Poles go, 'neener, neener. Germany does it too'.

[pscot]

It's hopeless, basically. We just can't stop.

A leading proponent of carbon capture and storage last week pointed out that Poland was taking a lot of flak for its failure to implement CCS technology, when their western neighbour, lauded for its enlightened renewables policy hadn't exactly been a paragon of virtue in that regard.

David Reiner’s assertion that it was “somewhat unfair to only focus on Poland, when both Germany and the Netherlands, which would claim to have far greater concern for climate change, are going ahead with several new unabated coal-fired plants” turned out to be even more timely given Germany announced a new generation of hard coal-fired power plants shortly after.

Whatever about the respective positions of both these countries to CCS, their overall power energy policies are far from clear at times. But it does seem that Berlin has got better public relations savvy than Warsaw. This week Poland hosted the United Nations Climate Change Conference but also entertained the World Coal Summit at the same time. This behaviour seems to signal to the world that Poland wants to have a rational balance of coal and renewables in its energy make-up into the future. The green lobby has, of course, been calling it a cynical exercise.

The fact that the country’s environment minister Marcin Korolec was sacked at the height of climate change negotiations will be used as further evidence by Poland’s critics that it is not serious about climate change.

http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2013/11/mixed-signals-from-germany-and-poland.html