“Poland’s black curse”

German chancellor Angela Merkel said during a visit to Poland in February that she hoped the neighbouring country would “cooperate in terms of climate protection”, Ulrich Krökel writes in Rheinische Post. But neither Poland’s current national-conservative PiS government nor its more liberal predecessor under Donald Tusk, the current president of the European Council, “were going to break with the tradition of protecting and subsidising the domestic coal industry”, Krökel writes. Autonomous supply security is sacred for a country that has been occupied by foreign powers so many times in the past, he explains. Poland is therefore wary both of projects like the German-Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea and of new wind parks – “arguably because most manufacturers come from abroad, from Scandinavia, Austria or Germany”, he writes. The author says Polish climate protection advocates could put their hopes on only one problematic asset: smog, which is becoming a growing public health issue in “the China of Europe”.

For more information, see the CLEW dossier Germany’s energy transition in the European context.