There is a photograph that stays with me from this Guardian piece.
A 49-year-old miner named Rafal Dzuman, stepping off his shift. Coal dust so fine it has permanently traced a thin black line around his eyes — like makeup he can never fully remove. Twenty years of descending 700 metres underground, every single day, at a mine that has been operating since the mid-17th century.
That image captures something that statistics and policy documents never quite can. This isn't just an energy transition story. It's a human one.
Poland is the last country in the European Union still fully committed to coal extraction. 80,000 people descend underground every day in Upper Silesia. Around 200,000 are employed across active mines and the broader supply chain. Coal still generates roughly half of Poland's electricity. And the reserves at some mines are estimated to last another 50 years.
Yet the political decision has already been made in Brussels. Decarbonisation is not a question of if — it's a question of when, and how fast. The target date is 2049, though some projections suggest coal could be phased out entirely by 2035.
The tension in this story is real and it deserves to be taken seriously on all sides.
On one hand, the environmental case is unambiguous. Coal is a polluting fossil fuel contributing directly to climate change. The European Green Deal exists for sound scientific and moral reasons. Two-thirds of Polish mines have already closed or been repurposed — some into museums, some into art galleries, one into a golf course, another being redeveloped as a gaming and technology hub. The transition is already underway and it is producing genuinely interesting reinvention.
On the other hand, the human and economic complexity is enormous. When a region's entire identity — its schools, its families, its language, its patron saint — has been shaped by a single industry for centuries, "just transition" funding and retraining programmes, however well-intentioned, cannot simply replace what is being lost overnight. The miners' union makes a legitimate point: if the pace of transition is too fast, new jobs in new sectors will not materialise quickly enough to absorb the losses.
And then there is the geopolitical wrinkle that nobody planned for.
The conflict in the Middle East has pushed oil and gas prices sharply higher. Suddenly, the economic calculation around coal — already complicated — has shifted again. Questions that seemed settled are being reopened. Is it rational to accelerate the phase-out of a domestic energy source during a period of global energy price volatility? What does energy security look like when external supply chains are disrupted?
These are not comfortable questions for green transition advocates. But they are legitimate ones, and ignoring them doesn't make them disappear.
There is a detail in this piece that I keep returning to.
Seventeen-year-old Wiktor Dudek, hard hat on, sitting in a tunnel-laboratory beneath his school in Rybnik, learning to become a miner. His grandfather was a miner. His father was a miner. And so, he has decided, will he be.
"The outlook for us young people is not rosy," he says. "But this is our tradition."
That's not ignorance. That's identity. And identity doesn't dissolve simply because a policy framework in Brussels has set a deadline.
The honest truth is that the energy transition is necessary, inevitable, and deeply disruptive to real communities in ways that are often discussed in the abstract by people who don't live them. Poland's coal story is a reminder that how we make this transition matters just as much as whether we make it.
The world extracted more coal in 2025 than in any previous year — over 9 billion tonnes globally. Poland's 85 million tonnes is less than 1% of that total. Phasing it out will not, on its own, solve the climate crisis. But it will fundamentally reshape the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in one of Europe's most historically rooted industrial communities.
They deserve a transition that is honest about that weight.
#EnergyTransition #ClimatePolicy #EuropeanGreenDeal #Poland #JustTransition onnet 4.6
