If you want to know how far away Europe is from becoming a climate-neutral continent, you only have to drive 500 kilometers east of Berlin. Once in Belchatów, the smell of burned coal creeps into the visitor's nose at the train station. It comes from the numerous old stoves with which many people in the small Polish town are still heating up against the harsh winters. Without coal there would be no electricity, no warm living rooms and no work in Belchatów.
According to Ursula von der Leyen, the EU should be climate neutral by 2050. How little agreement there is can be seen in Belchatów, Poland. People there hope that coal will still be burned in a hundred years.
The world's largest lignite-fired power station is just over ten kilometers from the city. His chimneys can be seen from everywhere. They rise 300 meters out of the landscape and are almost as big as the Eiffel Tower. Every year, 45 million tons of lignite roll from the surrounding open-cast mines on the conveyor belts into the combustion chambers. Between 30 and 40 million tons of climate-damaging CO2 are released into the atmosphere. This means that the plant emits more greenhouse gases each year than Slovakia or Ireland.
Before the coal giant was built in the 1980s, Belchatów was a small nest. At the end of the 1970s, however, huge brown coal deposits were discovered among the farmers' fields. "Today the majority of the jobs depend on the coal-fired power plant." Before it was built, we had almost 20,000 inhabitants here, today we have three times as much, "explains Jakub Berowski, city planner of the Belchatów municipality.
He receives at a long wooden table in an unadorned office. What does the municipality think of climate protection? After all, the EU wants to become climate neutral by 2050 at the latest. "A lot," replies the city planner with an insistent nod. "We have free public transport and lots of green spaces here. The municipality is doing a lot to make Belchatów climate-friendly." Of course, Berowski means the city. Not the power plant. That is the operator's responsibility. And that is the Polish state. According to subsidy reports, the government spends over 900 million euros a year on mining and coal-fired power generation.
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Post-coal concepts are rare
Despite all the climate protection statements, the community has a hard time imagining life after coal. The city planner tells something about tourism that one wants to promote here. For example, ski slopes on slag heaps. And a nuclear power plant was once under discussion. There are no more ideas at first. However, that is not so urgent anyway, after all, the operator is currently planning new open-cast mines for the period after 2035; licenses have been in place until at least 2040.
The city secretary Artur Kurzja, an elderly man with a blue jacket, comes from a village that was excavated by the operator PGE for the lignite. He asks with a smile whether someone would seriously believe in the German coal phase-out. "We recently visited a community in Saxony-Anhalt and showed them how sustainable lignite can be extracted," the city council proudly says. The guests were "very impressed" with the modernity of the open-cast mine.
This denial of reality in Belchatów is normal in Poland. There are no serious attempts by operators or the government to tackle the coal phase-out or even a structural change. That is why the municipalities can do little if it is done as if coal-based power generation would continue for a hundred years.
"Why should we stop using the coal at all?"
This is confirmed in a conversation with a local trade unionist. Jaroslaw Grzesik himself drove into the pit and has represented his buddies in the Solidarnosc union for 20 years. Solidarnosc enjoys a good reputation in Poland and Europe because it emerged in the 1980s from a strike movement against the socialist state power and Soviet influence, in which many intellectuals, regime critics, but also the Catholic Church participated.
Grzesik cannot and does not want to imagine an end to coal. All this makes no sense: "Why should we stop using coal at all? After all, humans are only responsible for 1.5 percent of global warming," the Solidarnosc representative claims, grotesquely mistaking the scientific facts. He considers the German coal phase-out to be a deception. But even if it did, a country like Poland - unlike Germany - would never have the money to churn billions of euros into the regions affected by structural change, he says.
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The coal-fired power plant operator PGE is more careful. The management rejects a conversation and a visit to the power plant. PGE also advises the miners in the opencast mine not to receive journalists, although they initially agreed. In the parking lot in front of the power plant site, security arrives within minutes when photos are taken. An hour interrogation follows. Apparently you are very nervous because you are afraid of climate activists.
The "EU dictatorship" in Brussels is to blame
Finally, a written reply states: "We do a lot for climate protection and concern for the natural environment is one of the priorities of the Belchatów power plant". Details of emission reductions and technical improvements follow. PGE are now also building wind farms in the Baltic Sea. However, Belchatów "plays a very important, stabilizing role in Poland's electro-energy system". And: "The energy policy of the European Union forces us to constantly adapt to new requirements."
It is no wonder that Poland sees climate protection policy as a constraint. European emissions trading is becoming a real threat to the country because the price per tonne of CO2 has risen to over EUR 25 in recent months. Since coal-fired power plants are only allowed to emit a certain amount of emissions, the rest must be offset with emission rights. This means considerable additional costs that the Polish state has to shoulder because of its power plants. That is why the country is trying to slow down wherever possible and does not see climate change but the "EU dictatorship" in Brussels as the real threat to millions of Poles, as the trade unionist Grzesik puts it.
At the EU summit on Thursday, the country again boycotted the Union's goal of becoming climate neutral by 2050. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had suggested that his country should only become climate neutral in 2070. A special regulation now applies to Poland because the country insisted on achieving the goal at its "own pace". All other countries committed to the 2050 target.
Already in the summer, a majority of the EU countries tried unsuccessfully to set the 2050 climate protection target. At that time, in addition to Poland, other Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Hungary also blocked. The negotiators then agreed to ban coal subsidies in the EU from 2025. Poland was able to achieve an exception for its power plants and is allowed to continue to use state money to continue to use its power plants.
In order for Poland to follow the EU's course on climate change, the EU Commission has also included a European structural change fund, the "Just Transition Fund", as part of the "European Green Deal" just presented. Scope: around one hundred billion euros (read more about the contents of the "Green Deal" here).
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The recently green European Investment Bank also wants to fill the new money pot, Vice-EIB CEO Andrew McDowell announced in mid-November. This is to help coal-dependent countries like Poland. However, this can be expensive for the EU. Solidarnosc spokesman Grzesik believes that at least twice as much money is needed in Poland as in Germany. "We would need 40 billion euros for the Silesian region alone, and that is by no means all coal-fired power plants," says the trade unionist.
But the whole effort is not worth it. After all, there is no climate change.
