Polly: on heat

I am extremely busy packing up ten years' worth of accumulated crap, but my impecunious, Hellenic friend has goaded me into addressing the load of old crap from Polly.

Word reaches me that the Devil's Kitchen is bubbling over with rage - after all, this hits all his sweet spots, doesn't it? Polly, Miliband and climate change; it's the perfect storm.

I fully expect him to take time out from his busy schedule of packing and travelling to give us a few choice words on this latest contribution to the debate. I challenge him to try doing it without using the word "cunt".

I bet he can't.

Well, I shall take him up on that challenge: let's see if I really can fisk an entire Polly article, involving both Miliband and climate change without using the "c" word eh? Nope; I've just read it over again and there is simply no way...

Hotter still and hotter it grows.

The only place that it's getting substantially hotter is within the foetid folds of Polly's cunt; it seems that, rebuffed by The Gobblin' King, Polly has her eyes set on younger meat.

Yes, perhaps for Tony Blair - but rather more for the world. Not a week goes by now without hair-raising new climate reports.

Every one of them more ill-informed than the one before. Only, science is a little beyond Polly's grasp; let's face it, she's supposed to be an "economics writer" and she cannot even grasp the relatively simple concepts involved in that: she's go no fucking chance with any hard science.

After the Stern report...

... which everyone with any kind of knowledge realised was so fucking flawed as to be utterly useless as a serious document; it was little more than a piece of government propaganda...

... this week finds the Arctic ice melting faster than previously thought...

... Ah, yes, that'll be this report then, which Gavin Ayling rightly derided as being no more "than statistics and guesswork"...

... and the Met Office reporting that 2006 is the hottest year since records began. Will anything be done in time?

Polly, the trouble with you lot is that you are assuming that a) we are the sole factor in warming and that b) we can do anything about it. These are pretty fucking big assumptions, frankly, love.

Political pessimists fear that nothing short of the catastrophic flooding of New York, with millions dead...

... You'd absolutely love that, wouldn't you, you vindictive, old horror?

... will make the rich world understand that climate change really is the greatest global terror of all.

What? What the fuck are you talking about, you silly bitch? Have you not heard of the mediaeval warm period (when sea temperatures were at least 1 degree Celsius warmer than they are now): I don't remember that being an extinction level event. In fact, I'm pretty fucking certain that humans managed to live through it rather well.

Now the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development issues a warning on the future of the Alpine skiing industry. Could a lack of snow in Klosters, Gstaad and Courchevel have the same electrifying effect on powerful opinion formers without millions having to die first? Or will the resorts just bring in ever more gigantic artificial snow makers belching out volumes more CO2?

And, remind me why the fuck that is relevent? Don't you ever read the dissenting voices (of which there are plenty) and those who point out—using, you know, science—that CO₂ emissions really don't have that much of an effect and any effect that they do have is logarithmic, not exponential? Don't you ever let that thought enter your raddled, bewigged head?

The climate still hovers uncertainly at the borders of politics.

It's still hovering on the borders of science, actually.

Its salience rises, but it still lacks authentic political traction to turn it into politics as we know it. Those who genuinely put green issues at the top of their agenda still have to place themselves outside the conventional two-party system. In a small sign of the times, Labour got a fright in a Kentish Town byelection last week, trailing third after Lib Dems and Greens. David Cameron has done well by stealing green iconography to repaint the image of his party. His Vote Blue, Go Green message and fuzzy oak tree do have green roots in conservative tradition - their green-welly rural heritage. He challenges Labour to introduce tough annual targets for CO2 emissions, pledging to cut some taxes and increase green tax. The Lib Dems, with a far stronger, well-worked-out regime, also offer green energy taxes as the answer. Both parties now look greener than Labour - but Labour may be about to trounce them both.

Well, you could be right, Pol; after all, no one is better at punishing tax-rises than this bunch of incumbent cunts.

Until now, while Cameron has flaunted his mini-windmill, Labour's green light has flashed only intermittently in public. Are they serious?

Actually, I've asked that of NuLabour a number of times; usually I employ the rising tones of incredulity as I rage, "Are they fucking serious? What the fuck are they playing at this time?"

They have led the way in pushing the EU to toughen its carbon-trading regime and engaged with India and China on new technologies - but these aren't as eye-catching as huskies. Attracting attention for what matters can be hard: this week Douglas Alexander made a resoundingly important environmental announcement on re-regulating buses - but it went hardly reported.

That's because it is fucking tedious, except that one could point out that governments in general, and this bunch of sunts in particular, are totally talentless at running anything. For fuck's sake, they can't even buy Post-It Notes without pissing away £660 million!

