CFACT is sad to learn of the untimely passing of our friend and colleague Einar Du Rietz of Sweden. Einar wrote a long-standing blog for CFACT Europe. He was a member of several CFACT delegations to UN climate conferences.

Einar loved individual freedom and it is to that he dedicated his life. What finer cause?

Rest in peace, Einar.

Einar’s post when Al Gore idled his car throughout his lecture in Sweden, then snubbed the train for the Swedish government plane.  Frankly Sir, You are an embarrassment.

View Einar’s archive at CFACT.org.

Einar Du Rietz

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From our friend and colleague Jacob Arfwedson of Sweden and Paris, Einar’s very dear friend:

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I have the sad duty to announce the death of our dear friend Einar Du Rietz.

He passed away on Thursday 18 April after a sudden heart attack.

I first met Einar in the Uppsala Cathedral Boys’ Choir in the late 1970’s,

but we first got to know each other in youth politics, working together in the (MUF) Moderate Students Federation during the early 1980s.

As we got to know each other (after a period of animosity, to be sure), Einar became a close companion, increasingly a soul mate for matters both philosophical and trivial, an everyday friend for counsel on love affairs, an expert cook, a constant know-it-all in some instances where he had no idea, and a steady sounding board in areas where his intuitive knowledge often had astounding effectiveness, and sometimes disastrous impacts. He bore both with equanimity, as a true gentleman; and sometimes with quarrel. He often had the last word, and always believed he deserved it.

Above all, Einar had an ingenious way with words and music, as Noel Coward would say: he could write fresh lyrics to jazz standards and pop music, almost at the drop of a hat. My fondest memories are those of late nights and early mornings in Stockholm and Paris where we wrote one verse each, which would then be reviewed, sung, sometimes ridiculed and discarded, or recorded.

Einar was a genuine individualist: he persistently pushed forward his own view, sometimes to the point of the idiosyncratic, but always with a consistent point. Even if he sometimes (well, often in fact) went over the top, he never lost his sense of humour, although from time to time he lost his balance as things and the evening went on.

Being outrageous was his way of conforming to everyday life; it created some equilibrium in his existence, which in general was far from general.

Although his life proved much too short, he conformed to it, in his own peculiar way: as we used to say, even last week “später, vielleicht”.

Farväl, käre broder.