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Poland’s effort to hang on to coal-fired power for as long as possible was dealt a blow by the EU’s top court on Friday.
In a preliminary injunction, the court said Poland must cease extraction activities at the Turów brown coal mine near the Czech and German borders for the duration of a lawsuit filed by the Czech Republic challenging the mine’s permit.
It’s part of a growing number of negative verdicts and opinions issued by the EU’s top court that are inflaming relations between the EU and Poland’s nationalist government.
The Czech lawsuit is about the alleged environmental damage caused by the massive open-pit lignite mine. The Czechs have complained that the mine is polluting and affects local groundwater, but those grumbles were rejected by the Polish government and by state-controlled PGE, the country’s largest utility.
PGE even rammed through an extension of the mine until 2044 and this month opened a new lignite-fired unit at the Turów power plant that cost 4.3 billion złoty (about €1 billion).
In response to outrage over Turów and other investments in expanding coal-fired power plants in Poland, PGE launched a PR campaign, calling for a “Green Deal, not a Grim Deal,” featuring a stock black-and-white photo of a pensive child.
The mine was originally supposed to operate until 2020; it was the decision to race through the permitting procedure to keep it operating for more than two decades longer that unleashed the Czech lawsuit filed in February — a complaint supported by the European Commission. That led to Friday’s injunction.
“It appears sufficiently likely that the continuation of lignite mining activities at the Turów mine before the final judgment is delivered is likely to have negative effects on the level of groundwater in Czech territory,” reads the decision by Vice President of the Court Rosario Silva de Lapuerta.
Undermined argument
She also found Poland hadn’t made a convincing argument about the crucial nature of the mine, which supplies a power plant that PGE says generates about 5 percent of Poland’s electricity. The injunction is only in force until the court issues a verdict, but that can take years.
“Poland has not sufficiently established that the cessation of lignite mining activities at the Turów mine would pose a real threat to its energy security, to the supply of electricity to Polish consumers or to cross-border electricity exchange,” Silva de Lapuerta said.
Czech Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhánek called the decision “great news.”
The Polish government is analyzing the decision, an official said.
PGE denounced the injunction, saying it endangered the bloc’s Green Deal and would lead to an “uncontrolled energy transformation.” The company’s shares dropped 4.6 percent on the Warsaw Stock Exchange on the news.
Poland generates about 70 percent of its electricity from coal, mined by a dwindling but still politically powerful mining sector. The country recognizes that there is no long-term future for coal in the EU, but is trying to stretch out the transition for as long as possible. Current plans call for coal to account for 11 percent of power generation by 2040, and for the fuel to be phased out by 2049 — the year before the whole EU is supposed to become climate neutral.
That’s significantly slower than neighboring Germany, which aims to end coal use by 2038; the Czech Republic is eyeing the same year.
Sebastian Kaleta, a deputy justice minister, denounced what he called “interference” in Polish affairs, and predicted “a stern and determined response.”
But Greenpeace Poland’s Joanna Flisowska said that the CJEU “couldn’t take any other decision in this situation.”
“The Polish government has been ignoring the Czech concerns regarding the Turów mine and its harmful impacts for far too long,” she added. “This situation could have been avoided if only the Polish government and PGE had taken the need for planning the just transition seriously; instead they decided to keep denying the reality, and they want to continue mining and burning coal in Turow by 2044.”
Flisowska said she hoped the injunction would “act like a bucket of cold water” and spur Warsaw into action. “There is no other way than to move away from coal within the next decade.”
Legal fight
The CJEU’s injunction is part of a growing number of legal decisions running against Poland — ranging from a ban on logging practices in an old-growth forest, to a series of opinions and verdicts questioning the government’s radical judicial reforms.
That’s made the court a target for the government and its backers. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, packed with pro-government judges, is due to rule on whether the Polish constitution has primacy over EU law.
The court is being denounced as an example of Brussels interfering in the affairs of a member country.
Patryk Jaki, an MEP from Poland’s ruling right-wing coalition, called Friday’s injunction a “huge scandal,” adding: “Soon it will turn out that Poles won’t be able to rule themselves in their own country. A colony which is ordered around.”
Silva — a Spanish jurist who was the country’s first female solicitor general and was appointed to the CJUE 18 years ago — has been the author of several recent decisions that have angered Warsaw.
In 2018, she signed a ruling that said Ireland had the right to refuse to hand over an alleged drug dealer to Poland if its judiciary determined that the accused would not receive a fair trial there. Silva also authored a decision ordering Warsaw to “immediately” suspend changes to the country’s Supreme Court and reinstate judges dismissed in what was widely seen as a purge of the country’s judiciary.
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