NuLabour snatching yet more power (and then inevitably fucking it up and back-tracking at a cost of billions) is hardly a newsworthy story these days.

Buses, used in two out of three public-transport journeys, never interest well-paid newsrooms that don't use them; they prefer endless stories on the £5 charge on air tickets.

Well, you said it, Polly. What was your salary again: £140,000? And don't tell me that you get the bus to your Spanish villa?

It is 20 years since Margaret Thatcher disastrously deregulated buses. Now Alexander is giving councils the power to control them again. It should end the bus wars on popular routes and bus deserts on other routes: it could replicate Ken Livingstone's bus triumph and reverse the Thatcher drop in bus ridership.

Don't be a fucking pillock, Polly; the drop in bus ridership is not simply because of deregulation. Cars have become cheaper, credit easier to obtain and the fact is, no matter how you try to dress it up, cars are simply more convenient. To attempt to pass off any fall in numbers simply onto deregulation is stupid, ignorant and lazy reporting of the very worst kind.

There will be a virtuous trade-off: councils can apply for cash for new buses from the transport department, but only if they bring in road pricing.

There are times, Polly, when I have to ask myself whether you an incurable optimist or if you really are this stupid. If you want to know just one reason why road pricing, as recently proposed, is a fucking ridiculous idea, then you might want to read Unity: he thinks the plan is totally, fucking insane and he's a card-carrying Labour man.

This should start a great environmental push to get people out of cars and on to new and better buses.

That's right, and you'll be in the vanguard, won't you Polly? You'll be there, leading by example; just like you did when you demanded that everyone should publish what they earn...

So here a major left-right divide may open up if Tory councils refuse to trade buses for congestion charging, while Labour and Lib Dem councils seize the day, exposing the thin reality of Cameron's green claims. But so far Labour is losing the green battle. Blair and Brown have failed to make this their number-one hot-button domestic political issue, still haunted by fuel-protester phobia, uncertain how to get a political grip.

I think that you may be onto a loser here, Polly; it doesn't seem as though Tory councils are averse to making people's lives a little more miserable and expensive through the application of a little eco-religious zeal. I suggest that you rethink.

You see, people do love to have power: it makes them feel important when their dick has stopped working. As such, the kind of people on our councils are, in the main, certainly not against having more control over the lives of people under them.

Now the younger generation - Miliband and Alexander - are leading the way.

They are certainly leading the way in ignorance and stupidity; do remember that Miliband was the Minister who was unaware of a wave power generator that has been feeding the grid for the last six years. He also, apparently, believes that "evidence of cause and effect [between CO₂ emissions and climate change] was unambiguous." Miliband is a liar.

Last night, in a remarkably radical speech to the Fabians, David Miliband showed how to capture the green flag for Labour. He planted a red/green standard that the blue/green Tories can never match. Here at last was the environment turned into progressive politics, no longer outside the political bloodstream but at the heart of the matter. Here is clear green water between left and right, as Miliband brings progressive ideology into the argument. He makes it as clear as day why the Conservatives could never cope with global warming, but Labour can. He lays out the intellectual framework for Labour's capture of green politics, with the practical policies to prove it.

You see, Miliband is already there, face between Polly's legs; his glasses smeared with her vaginal secretions as he pleasures her swollen, cock-like clitoris with his forked tongue. Polly—thighs high and wide, hand on the back of Miliband's head and urging him further into her scabby folds—is already cumming strongly, bellowing in pleasure as she wonders how she ever thought that Gordon could match young David's stamina.

A reversal of climate change needs strong action by the state at home and abroad, especially in the EU; Tory shrink-the-state Euroscepticism can't do that.

Er, what "Tory shrink-the-state Euroscepticism"? Let me know when they have some and I might consider voting for the bastards again.

It needs admission that the damaged environment is a market failure; the Tories can't admit that.

OK, remember that sentence...

Simply taxing energy is wickedly regressive, harming the less well off without changing the habits of the rich; the Tories and the Lib Dems both choose energy taxation, despite its social injustice.

That's tough, Polly. What's more important: saving the world or Wayne and Waynetta being able to afford their cheap, package trip to whore themselves, ganting on each other's napper, in Aya Napa?

It takes facing down the old greens with their puritanical zest for de-growth: people will never vote to live in yurts in the woods, but they will vote for restraint and the most realistic chance of clean growth. International carbon trading is the only hope, harnessing the power of markets to find clean technology.

Erm, Polly, you have just stated that "the damaged environment is a market failure" and now you want to use the market to solve the vexed environmental question? Mental is the word for it, you idiot. For fuck's sake, woman! Can you not even be consistent in the space of one paragraph?

