"Poland vows to keep coalmine open despite €500,000-a-day ECJ fine", 20 September 2021

Poland’s rightwing government has said it will continue to mine coal on its border with the Czech Republic despite being ordered to pay €500,000 for every day that it defies a European court of justice order to stop.

The fine was issued by the EU’s highest court on Monday after four months of Warsaw ignoring an earlier order to suspend extraction of lignite, a low-quality brown coal, at the Turów opencast mine in south-west Poland.

The government said it would continue to operate Turów, arguing that its suspension would put the country’s energy security at risk. The mine fuels a power station providing about 7% of the country’s electricity supply. It employs about 3,600 people.

“The fine mentioned by the [court] is disproportionate to the situation and is not justified by facts,” a government spokesperson said. “It undermines the ongoing process of reaching an amicable settlement.”

Marcin Romanowski, a justice minister, tweeted: “The [ECJ] demands half a million daily fines from Poland for the fact that Poland did not leave its citizens without energy and did not close the mines overnight. It is judicial robbery and theft in broad daylight. You won’t get a cent.”

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Communities in Germany and the Czech Republic have long blamed Turów, owned by the state-owned utility company PGE, for draining their groundwater and causing dangerous levels of air and noise pollution...

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Poland relies on coal to meet up to 80% of its energy but it has agreed to shut its last mine by 2049, in line with targets for emissions cuts set by the EU. In 2019 lignite burned at Turów’s electricity plant produced 5.5m tonnes of CO2, making it the fifth largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Poland.

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