In the News
December 19, 2018
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.
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.
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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.