And as I have recently posted, the new technology is arriving. But making everyone poorer now is not going to speed up the delivery of that technology; rather the opposite, in fact. Can't you take a little time to research what you write? I mean, you only have to write two columns a week for your £140k: you could at least attempt to make them accurate.

But Miliband's electric radicalism comes in his plan for personal carbon allowances. Here is where social justice meets green politics for the first time.

"Oh yes, David, there, there, oh fuuuuuuuuck, yeeeeeeeees..."

Give every citizen the same quota of energy and let them buy and sell it on the open market. The half of the population who don't fly will make money from selling their quota to the half who do. Drive a gas-guzzling 4x4 and you will have to buy a quota from the third of the population with no access to a car.

I see, Polly; and who decides how much everyone gets, eh? And what happens when the points run out: does business grind to a halt?

Has it not also occurred to you, Polly (because it has to my father's local mechanic), that your "gas-guzzling 4x4"s are actually rather more fuel-efficient than your much-vaunted prole's battered old Fiat? Has it not occurred to you that it is your famous hard-working poor who are going to be hit by this; you know, the ones who cannot afford to live in the city and cannot afford the train? And who certainly cannot afford to buy a new, greener car? Or are you going to propose that the taxpayer should buy them a new car? Because I wouldn't put it past you, you grasping, statist bag.

Who could complain about such transparent fairness?

Well, I expect you would have a go at it, were it implemented by the Tories...

It is relatively easy to do: swiping a quota card to pay gas and electricity bills or buying petrol is a simpler transaction than Tesco's complex information on their loyalty card.

Whereas the government can't get any fucking IT system right: even were this proposal sensible, the state would completely fuck up the implementation.

In wartime, ration books were produced quickly for all, covering almost everything bought and sold, involving every little corner shop.

Yup, and people were mugged for their ration books; they had them stolen so that the local spiv could sell their entitlement back to them.

(Could paper ration books be easier than trying to computerise it all?)

No. Don't be pathetic.

Why is this a quintessentially Labour policy that the Tories would never copy? Because it in effect redistributes money from the rich to the poor, from the frequent flyers to never-flyers, with a parallel currency.

This argument is totally flawed, as I have illustrated above. What it does is simply to ensure that the poor are poorer. I look forward to you wandering around to the pensioner's house to tell them in person that, because they have run out of carbon points, they can have no heating this winter (even if they have the money to pay for it).

There are high hopes that this could be in the manifesto for the next election, ready to begin soon after. Is it politically saleable? It would begin at a moderate level. The current price of carbon for an average person's consumption is only £100 - not much incentive.

What? Over what timescale? And on who's figures? Even Stern calculated $85 per ton—yes, Polly, that's dollars—which translates to roughly £43 per ton.

But the price will have risen by then and the quota would be tightened each year to hit Miliband's 30% carbon cut by 2020. The tighter the quota, the more marketable new clean technologies become.

It's not a question of marketability, Polly; it's a question of engineering: there are technical problems that need to be overcome.

Plus, of course, your carbon-trading scheme has made the development costs far more expensive; amongst anything else, all of those horrible chemicals that are needed have just become more expensive (the mining companies have to buy carbon points), not to mention transporting them.

I suspect it will be hugely popular, a national game engaging even teenagers in quota-conservation wheezes. It tickles parts of the psyche that like to trade and bargain. Wear vests and save heating to sell some quota? But when to sell? Will the price rise or fall at the end of the year as everyone sells their excess? Will it rise in the summer as people buy quota for flying, or in the winter when it's cold? Imagine how keenly fluctuations in carbon-quota price will be followed as people decide when to buy or sell.

Bringing a massive amount of uncertainty to the price of fucking everything, you dozy cow. Polly, you have to be insane: it's the most charitable explanation of your tedious bullshit.

Here's the big question: what does Gordon Brown think?

Why don't you ask him while you are bending over your desk for a farewell fuck?

He met Miliband this week and the word is that he greeted it warmly. There are good reasons why Brown has been reluctant to "prove" his credentials by making gestures with green taxes on petrol now, when they only hit poorer drivers without a strong effect on petrol use. But Miliband's plan is the blend of fairness and environmentalism that Labour needs.

And its implementation will be the blend of technological fuck-up and economic spitefulness that has characterised this piece of shit government. But as long as Miliband is getting you off, what do you care, eh? And all of this shit to "solve" a problem that may not, actually, be a problem and the cause of which is highly uncertain; and it is suggested and, presumably, to be implemented by a man who has less than no knowledge about his brief. I mean, I really am absolutely filled with confidence (though not as filled as you, Polly, once David has finally slung his cock up your well-noshed cunt).

I mean, for fuck's sake...

UPDATE: Factchecking Pollyanna is onto this morning's column (whilst Polly is on Miliband's)...