energy policy

Z przyjemnością przedstawiamy wybranych dziennikarzy do tegorocznej polskiej edycji programu Transatlantic Media Fellows.

Raport ukazuje powiązania między polityką zagraniczną a kwestiami bezpieczeństwa i energetyki oraz analizuje i proponuje rozwiązania w kontekście zmieniających się realiów społecznych, politycznych i ekonomicznych po obu stronach Atlantyku.

"When Western Europe thinks about greening its electricity generation, Poland has a more basic problem of how to change people’s minds and turn them away from using dirty fuel in their homes. But Poland’s electricity market is also about to change and a lot has happened since Poland joined the European Union in 2004", states science journalist Tomasz Ulanowski.

The conviction that Poland should denounce the EU climate agreement still forms a big part of the political beliefs. However, other voices on this issue can increasingly be heard on the right side of the political spectrum.

Poland has a new president – Andrzej Duda, from the right-wing and anti-European party. And if the current political winds do not change, we can expect a substantial shift in the Polish parliament after the general elections in the fall, warns Michał Olszewski. What does it mean for the Polish environmental policy?

Rebecca Harms, the president of The Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament, has commented on the Energy Union project proposed by the then Prime Minister Donald Tusk. In an interview with EurActiv Poland, she introduces a green perspective into the discourse on the project and ponders on its impact on Eastern neighbours as well as climate change.

Poland was instrumental in preventing more ambitious goals at last fall’s EU energy and climate target negotiations in Brussels. Over the long run, however, this strategy may backfire, as Michał Olszewski warns.

The Polish government is one of the proponents of a European energy union. Unfortunately, its sole concerns are cheap access to gas and the survival of Polish coal – a goal that runs completely contrary to the EU’s climate policy, argues Michał Olszewski.

In the course of the EU election campaign, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk presented his vision for a European Energy Union, which is supposed to end European dependence of Russian gas, which he identified as the essential problem of European Foreign Policy in the Ukraine-Crisis. However, it encountered immediate criticism from green politicians. "Tagesspiegel" published  an article "Polen will die EU unabhängiger machen" ("Poland want to make the EU independent) (in German), where strong and weak sides of the proposition by Tusk are thorougly analyzed. Green voices are represented by Irene Hahn-Fuhr, director of the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation in Warsaw, and Rebecca Harms, Co-President of the Greens/ EFA in the European Parliament.