Poland’s dependence on coal
Poland has the fastest-growing economy in the European Union and the power that drives it comes from the dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal. How can the country cut its dependence on this polluting source of energy?
Coal produces around 93% of Poland’s electricity and the industry employs more than 100,000 people. It’s a cheap way to produce energy but it provides an enormous headache for any government trying to maintain economic growth and also meet ever-stricter EU greenhouse gas emission targets. Continue reading
Will Poland’s football team ever be great again?
Euro 2012 championship co-host Poland’s glory days on the pitch appear to be firmly stuck in the past. Can the tournament revive the fortunes of a once-great footballing nation?
A recent TV commercial for a Polish bank showed a pair of men sat on a couch watching a match in a scene from contemporary Polish life. The game they were watching was from October 1973. Continue reading
Fein: Passover remembrance
This year, at Pesach time, we mark the sixty-ninth anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. For more than half a century, we have spoken of the uprising at our seder table, recalling that it was on Pesach night in 1943 that the hateful enemy stormed the remnant of our people who had not yet perished. But our people rose up in hopeless courage and, in the days of their struggle, became immortal. It has become our custom to dedicate our second cup to their memory, to the memory of all those who perished in the Kingdom of Night and to seek to draw meaning from the darkness. Continue reading
Right and justice shine through the infernal prism of wartime Poland
One of my most treasured possessions is an old photograph. Taken in 1910, in Krakow, Poland, it shows five generations of my ancestors on my mother’s side, beginning with my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Pinkus Krengel, who was born in 1818.
Due to the unusual nature of the surname, Krengel, it isn’t hard to trace the history of my family. In fact, we know that they left Spain for Poland at the end of the 15th century, just when the interrogators of the Inquisition were polishing their twisted metal with Jewish blood. Continue reading
Shale Boom in Europe Fades as Polish Wells Come Up Empty
Europe’s best hope for a shale-gas boom is fading as explorers in Poland confront rising taxes, a lack of rigs and rocks that are harder to drill than expected.
While shale could help Poland lessen dependence on Russian supplies and cut its gas bill, a government proposal for a levy on production threatens to curtail investment. Failed wells byExxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) curbed the optimism that led two dozen companies to grab licenses. The government said last week that shale-gas reserves may be lower than estimated, and drilling a well costs almost three times as much as in the U.S. Continue reading
Putin Showed His Weakness With Poland
The citizens’ awakening in Russia dates from the disputed State Duma elections on Dec. 4 and the first protest held on the following day on Chistiye Prudy. But to my mind, the first sign thatVladimir Putin‘s regime is tottering emerged 20 months earlier, on the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The ceremony commemorating the 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals murdered by Stalin’s security forces and the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and a number of government and military officials marked a rapprochement between Moscow and Warsaw. Continue reading
Poland, the EU Growth Leader
The title of this commentary may come as a surprise. Over the past year and a half, the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone has dominated European issues in the financial press. There has been little mention of the Central and Eastern Europe members of the European Union, with the exception of disturbing news about political developments in Hungary. Quietly, the Polish economy has been registering outstanding performance, despite a very difficult environment. Unlike other EU economies, Poland avoided a recession in 2009, achieved 3.9% growth in 2010 and, according to the latest data, grew at a 4.3% rate in 2011. The latter rate contrasts with 1.5% for the Eurozone and 3.1% for Germany. Continue reading
Polish Catholicism Under Siege?
The reality is probably that the Catholic Church in Poland has been modernizing more slowly than the state as Poles catch up on what they “missed,” mainly because of external circumstances, in the 19th and 20 centuries. Continue reading
Reporter-activist relishes Poland’s Jewish revival
Poland’s Jewish community today — at 8,000, tiny compared to the 3.4 million before the Holocaust — is on the upswing, though it wasn’t easy to revive Jewish life. Most of Poland’s Holocaust survivors immigrated to Israel or elsewhere. Thousands more were banished in communist purges. Those who remained were, Gebert said, “the least Jewish.” Continue reading
Poland Leads Wave of Communist-Era Reckoning
For all that Poland has accomplished since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it has long resisted fully coming to terms with its Communist past — the oppression, the spying, even the massacres. Society preferred to forget, to move on.
So it may come as a surprise that Poland and many of its neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe have decided the time is right to deal with the unfinished business. Suddenly there is a wave of accounting in the form of government actions and cultural explorations, some seeking closure, others payback. Continue reading
