Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has made the quality of the country’s coal a patriotic cause
pine forests, bone dry in the scorching weather, disappear into the horizon of the central Polish plain. To the south is the lunar landscape of a city-sized opencast lignite mine. A tangle of conveyors carries the coal up to Elektrownia Belchatow, Europe’s largest thermal power station and its largest producer of carbon emissions, at a rate of one tonne a second. Pawel Koszek, a repairs specialist, surveys the scene with satisfaction. “Electricity”, he says, “is our comfort and our security.
Downstairs, at a bank of computers, he radiates pride as he demonstrates how to regulate the flow of oxygen to its 13 furnaces. Together they produce about 20% of Poland’s electricity. It is like flying a plane, he muses: the operators must be able to take control in an emergency. There has never been a major incident at Belchatow. Compare that with nuclear power plants like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Wind energy? Solar energy? They come and go. Try charging your phone on a solar panel.
So locals are understandably defensive in the face of Europe’s environmentalist surge. Part of this impulse is straightforwardly economic. “Without the power station and the mine,” says Marchin Nowak, Belchatow’s development director, “the town will lose its economic raison d’être.” Already-imposed carbon-emissions licences have increased the cost of generating electricity there.
Being in Belchatow reminded Charlemagne of those European towns caught up in, or at least alarmed by, the migration crisis of four summers ago. In such places, too, the issue was cultural as well as purely economic. Locals worried about jobs and wages, and fretted that the costs and benefits of the change would be unfairly distributed. But they also worried about the character of their society and felt alienated from globally minded elites in the big cities. Fake news proliferated.
It even has a similar geography. It was tempting to see the migration crisis as a struggle between the eastern and western halves of the. That is true of the environmental battle, too. But as with the immigration debates, it oversimplifies the matter. Zuzana Caputova, Slovakia’s new president, and Robert Biedron, an insurgent Polish opposition leader, are both keen environmentalists. And climate change is just as divisive in the western.
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