attended, ‘We had 70 years of communism, why would you want to go back to it?’ A brief, well-argued, succinct analysis of the political wolf in the cloak of green.”
When Climate Ideology Collides With Personal Freedom
Klaus explains on his own blog, “At another launching of my book, it was in Poland almost a year ago, one participant of the event at the University of Warsaw expressed his basic agreement with my views about the scientific and economic aspects of the issue but asked me where I see the threat to freedom because he doesn’t see it. I tried to tell him that environmentalism, and especially its most extreme version, global warming alarmism, asks for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion, of government intervention into our lives and of government control over them. We are forced to accept rules about how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel, and so on. Some of us and some of you had experienced similar examples of that in the communist era, and — I believe — we are obliged to do everything we can to avoid a similar fate in the future.”
A Call for Intellectual Independence
No need to be a climate complier anymore. President Trump has unshackled us from green climate communism. Make a sprint for freedom.
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