ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how carbon dioxide and, later on, shale gas became objects of energy politics in the context of post-socialist transformation and EU membership. Each case is discussed separately but the common goal is to show how the making of these two objects involved various non-domestic actors and how in each case the process was inscribed into the various political and economic agendas of these actors. In this chapter, I am interested in understanding how the making of these two objects formed part of the Orientalizing and de-Orientalizing discourses about Poland during recent decades. In both stories, US-based actors were the first to introduce new objects – carbon dioxide and shale gas – to the political agendas of the ruling Polish government. However, in both cases, it was the EU that stabilized its existence in relation to energy and climate politics and established itself as a reference point for the further discourses and actions of Polish actors.
