Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Decarbonization and ENGOs

https://www.nytimes.com/

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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. Lately, climate policymakers around the world have been grappling with the fact that even the best-laid plans to tackle global warming will falter if they don’t take into account people who might lose out from a shift to cleaner energy. And Poland offered a sharp illustration of just how difficult that can be in practice.

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https://www.forbes.com/

Yesterday, when the U.S. delegation at UN climate talks in Katowice, Poland organised an event promoting fossil fuels, the reaction was fierce – and predictable.

It was the second year in a row the U.S. has staged such an event at the annual climate gathering setting the rules of the Paris Climate Agreement, staying true to the headline message coming from the White House that climate change is a hoax and the agreement will hinder economic growth.

But behind the scenes, delegates from the U.S. government are sounding a different tone. Speaking at a “innovation in coal and natural gas” event on the sidelines of the summit, Preston Wells Griffith, the deputy assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, told the audience that “alarmism should not silence realism.”

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https://www.eenews.net/

The future of the Paris climate agreement is being charted now in a Polish city that proudly displays its coal-mining heritage. The U.N. climate talks that began Monday in Katowice, Poland, aim to finish the Paris “rulebook” — implementing guidelines for the 3-year-old pact.

Failure to strike a deal by the end of next week would undermine global trust in the climate deal in the wake of a U.N. report last year that showed only a swift decarbonization could avert disaster.

“Leaders of the world, you must lead,” British broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough said at the conference’s opening Monday. “The continuation of our civilizations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands.” U.N. chief António Guterres echoed that message, urging representatives of nearly 200 nations to work together. “Only global answers,” he said, “can solve global problems.”

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https://www.france24.com/en/

KNURÓW (POLAND) (AFP) – “It’s a family thing. My father, my grandfather were miners, so I am,” says Arkadiusz Wojcik at a coal mine in the southern Polish town of Knurow. Defying the danger to life and limb of descending into the mine on a daily basis, Poland’s coal miners still pass down the job from father to son.

The occupation may be on its way out in much of the West, but in Poland’s Silesian coal country it is thriving thanks to high wages and support from a government that refuses to decarbonise the economy. In Brussels, Berlin and Paris, coal is the enemy. It produces the carbon dioxide blamed for the planet’s rising temperatures.

In Poland however, coal is a way of life, with no signs of changing. “Here in Silesia, it’s a tradition,” says Wojcik, 36, after working a night shift 650 metres (2,100 feet) underground. The Knurow mine is operational day and night, with the schedule divided into four shifts. But one thing is constant: the risk.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/

As government officials, scientists, and green activists gather for the United Nations climate conference in Poland, Adam Pietron has a few words of advice: Try to avoid the air. Pietron lives in Katowice, a coal-mining and steel-making stronghold for centuries that’s host to the conclave, and he says the pollution is so bad that this year he installed an air purifier.

“Sometimes the smog is terrible,” Pietron says, consulting an app on his phone that measures air quality. “A few days back, it was tough to breathe.” More than 22,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries are coming to a city as closely tied to the carbon economy as almost anywhere on earth.

Katowice is the capital of Silesia, the heart of the coal industry in the country with Europe’s worst air–mostly due to its continued reliance on the fuel for everything from massive power plants to basement furnaces.

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https://www.ctvnews.ca/

KATOWICE, Poland — Three years after sealing a landmark global climate deal in Paris, world leaders are gathering again to agree on the fine print.

The euphoria of 2015 has given way to sober realization that getting an agreement among almost 200 countries, each with their own political and economic demands, will be challenging — as evidenced by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris accord, citing his “America First” mantra.

“Looking from the outside perspective, it’s an impossible task,” Poland’s deputy environment minister, Michal Kurtyka, said of the talks he will preside over in Katowice from Dec. 2-14. Top of the agenda will be finalizing the so-called Paris rulebook, which determines how countries have to count their greenhouse gas emissions, transparently report them to the rest of the world and reveal what they are doing to reduce them.

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