Poland is suffering from consequences of war in Ukraine
2022.12.08 09:53
Poland is suffering from consequences of war in Ukraine
Budrigannews.com – In search of cleaner country air, the Tkaczuk family relocated in 2018 from the Polish city of Krakow to the village of Olpiny in the Carpathian foothills.
Four years later, as a result of the Ukraine war, Russian gas deliveries to Poland were halted, a ban on the dirtiest stoves for heating was put off, and Olpiny’s air pollution was four times higher than normal last month.
“I feel completely helpless and abandoned by the state,” said 38-year-old asthmatic mother Julia Tkaczuk. For me, every sneeze is a warning sign.”
Krakow, Poland’s second-largest city, is even worse.
According to Airly, a California-based organization that monitors pollution, New Delhi was the only city in the world with a higher concentration of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) in the air on Nov. 20, when temperatures dropped below zero for the first time this year.
Experts assert that the consumption of the fuel at home will have the greatest impact on health, despite the fact that a number of European nations other than Poland, such as Germany and Hungary, are burning more polluting brown coal, or lignite, in order to keep the lights on.
Coal is the primary source of heating in the municipality where the Tkaczuks live, and forty percent of households use outdated furnaces that are referred to as “smokers” due to the poisonous fumes they produce.
Piotr Kleczkowski, an environmental protection specialist at Krakow’s AGH University, estimates that the winter ban in Tkaczuk’s province will result in up to 1,500 untimely deaths.
Black coal offers three times as much energy, but lignite has several times as much sulphur, ash, and mercury. When it is burned at home, a poisonous mixture of sulphur and mercury is released, increasing the risk of asthma, lung cancer, cardiac arrest, and strokes.
“It deteriorates: “Mercury finds it easier to get into our lungs when there is more sulphur in the air,” Kleczkowski said, referring to the way the two elements combine in polluted air.
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Sure, Poland has been one of Europe’s most polluted countries for years, and governments have tried to make it harder for homes to burn dirty fuels.
However, the Law and Justice (PiS) government lifted a two-year ban on residents burning lignite and low-quality hard coal, which cannot be effectively filtered in home stoves, after Russian gas was cut off in April due to a payment dispute.
Additionally, it eased restrictions on the sale of coal waste, which can be extremely polluting, bringing Poland back to the days prior to 2018, when coal regulations were more stringently enforced to combat smog.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the PiS party, even instructed residents of Nowy Targ, which is predicted to have the worst air quality in Poland in 2020, to burn just about anything they wanted.
He stated, “We should be burning everything, except tires and similar things, because unfortunately this is what happens here.” Just, Poland should be warmed.”
A ban on the dirtiest home furnaces that was supposed to go into effect in 2023 was also postponed for two years in November by the Lodz region in central Poland.
The government asserts that the lifting of the ban on lignite and low-quality coal is connected to the conflict in Ukraine and should be temporary; its impact on air quality will be assessed after the winter.
In response to questions from Reuters, Poland’s climate ministry stated, “The central government has no influence on the scope and timelines of the regional anti-smog rules.”
However, doctors claim that the policy change is already causing respiratory issues in the most polluted areas.
According to the chief of the paediatric ward, Katarzyna Musiol, child admissions to the Provincial Specialised Hospital in Rybnik, which is close to the Czech border, skyrocketed in November as temperatures dropped.
According to data from Airly, which has five monitoring points in the town, on the night of Nov. 20, when the temperature in Rybnik dropped to minus 3 Celsius, the average concentration of PM 2.5 particles was six times higher than normal.
Particulate matter, which is only 2.5 microns wide or less, is regarded as the most hazardous air pollutant and can penetrate the lungs and even the bloodstream.
Even though it was Rybnik’s first really cold night of the year, the air quality was already the worst it had been since December 13, 2021, when it was minus six degrees Celsius. “The ward is full of children, and 90% of them have conditions caused by smog: windedness, respiratory syncytial infection (RSV), bothered asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia. Musiol stated to Reuters that some of the infants have RSV and breathing issues.
“Our standard is above the norm. She stated, “We have a lot of children in need of intensive treatment, and the smog has been intense over the past few days.”
The town of 130,000 people in the province of Silesia has maintained its anti-smog regulations, which prohibit stoves older than ten years, but coal is widely used.
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During the day, Magdalena Kolarczyk Guz from Rybnik’s municipal police patrols the town, looking for houses that throw smoke into the air and people who are breaking the rules.
As she walked through a neighborhood filled with detached homes, she told Reuters, “The words of the politicians, even the most important ones, don’t change the law.”
She locates one that is shooting filthy smoke into the sky. However, she cannot force entry because nobody answers when she rings the doorbell.
Poland burns about 80% of the coal that European Union residents use to heat their homes. In April, Warsaw became the first EU member to stop purchasing imports of Russian coal, which is typically used by residential customers. Shortly thereafter, it began to run out.
State-owned retailers began rationing supplies as prices quadrupled. Poles began traveling to the Czech Republic in the summer to purchase lignite from wholesalers there because they were in need of winter supplies.
“The interest from Clean clients is tremendous,” said Dan Bernat, a Czech coal trader in Libun, 35 km (22 miles) from the Clean line. ” We are unable to accommodate their sometimes absurd volumes of 10, 15 or full truckloads.”
When compared to an average monthly wage of just under 5,000 zloty after taxes in Poland, three tonnes of black coal—the amount typically required to heat a home throughout the winter—can cost as much as 10,000-12,000 zloty ($2,240-$2,690).
However, Polish power and mining company PGE reported that 21,000 tonnes of lignite were sold in the first four weeks after it became available to residential users in October for about a tenth of the price of hard coal.
Kazimierz Kujawski, a farmer, arrived at the vast Belchatow lignite mine in central Poland to collect six tonnes, the maximum amount a single customer can purchase. “I can’t afford hard coal,” he said.
Professor Kleczkowski says that because some people can’t afford coal, people are burning garbage instead, which produces more carcinogenic toxins than lignite and is difficult for authorities to stop.
In October, a resident of Wejherowo in the north of Poland refused to pay a fine to the police for burning furniture scraps, claiming that PiS leader Kaczynski had stated that he could burn anything. The legal proceeding is ongoing.
Kleczkowski stated, “We are pumping substances into the atmosphere that are much more harmful than what we have seen in the last year.”
“We will experience extremely high levels of pollution if temperatures fall below zero again: the levels at which acute effects, such as strokes, may occur.”
