Focus on climate crisis
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Reporting on climate change is one of the major journalistic challenges of our time. The climate crisis is also one of the most important issues of humanity for SPIEGEL. For this reason, we support an international initiative that seeks to take a look this week: "Covering Climate Now" has been initiated by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Canadian newspaper "The Nation", with more than 200 media companies worldwide including the Guardian, El País, La Repubblica, The Times of India, Bloomberg or Vanity Fair. SPIEGEL is dedicating the cover story of the current issue to the climate crisis this week and every day pays special attention to mirror.de
It dawns on the evening of September 9, when three motorized dinghies chase out into the Gdansk Bay, in the harbor entrance the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" anchors.
The activists do not react to the warnings of the Polish border guards. Your mission: to stop a freighter from Mozambique. "Stop the Coal" spray on the black side of the ship before being arrested. Because the ship from Africa transports the black fuel.
Max Zielinski / Greenpeace Polska via REUTERS
Greenpeace action in the port of Gdansk
It is one of the most absurd excesses of the international energy industry that Poland, which is so proud of its heavy industry in Silesia, has to import coal, and then also from Mozambique.
The country lags behind in terms of climate protection, and with it the other states in the region: Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria ranked low in the energy transition ranking for EU countries. Poland even denies a miserable 70th place, behind Kenya and El Salvador. For comparison: The Federal Republic is - not too intoxicating - in 17th place.
Alternative energies do not matter
All of these post-communist countries make a higher than average share of their energy needs by burning coal. By contrast, alternative energies hardly play a role. And that will not change that quickly: in the spring, the Visegrád states of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic blocked a central EU decision on the climate strategy.
Environmentalists are already talking about a "coal curtain" that moves through Europe. The slightly crooked image means an invisible border between the old EU West and the new ex-Communist member countries, where once the Iron Curtain ran between the blocs. Energy is saved here, windmills and solar panels are built, and fossil fuels are constantly being used there.
But it would be too cheap to explain these differences simply by saying that the East Europeans, as in refugee politics, are also lagging behind in the energy issue and have not yet reached the civilizational level of the West.
Colossal reform traffic jam in Poland
The governments in Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest have a whole bundle of reasons that make reversing climate policy difficult:
- This is the legacy of the communist past,
- poor building fabric,
- an energy-intensive industry,
- the historical trauma of the processing of entire industries after the turnaround,
- a public that is more concerned with the daily struggle for survival than can afford to turn to abstract issues such as global warming.
But of course there are a lot of omissions. The example of Poland reveals the mechanisms that are used to some extent in the other countries as well:
- The country uses 80 percent of its energy from coal - at the same time it is smog-hit like no other in Europe.
- 33 of the 50 cities with the worst air in Europe are in Poland, including Royal Krakow.
- Physicians estimate that every year around 40,000 people die as a result of the plague.
Why has the country barely moved in the energy issue since the fall of the Wall? Continues to rely on the black fuel, although the Silesian coal can not even compete with the price of Mozambique today? The national-conservative government in Warsaw is facing a colossal reform backlog. Not only many factories are not energy efficient, but also households. The old buildings from communist times are miserably isolated, millions still heat with kilns.
More about the climate crisis
Warsaw estimates the cost of modernization to be around 400 billion euros - money that would have to be passed on to consumers. And that is politically very sensitive. Electricity bills are a political issue in Eastern Europe, where energy used to cost nothing in communist times.
Higher electricity prices would hit the poor and the elderly
Above all, the poor and the elderly, who inhabit the poor building fabric and have low incomes, would be hit by electricity price increases. It is no coincidence that in Hungary, on the utility bills, Viktor Orbán shows to households how much money the respective household has saved through government policy.
In addition, governments like the Polish ones are struggling to tackle the energy-intensive heavy industry with environmental regulations, or even to make plans for a complete settlement. The trauma of the turning point is deep:
- Immediately after 1989, it was the workers in Silesia, for example, who were hit hard by the change.
- Hundreds of thousands became unemployed when their unprofitable businesses were wound up - but they had just driven communism out of power with their strikes.
Even today, about 80,000 people still work in Poland alone in the coal industry. It is not, according to Eurobarometer, the EU pollster, that Eastern Europeans are ignoring climate change. But they do not take him so seriously: While in the EU average, 23 percent of respondents see global warming as the biggest problem in the world, it is less in Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria just about ten percent.
The Visegrád countries rely on nuclear power
First of all, the wealthy Westerners should do something, such as the attitude of many summarize. "Even if we had decarbonized the economy completely tomorrow, an effect on the global climate would be imperceptible," said the spokeswoman for the Warsaw government, Beata Mazurek, the collective predatory strategy.
In order to escape the coal trap, the Visegrád countries are counting on nuclear power - of all things. While Germany wants to leave by 2022, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are even expanding their nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy is intended as a transition until the entry into renewable energy is easier than possible today.
Poland was already paying attention to atomic energy in the 1980s. At the village of Zarnowiec on the Baltic Sea coast, the unfinished foundations of a reactor, ruins of another era, are gnawing away. But the government is driving the idea again energetically forward: A first nuclear power plant should go 2033 to the net.