The EconomistJune 29th 2019 Europe 33I
n three directionspine forests, bone dry in the scorching
weather, disappear into the horizon of the central Polish plain.
To the south is the lunar landscape of a city-sized opencast lignite
mine. A tangle of conveyors carries the coal up to Elektrownia Bel-
chatow, Europe’s largest thermal power station and its largest pro-
ducer of carbon emissions, at a rate of one tonne a second. Pawel
Koszek, a repairs specialist, surveys the scene with satisfaction.
“Electricity”, he says, “is our comfort and our security.” Last week-
end activists from Greenpeace projected the face of Mateusz Mora-
wiecki, Poland’s prime minister, with the caption “shame”, onto
one of Belchatow’s seven cooling towers. “They don’t understand
the technology,” scoffs Mr Koszek, who has worked at the plant
since 1989 and met his wife there.
Downstairs, at a bank of computers, he radiates pride as he
demonstrates how to regulate the flow of oxygen to its 13 furnaces.
Together they produce about 20% of Poland’s electricity. It is like
flying a plane, he muses: the operators must be able to take control
in an emergency. There has never been a major incident at Belcha-
tow. Compare that with nuclear power plants like Chernobyl or Fu-
kushima. (Happily, it is unlikely ever to be hit by a tsunami, as Fu-
kushima was.) Wind energy? Solar energy? They come and go. Try
charging your phone on a solar panel. Good old coal is reliable.
This puts Mr Koszek and his home town at the wildly unfash-
ionable end of the environmental debate in Europe. The place,
dubbed “Belcha” in the foreign press, serves as a symbol for Po-
land’s foot-dragging on carbon emissions. The Greenpeace activ-
ists were angry at Mr Morawiecki’s government for blocking a
commitment to make the eucarbon-neutral by 2050. Yet to its
60,000 residents Belchatow is a pleasant place to live. Amid flow-
ers and fountains in the newly renovated Narutowicza Square is a
walk of fame for stars of the local volleyball team, which is spon-
sored by and named after the state-owned firm that runs the mine
and plant. Many families have several members working at the two
sites, which employ 8,000 people and many more indirectly.
So locals are understandably defensive in the face of Europe’s
environmentalist surge. Part of this impulse is straightforwardly
economic. “Without the power station and the mine,” says Mar-
chin Nowak, Belchatow’s development director, “the town willloseits economicraison d’être.” Already eu-imposed carbon-
emissions licences have increased the cost of generating electric-
ity there. He warns that further eumeasures will make Polish coal
still less competitive and that generation will shift east to Belarus,
Ukraine and Russia. The emissions and the jobs, he argues, will
merely be displaced out of the eu.
But the defensiveness also goes beyond the bottom line. Bel-
chatow is proud of its industry. Coalmining began there only in the
1970s and many residents moved to the town from other places,
but they venerate St Barbara, the miners’ saint, like residents of
older Polish mining regions such as Silesia. The city’s logo is an
electrical “on” button and its slogan is: “Belchatow: always a good
reaction”. Law and Justice, the nationalist party that rules Poland
and dominates local politics in Belchatow, has made the quality of
Polish coal a patriotic cause (one critic refuses to give a quote for
fear of reprisals). The party condemns western eustates for refus-
ing Poland the chance to catch up with their living standards. Even
those in Belchatow who accept the need to cut emissions, like Mr
Nowak, say Poland is unfairly treated: “You can’t expect Poland to
leap to zero carbon in 30 years.”
Being in Belchatow reminded Charlemagne of those European
towns caught up in, or at least alarmed by, the migration crisis of
four summers ago. In such places, too, the issue was cultural as
well as purely economic. Locals worried about jobs and wages, and
fretted that the costs and benefits of the change would be unfairly
distributed. But they also worried about the character of their soci-
ety and felt alienated from globally minded elites in the big cities.
Fake news proliferated. Today immigration has faded as a political
flashpoint, as the numbers arriving have collapsed. The environ-
mental debate is taking its place.
It even has a similar geography. It was tempting to see the mi-
gration crisis as a struggle between the eastern and western halves
of the eu. That is true of the environmental battle, too. But as with
the immigration debates, it oversimplifies the matter. Zuzana Ca-
putova, Slovakia’s new president, and Robert Biedron, an insur-
gent Polish opposition leader, are both keen environmentalists.
And climate change is just as divisive in the western eu. Green and
greenish parties are rising and populist parties like the Alternative
for Germany, as well as anti-establishment protesters like the gi-
lets jaunesin France, are turning the environmental movement
into their new enemy of choice in the culture war. The real divide,
as with in immigration, is within societies: between big cities with
their Fridays for Future marches, car-free days and liberal politics,
and small towns where the old ways of doing things die less easily.Learning from the past
Immigration has vanished from Europe’s headlines because the
populists won the battle. For all the optimism of the “refugees wel-
come” campaign in 2015, a broad consensus has now formed
around much more restrictive, “Fortress Europe” policies. Envi-
ronmentalists can learn some lessons from what the pro-immi-
gration campaigners got wrong. First, do not split the difference
with populists. Instead, take on their arguments with emotionally
resonant facts. Europe’s record-hot summers are powerful argu-
mentative props. Second, do not pander to those who resist
change, but do not patronise them either. Treat them as grown-
ups, listen to their concerns and move faster to cushion the effects
of change with transition funds and retraining schemes. Europe’s
liberals are entering a new culture war. They should avoid the mis-
takes of the last one. 7Charlemagne Back to the barricades
With immigration sidelined, environmentalism is emerging as Europe’s new culture war