The Poles may spoil Paris party

The new conservative government in Warsaw threatens to upend EU climate policy.

WARSAW — Poland’s new conservative government is threatening to veto a deal at the Paris climate summit, making clear its determination to protect the country’s large coal industry.

“For Poland, the road is not signing that document,” said Piotr Naimski, an MP with the ruling Law and Justice party who helped devise his party’s energy policy.

Poland is the only European Union country to issue such a blunt warning so far. Its potential role as COP21 spoiler could undercut the bloc’s negotiating strength.

The country has yet to finalize its negotiating stance, but if it resembles Naimski’s tough line, Poland could possibly derail the whole climate pact, which has to be accepted by all 196 governments, including both Poland and the European Union.

That isn’t necessarily Poland’s goal. It wants to force the EU to water down its own ambitious emissions reduction plans, which Warsaw views as a jobs killer, without torpedoing the Paris negotiations entirely. 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 Deputy Environment Minister Paweł Sałek, an engineer with a low public profile who started in the job only last week. He replaced Marcin Korolec, a climate policy veteran whose caustic wit annoyed his EU partners.

Sałek will likely hold a harder line than even Korolec.

Sałek’s boss, Environment Minister Jan Szyszko, 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 next week. The two will be working to resist EU-backed emissions limits without getting tarred as a spoiler.

That could prove tricky. The EU’s position for the summit was already agreed upon in September, and the bloc will take the lead negotiating for its members in Paris. The position is based on the EU’s internal climate agenda to cut carbon emissions by 40 percent on 1990 levels, to have renewables supply 27 percent of energy and to boost energy efficiency by 27 percent — all by 2030. Brussels has also created an Emissions Trading System designed to spur industries to emit fewer greenhouse gases. The PiS government wants to weaken these measures.

“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 last week 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 Prime Minister Beata 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 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.

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