On Wednesday, June 8, a press conference was held in the MP Marek Kuchciński's office in Przemyśl by Jan Szyszko, former Minister of Environmental Protection, Natural Resources and Forestry in Jarosław Kaczyński's government and professor at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences.
Prof. Szyszko, together with Mr. Andrzej Ćwierz from Jarosław, presented current energy threats to the Polish economy. At the beginning, Professor Szyszko informed that recently in Oleszyce Forest District, in the presence of Metropolitan Archbishop of Lviv Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki and Bishop of Zamosc-Lubaczow, foresters symbolically planted several hundred oak trees in memory of foresters murdered in Katyn and foresters who died in the Smolensk crash.
Polish foresters - along with Polish Army officers - were mass murdered by the NKVD in the territory occupied by Soviet Russia. Jan Szyszko thanked the residents of Przemysl and the Przemysl Land for the most numerous participation in the action of collecting signatures, organized in defense of Polish forests by the Association for Sustainable Development of Poland and members of "Law and Justice".
The professor reminded that the coalition government of the Civic Platform and the Polish Peasant Party took actions to include the state forests into the public finance sector. It was a kind of beginning of the process of destabilization of the Polish state forests by preparing them for privatization.
- Thanks to public support, we collected more than one million two hundred thousand signatures in our action and the government withdrew from this action. Thus, we managed to defend the Polish state forests. On this issue we have organized workshops and a big conference in the Sejm, the Senate and in the Tuczno Forest Inspectorate, showing how much carbon dioxide the forest absorbs, which can be used in the limits for the production of carbon dioxide given to Poland by the European Union. This is therefore a great opportunity for the Polish economy to get out of this danger, which has been caused by the current government by uncritical adoption of the EU climate and energy package - said J. Szyszko.
- The government has given up on Poland's successes in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, handing them over as if to a common asset of the European Union, while at the same time adopting very high standards forcing Poland to buy emission limits in the production of electricity, heat, glass, cement, steel and paper. This has resulted in Poland having the most expensive electricity in Europe, and next year there will be a further increase in prices of several dozen percent. It is a disgraceful decision from the point of view of Poland's economic interests that we are blocking our own energy resources (the largest coal and lignite deposits in Europe), becoming dependent on increasingly expensive Russian gas and at the same time giving up the great successes of the Polish economy in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by, among other things, increasing energy efficiency when burning coal. As part of the climate and energy package, the Polish government undertook that we would capture carbon dioxide from the air, liquefy it and store it in geological strata at a price of up to EUR 100 per tonne. The Law and Justice government prepared a bill to regenerate and enlarge the area of forests to improve the balance of carbon dioxide production. The present government has abandoned this option, but instead has allowed that if a foreigner buys a Polish forest or buys the right to absorb carbon dioxide from a Polish forest, he will receive a monetary equivalent for absorbing carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, we have timber alone in the Polish forests for 350 billion zlotys. It is one fourth of the country's territory - over 7 million hectares. And under these hectares there is sand and gravel. And even deeper there are natural resources. And the geological law is prepared so that the landowner can be the owner of strategic resources. Well, no wonder that liberal circles want to privatize it. And for all this, in my opinion, the present government should stand before the court of state - added professor Szyszko.
He also admitted that in a longer perspective the extraction of the so-called shale gas may improve Poland's energy situation, however this is endangered by selling not only prospecting concessions but also production concessions. At the same time, the new geological law, which will be approved soon, makes it possible to trade in extraction concessions by those who have already acquired them as prospecting concessions.
Prof. Jan Szyszko appealed to pay attention to these energy issues and to defend Polish interests, Polish energy resources and thus Polish energy security. The latter can be built in two ways: either on one's own resources, provided one has them, or on diversification of supplies by competing entities. Unfortunately, the current government has destroyed Poland's energy security based on its own resources and, at the same time, for no apparent reason, signed a contract for long-term supplies of Russian gas, already knowing that we have our own shale gas resources.
