Time November 2/November 9, 2020THE GREAT RESET
to make sure the climate agenda maintains broad popular support.
The Green Deal broadly—and Just Transition specifically—are
altering the politics of climate change in Europe and the nature of
the bloc’s economic development. It might determine the jobs and
industries that employ workers across the Continent for the next
century. In Poland, the Green Deal has already fueled a rush to chart
a new path, one that honors the country’s coal-mining heritage
while also preparing it for a new future. In September, the country
committed to shutting down its coal mines for good. The question
now is how to do that, and whether the country can move fast enough
to meet the E.U.’s deadlines. “We are at a key, critical moment in the
history of Poland and in the making of the European Green Deal,”
says Michal Kurtyka, Poland’s Climate Minister.
The stakes may be just as high abroad. From Kentucky to South
Australia, Ukraine to Indonesia, coal communities around the world
are watching closely, looking for models of a successful transition.
More important, because the E.U. is the world’s second largest econ-
omy and second largest market, the Green Deal will ripple across the
world, igniting the global race to develop a clean-energy economy.
“It is an invitation for cooperation—with China, India, the United
States, Canada,” says Karsten Sach, deputy director-general of the
German Environment Ministry.
But for the invitation to work, the miners in Katowice will have
to be on board.
The popular image of a coal miner is easy enough to picture:
a large, hard-hatted man, dressed in a soiled uniform with a face
darkened by the black rock he spends all day extracting. Marek Wy-
styrk couldn’t have looked more different: bespectacled and neatly
dressed, he would look more in place in a library than deep un-
derground. We meet in a café in a stately prewar office building in
downtown Katowice.
Wystyrk, who spent nearly 20 years in the underground mines,
first as a miner and then as a manager, is full of what seem like con-
tradictions. Speaking through a translator, he praises coal, but he
doesn’t say he wants his kids to join the industry. He says something
needs to be done about climate change, but doesn’t think it should
be Poland’s responsibility to address it. He touts his region’s coal-
mining heritage, but he decries how it has left so many behind. It’s a
nuanced view—like those of so many on the ground—that’s rooted in
an effort to grapple simultaneously with two dueling realities: coal
has provided for millions of Polish families, and climate change and
the transition away from fossil fuels will, sooner or later, kill the in-
dustry. “I would like to defend the good name of mining,” he says.
“It’s not just environmental degradation.”
Indeed, coal has given Poland a lot: the fuel for the country’s eco-
nomic development for the past 150 years. Demand for the natural
resource in Europe helped build Poland’s railroads and grow cities
surrounding mines, and the rock became a symbol of prosperity and
a strong work ethic. After World War II, Poland nationalized the
mines in line with its shift to a communist economic system and
helped power the entire Soviet bloc.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Western European countries
sought new ways to collaborate and protect their common interests,
and coal played a central role. In 1952, six European countries formed
the European Coal and Steel Community. The organization, which
would evolve into the 27-member European Union, was founded
‘WE ARE AT A KEY,
CRITICAL
MOMENT... IN
THE MAKING OF
THE EUROPEAN
GREEN DEAL.’
—Michal Kurtyka,
Poland’s
Climate Ministeron the principle that a common mar-
ket for coal and steel—essential to
the economy of any industrialized
nation—would eliminate the risk of
another intra-European confict and
create a new foundation for economic
development.
This alliance grew in significance
over the following decades, espe-
cially as the Eastern bloc of commu-
nists eroded in the 1980s and 1990s.
(In Poland, that transition came
about in part because of strikes that
ground the country’s economy to a
halt in 1988, including at coal mines.)
With time, the E.U. came to regulate
the agricultural sector and make
environmental policy. The central
European government pushed its
members to espouse democratic val-
ues and rewarded them with invest-