Poland’s ‘Solidarity’ union joins forces with US climate change skeptics – Washington Examiner

Poland’s Solidarity labor union has joined forces with climate skeptics from America to call for “a restoration of the Scientific Method and the dismissal of ideological dogma” in the study of climate change as part of a joint declaration the union has submitted to the United Nations in partnership with a U.S.-based free-market think tank.

This is the same labor union founded under the leadership of Lech Walesa, the Nobel Prize winner who organized anti-Soviet movements in the 1980s.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly made the case that catastrophic climate change is imminent and that human emissions are largely to blame. The latest in a series of reports from the IPCC was released in October to measure “the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.”

The IPCC has maintained a significant presence throughout the U.N.’s 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is widely known as COP24. U.N. officials view the recently released IPCC report as a “wake up call” for conference participants to finalize negotiations for implementing the Paris climate agreement, which calls on participating countries to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. Although 195 countries adopted the language of the climate agreement during a December 2015 COP meeting in Paris, the agreement cannot be fully implemented until after 55 of the countries responsible for producing a combined total of 55 percent of the world’s emissions accept the treaty’s terms, according to the U.N.

Media coverage of the intergovernmental panel’s climate change report has made the case for “urgent and unprecedented changes” built around emissions restrictions to curtail global warming that could lead to catastrophic conditions.

But the joint declaration — which was signed by Jaroslaw Grzesik, chairman of Solidarity’s energy and mining secretariat; Dominik Kolorz, president of Solidarity in Poland’s Silesian region; and James Taylor, a senior follow for environment and energy policy with the Heartland Institute — makes the point that “there is no scientific consensus on the main causes and consequences of climate change.”

The Heartland Institute, which is headquartered in Illinois, has gained international recognition for challenging the premise of theories that link human activity with catastrophic levels of global warming. The free-market think tank released the latest version of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change at a media event last week in Katowice just as the COP24 meeting was getting underway. More than 100 scientists, economists, engineers, and other experts from across globe who have insight into the dynamics of earth’s climate have come together to take part in the nongovernmental panel, which began releasing the studies in 2009.

They conclude that “[t]he global war on energy freedom, which commenced in earnest in the 1980s and reached a fever pitch in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was never founded on sound science or economics. The world’s policymakers ought to acknowledge this truth and end that war.”

Unlike its U.N. counterpart, the nongovernmental panel performs a cost-benefit analysis into the use of fossil fuels that highlights the benefits to humanity.

“Despite calling for the end of reliance on fossil fuels by 2100, the IPCC never produced an accounting of the opportunity cost of restricting or banning their use,” the report says. “That cost, a literature review shows, would be enormous. Estimates of the cost of reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the amounts said by the IPCC to be necessary to avoid causing ~2°C warming in the year 2050 range from the IPCC’s own estimate of 3.4% to as high as 81% of projected global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2050, the latter estimate nullifying all the gains in human well-being made in the past century.”

Solidarity’s willingness to defy climate alarmism while making a principled stand on behalf of sound science will reverberate across Europe long after COP24 comes to an end, James Lakely, the director of communications for the Heartland Institute, said in an email.

“Propaganda fades, truth endures,” he said. “Solidarity proved with its joint statement with Heartland that it will not be pushed around by the jet-set bureaucrats of the United Nations. I think that is the case with Poland as a whole. The people of Poland get 80 percent of their power from coal. Going ‘carbon free’ in the next decade or so will destroy their economy and society. The Polish people know this, so they will not be pushed around by the UN — nor should it, as Solidarity made clear in their meeting with Heartland.”

He added:

Still, the money and organization standing behind climate change policies is considerable. That much was made clear in remarks made by Michal Kurtyka, a Polish energy official who is serving as the COP24 president.

Kevin Mooney (@KevinMooneyDC) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C., who writes for several national publications.