Covering Climate Talks in the Heart of Poland’s Coal Country

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/reader-center/katowice-climate-talks.html

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The backdrop for this year’s big United Nations climate talks seemed, at first, a bizarre choice. Diplomats from across the globe converged on Katowice, a city in the heart of Poland’s southwestern coal-mining region, to discuss how the world’s nations could accelerate their efforts to shift away from fossil fuels.

But when I traveled to Poland last week to cover those climate talks, I discovered that the setting was fairly apt.

Lately, climate policymakers around the world have been grappling with the fact that even the best-laid plans to tackle global warming will falter if they don’t take into account people who might lose out from a shift to cleaner energy. And Poland offered a sharp illustration of just how difficult that can be in practice.

Organizers of the climate conference had hoped that Katowice, home to some 300,000 people, could showcase how a place could edge away from fossil fuels and still thrive. The region, which had been mining coal since the 18th century, has in recent years been shuttering its local coal mines and diversifying into other industries such as automobile manufacturing.

Signs of this transformation were everywhere. In the city center, a 131-foot-high former mine shaft tower now offered sightseers panoramic views of the city center. On the site of a former mining waste dump, the city had built a saucer-shaped arena complex that hosted all the United Nations delegates arriving to debate new details of the Paris climate agreement. Dozens of electric buses prowled the streets.

I traveled with a local photographer, Karolina Jonderko, to the Nikiszowiec neighborhood of Katowice, which was built in 1908 to house local coal miners. After the fall of Communism in the 1990s, many of the nearby mines went out of business. The neighborhood was soon racked by joblessness and crime.

But local leaders banded together to revitalize the area. Today, we found, Nikiszowiec’s charming cobbled streets have become a popular tourist stop; its brick buildings now house artist workshops and young families.

“There’s a strong community here,” said Grzegorz Chudy, 46, a local artist who moved here ten years ago.

Inside the United Nations climate conference a few miles away, politicians and climate experts were talking of the need for a “just transition” away from polluting energy sources, in which workers who lost their jobs were able to find new livelihoods. Nikiszowiec seemed like a plausible demonstration of how that might work in practice.

Yet there was still more to the story. Even as Katowice was installing long arrays of solar panels around town, the city was still getting most of its electricity from a giant coal-fired plant nearby that coated the air with a thick smog on many days. The city ranks as one of Europe’s 50 most polluted, and a recent study found that the fouled air is decreasing life spans here by 1.5 years.

Many of Katowice’s residents still burn coal in furnaces inside their apartments for heating — a particularly harmful source of pollution. Stefania Perska, 79, has such a furnace and keeps a window in her kitchen open for additional ventilation. The city has been slow to convert many buildings to central heating, and, while Ms. Perska would like to switch to a cleaner-burning gas unit, doing so would require a steep upfront investment and double or triple the cost of fuel — a change she couldn’t afford by herself on her pension.

Elsewhere, the transition away from coal looked even more complicated. In the smaller city of Zabrze, east of Katowice, the last coal mine closed last year, and the area has struggled to find a new economic engine. The unemployment rate is three times as high as in Katowice. Former miners, who had long referred to coal as “the mother that feeds,” lamented the loss.

“The mining industry used to organize the culture of this city,” said Dariusz Eliasz, 53, a former miner who is now an event manager at a retired mine in Zabrze that has been turned into a museum. “Now people commute elsewhere for work, and it’s dissolved the community.”

A few minutes away, in an office across the street from another shuttered mine, Andrzej Chwiluk, the former head of a miners union, seethed at Poland’s policymakers for giving the miners little notice before closing the mine and failing to create a plan for alternative sources of employment. And he had a warning for the diplomats who were huddled, at that minute, in intense climate policy negotiations at the climate conference.

“It’s not true about us miners that we’re opposed to change or that we want to destroy the planet,” Mr. Chwiluk said. “But if there aren’t safety measures put in place for the workers” during a transition away from coal, he said, “there will be resistance.”

At a time when “Yellow Vest” protests, which began over a carbon-tax proposal, were erupting in France, it was a lesson that many inside the United Nations climate talks were wrestling with as they wrote rules that would implement the Paris Agreement. Some, like President Andrzej Duda of Poland, insisted that their countries could not “fully give up on coal.” Others suggested strategies for shifting the country to cleaner energy while minimizing social dislocation.

It was a theme I tried to keep in mind while writing about the outcome of those negotiations. By the end of the conference, nearly 200 countries had approved a new global agreement to try to step up efforts on climate change. But ultimately, those countries themselves still face an enormous task back home of creating a low-carbon future that doesn’t leave too many people behind.