Poland and Climate Change

The United Nations climate-change meeting at external pageCancúncall_made has been and gone. You wouldn’t think it if you followed the Polish media. Poland is not interested in climate change. When it does take any notice, it is to try defend its heavy industry and its mainly coal-fuelled energy-generators from the costs which a serious effort to do something would entail. The problem, as seen from Warsaw, is not global warming - but the European Union setting CO2 emission-reduction targets which, scream the newspapers, would be ruinous for Poland.

This is a pity, not least because Poland will hold the external pagepresidencycall_made of the European Union in July-December 2011 and thus coordinating EU policies - including climate change - before the external pagenextcall_made UN world summit in South Africa in November-December 2011. This is the last meeting before the external pageKyoto accordcall_made runs out in 2012, and something will have to put in its place. The EU needs Poland to be involved. The problem is that the country may external pagestaycall_made semi-detached on climate.

A formative time

Climate change is a new challenge for the world. It far transcends the cold-war divisions and attitudes which still inform the outlook of the people running Poland’s post-Soviet society. You’d think that the cold war has been over for twenty years and that everyone should have got beyond it by now. Not so.

True, young Poles who are now studying at university or in their first jobs were born after 1989, and 40-year-old Poles have lived their entire adult life as free citizens in a post-cold-war world. But the people who are still making the running in Polish politics and in government had their formative experiences in the student protests of 1968 and in the dissident movement of the 1970s. Those involvements, plus the external pageSolidaritycall_made period of 1980-81 and the underground movement which followed, formed their core political and social outlook. The benefits of all this external pageengagementcall_made came after 1989 when they came to power in Poland. As a generation they are still there.

How do they think about their country and its role in the world? They regard Poland as still a poor country compared to western Europe or the United States; consequently, Poland needs and deserves help and in no sense should itself be asked to help others who are worse off.

In this variation of the “beaten-dog” syndrome, the fact that Poland now receives huge aid in the form of European Union regional external pagefundscall_made is forgotten: there is still a lingering feeling that the outside world, and that includes the EU, is out to do the country down.

This makes it difficult to cope emotionally with an issue like climate change which goes far beyond any of the divisions and problems which faced the world before external page1989call_made. Climate change also forces the western world, including Poland, to come to terms with the fact that countries that once in effect could be told what to do (such as external pageChinacall_made or India) are now equal partners.

With all this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising when Poland’s finance minister external pageJacek Rostowskicall_made says that Poland is too poor to be able to address climate change, and should itself be helped. Rostowski was born and raised in England, and foreign minister external pageRadek Sikorskicall_made studied and worked as a journalist there in the 1980s. Both think that climate change is a “chattering classes” issue - an irritant which has to be dealt with only because the EU is obsessed about it. Poland’s prime minister external pageDonald Tuskcall_made is even reported to giggle about climate change when his officials press him on the issue.

Poland’s environment ministry has a climate-change department, whose director Tomasz Chruszczow is one of five external pagerepresentativescall_made on the European council who is talking to the rest of the world on behalf of the EU on climate-change issues. But the external pageministrycall_made is pretty low in the government’s pecking-order.

A new generation

The government does recognise that an effort has to be made to reduce CO2 emissions - but by as little as possible and at least cost to industry. There is external pageself-interestcall_made behind this move. Poland’s power industry, still mostly state-owned, is overwhelmingly fuelled by coal. Both the power and the coal industries are very strong lobbies which together employ 300,000 people. A switch of generating capacity to gas would be a way of reducing emissions further, though Poland fears that it would then become dependent on Russian gas supplies. But in any event it is clear that the structural external pagerealitiescall_made of the Polish economy - the predominance of coal in the fuel mix, and the lack of atomic energy - reinforce conservative social attitudes.

There is little prospect that Polish public opinion will force a change in the official external pageattitudecall_made. The media see climate as a scare-story. Even when modest progressive measures are introduced - the introduction of housing-energy efficiency-certificates, the withdrawal of some types of conventional lightbulbs - there are no information campaigns from the government. It is rare for commercial companies to highlight the fact that their products are energy-efficient, and this message is almost non-existent in the real-estate market. The state-owned energy companies make no effort to stress energy efficiency, in contrast to foreign investors such as Vattenfall or RWE.

When the European Union was putting together a fresh climate package in 2008-09, Poland organised a group of post-Soviet EU member-states (which was backed by Germany) to external pageweakencall_made the proposals. This looks set to external pagehappencall_made again. Poland is determined to resist the drive by Brussels to increase the CO2 emission target by 2020 from 20% to 30%, and is forging a coalition of member-states to this end.

Climate-change campaigners, and they do exist in Poland, argue that for the country to be involved properly in external pageaddressingcall_made climate issues it needs to alter the way it looks at itself and the outside world. But that may need a younger external pagegenerationcall_made to come to power, and for these younger people to be free of the complexes and attitudes of their elders.