A new front has emerged in the battle for climate policy. Until now the right wing had an exclusive claim to campaigning against measures to cut emissions. Now this has changed.
Reuters Point Carbon reported earlier this month that the Polish trades union, Solidarity, famous for its role in precipitating the fall of communism, has now identified a target far more insidious than the creed of Marx: the EU Emission Trading Scheme.
They are campaigning to collect a million signatures to take to Brussels and stop the nonsense about making companies cut their emissions of greenhouse gases. According to Reuters, “Solidarity fears that high carbon prices in coal-intensive Poland will drive up energy prices and lead to job losses in heavy industry.”
Says Zbigniew Płonker, Deputy Ladder Support, Independent Union of Silesian Pylon Cleaners: “We’ve had enough. Our brothers down the mines have shit lives as it is, spending 24 hours or more each day underground in the dark in the most horrific conditions. It’s outrageous that anyone would want to change it. What would we have to complain about?”
Another Union Leader, Pawel Porschiewicz, told us: “All my brothers down the mines would like to be able to drive Porsches like me. It’s crazy that the EU Bureaucracy should be preventing them from realising this dream. First Moscow, now Brussels. Crazy, crazy world,” he shook his head, then jumped into his Porsche Mephisto and drove off.
But not everyone is happy about the left donning the mantle of climate change denial.
In an angry phone call, Brad Spiegelbutt, chairman of the American Libertarians for a Hot Planet, railed at the incursion into his space by socialists. “We consider this not just a clumsy discourtesy, but an act of aggression! American Libertarians are outraged at the brazen impudence of a left wing organisation encroaching into our exclusive domain! Climate change denial has been clearly reserved for the libertarian right and other crackpots. It’s written clearly on the door of my office. What else do we have to do? What’s the point in having property rights if Polish unionists can run roughshod over them willy nilly? What happened to law and order?” He then began to hiccough ferociously said it would only stop once he read out a chapter of the Albanian translation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged backwards.
In an email correspondence, Günther Ohm, spokesman for the European Commission on climate change and the dimensions of ice cream cones, wrote that Polish ice cream cone dimensions are in full compliance with the Ice Cream Directive, but he is not in a position to comment on the length and breadth of waffles. His favourite flavour is pistachio.
