WARSAW — Poland’s new conservative government is no longer threatening to torpedo the COP21 summit, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be an easy negotiating partner as it seeks to defend Polish industry and coal-fired power plants.
“In Poland we see the need to protect the climate, but we’re also very loudly talking about the fact that our economy today needs different solutions than those which are being proposed,” said Beata Szydło, the new Polish prime minister, as she headed off to the French capital. “We came to Paris with the expectation that an agreement will be signed and carried out in such as a way as to accommodate our expectations.”
Poland’s first condition is that any climate deal must be universal. Warsaw worries that the EU’s ambitious 2030 goals, calling for a 40 percent reduction in emissions, for 27 percent of energy to come from renewables and a 27 percent increase in energy efficiency, are so expensive that they will cripple European and Polish industry.
Her second requirement is that any COP21 agreement must take into account the needs of specific nations, and that “the interests of the Polish economy to be protected.”
If those two conditions are met, then it’s “possible for Poland to sign” an agreement in Paris, she said.
That’s one of the toughest statements from any EU country going in to the climate summit.
Warsaw has already sent warning signals that it won’t just go along with the broader EU position, both in Paris and next year, when the EU sits down to apportion just how individual countries are supposed to meet the bloc’s 2030 targets.
Poland has taken one of the toughest stances from any EU country.
Before the summit, Piotr Naimski, an MP with the ruling Law and Justice party who helped devise his party’s energy policy, threatened a veto at the climate summit.
“For Poland, the road is not signing that document,” he said.
Szydło and Jan Szyszko, the new environment minister, have backpedaled on Naimski’s comments, because blowing up COP21 isn’t necessarily Poland’s goal. It really wants to force the EU to water down its own ambitious emissions reduction plans, which Warsaw views as a jobs killer. That means the Polish delegation will have to tread delicately in the French capital.
Poland’s previous center-right government also fought to dilute EU emissions reductions goals, defending the coal that supplies the bulk of the country’s electricity and accounts for thousands of politically sensitive jobs. The Law and Justice party (PiS), which this year took control of both the presidency and the parliament, is an even more ferocious defender of Polish coal than its predecessor.
A new climate team
The country’s climate policy is overseen by Szyszko, who has cast doubt on whether people are responsible for climate change — a view that won’t find much favor at Le Bourget’s conference center north of Paris.
Szyszko and Szydło will be working to resist EU-backed emissions limits without Poland getting tarred as a spoiler.
That could prove tricky. The commitment to the 2030 goals was agreed by all EU countries last year, something that Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU’s climate and energy commissioner, pointed out as COP21 started. The bloc also formulated a joint approach to the climate summit in September.
That leaves Poland very little wiggle room to reopen the debate on the EU’s 2030 goals after the Paris summit. Most of the other EU countries may want to examine those targets, but to make them tougher, not to water them down as Poland is hoping to do.
“We certainly have to get different conditions from the European Union, otherwise it will be the end of Poland’s development,” said Krzysztof Tchórzewski, the energy minister, speaking recently at a climate and energy conference hosted by the new Polish president, Andrzej Duda. Naimski, the Law and Justice MP, made his critical remarks at the same conference.
Those EU policies worry Europe’s industry and energy companies. If the rest of the world doesn’t sign up to similarly strict climate provisions as EU, it will hurt their competitive positions.
“For me it’s important that Paris is successful because a lot of parts in the world are not as convinced of the climate issue as Europe is,” Karl Buttiens, head of global CO2 strategy at steelmaker ArcelorMittal, said at a recent POLITICO event. “Everything that would lead to a more level playing field would be of course welcome. But that, I think, is more or less wishful thinking.”
The coal miner’s daughter
There was little doubt that under Szydło, a coal miner’s daughter from the country’s industrial heartland, Poland would resist pressure to reduce the share of coal in its energy mix. And with its abundance of coal and carbon-based energy production infrastructure, Poland is married to dirty fuels for the foreseeable future. The country generates about 85 percent of its electricity from 53 coal-fired plants. A dozen new ones are set to come online before 2020.
The new government isn’t following EU diplomatic niceties to defend Polish priorities.
“The previous government offered to contribute to an ambitious plan, but also managed to put protection of industry on the EU agenda,” said Michał Koczalski, an energy expert at lobbying firm CEC Government Relations. “This government is more likely to say, ‘You people in Brussels won’t tell us how to do things. We have our own agenda, our own challenges. And we will deal with them on our own pace’.”
The harder-edged approach is already being taken by Duda, who vetoed an extension of the 1997 emissions-cutting Kyoto Protocol just two days after his party won parliamentary elections on October 25.
The new government isn’t following EU diplomatic niceties to defend Polish priorities.
The question is whether Poland will choose the Paris talks to re-emphasize its opposition to EU policy.
“The COP21 talks will probably not be the proper place to argue with European goals,” said Konrad Świrski, a professor in the Institute of Heat Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology. “I hope that Poland remains invisible there. That would probably be the best solution.”
That’s also the hope of negotiators. Poland needs to save political capital for a fight next year over the EU’s emissions and renewables targets, which Warsaw will want to keep on the lower end.
Negotiators point out that Poland has been reluctant to upend EU climate diplomacy in the past. “In the end, to see that a COP in France would go down the drain because a European country would be blocking, I cannot see that,” said a source familiar with European climate negotiations.