Every severe economic crisis shakes the basic foundations of seemingly mainstream policies and ideas and makes one wonder whether the recession’s impact could have been mitigated by timely and ambitious decisions. Despite being the country with the lowest GDP drop this year in Europe, Poland seems to be smitten by such nationwide deliberation and perhaps unsurprisingly substantial attention is dedicated to the future of coal. For decades Poland was among the world’s top coal producers, to the extent that up to today no EU member burns more coal than Poland (75% of its electricity generation). Yet the intra-European pressure to canvass a greener and more sustainable future has brought Poland to the least probable of candidates, nuclear energy. Replacing coal with other forms of energy will prove to be not only an economic challenge for Poland, in many ways coal is ingrained in the regional psyche of South and […]