Prague, Oct 26 (CTK) – The government of Bohuslav Sobotka agreed on the further orientation of the Czech economy on burning brown coal, amid the energy revolution and the global effort to avert climate change, Marek Svehla writes in the issue of the weekly Respekt out yesterday.
The government decision shows the major role that fear, yielding to lobbies and modern visions play in the control over the Czech Republic, Svehla writes.
Fortunately, the Czech government is not the most important agent influencing the energy sector anymore, he says.
According to the original plan, coal mining in Bilina, north Bohemia, should end by 2035, but further 15 to 20 years of mining will be possible thanks to the last week’s government decision to lift the limits set in the 1990s, Svehla writes.
“I and my movement finally decided to trust the analyses of the CEZ firm that expects that coal deliveries for households and heating plants would have been otherwise threatened as soon as in 2022,” Svehla quotes Finance Minister and ANO leader Andrej Babis as saying in explanation of the decision.
This statement is shocking: Babis admits that the government did not have its own materials on an issue seriously affecting human health and international relations (CO2 emissions respect no borders) and that it once again relied on data from the CEZ state-controlled power utility, which – to put it in diplomatic way – had turned highly unreliable in the past, Svehla writes.
The arguments of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) were sad as well, Svehla writes.
Sobotka claimed that “the issue of maintaining employment played a role.” In other words, the government has been able to deal with unemployment in the Most coal-mining area in northern Bohemia only by the application of the communist recipe of plundering the environment, Svehla writes.
Does the government really believe that there will be no other way of providing people with heat in 2035 than through burning coal, like in 1950, when the massive coal mining began? Svehla says.
Sobotka’s argument that the mining is not a problem because no houses will have to be pulled down due to it can be challenged, Svehla writes.
“The dispute over the coal mining limits really became a question of the protection of villages and heat deliveries in the Czech Republic,” he says.
Being removed from one’s home is definitely not a good thing, but a high compensation can make people happy, Svehla writes.
However, the main problem of the north Bohemian coal is that it goes sharply against the policy of climate protection and Czech power industry’s modernisation, he says.
An analysis that the Centre for environmental affairs of Charles University worked out for the government concluded that the mining beyond the limits in Bilina would cause damage of human health and the environment worth approximately 13 billion crowns, Svehla writes.
If the estimated damage beyond the Czech borders were added, especially the CO2 emissions, the total damage would reach 300 billion crowns, he writes.
Sobotka’s government has ignored these data and it keeps considering coal a domestic and purely economic issue. But according to rough estimates, the coal mined beyond the limits will produce the same volume of CO2 emissions as the road transport in the Czech Republic in 12 to 15 years, Svehla writes.
He says the government decision is very problematic for the power industry, too.
The original plan of ending the mining by 2035 gives enough space to react to the big changes in the energy sector. Last year, Germany produced most of its energy from alternative sources for the first time. Within a decade, the power from wind will become the cheapest even without subsidies, Svehla writes.
This has led to enormous investment in green energy and it will cause an unprecedented fall in the electricity prices. Coal or gas power plants will have a more and more difficult position because solar or wind power plants, once being built, produce energy for free, Svehla writes.
As a result, the construction of classical power plants is not profitable anymore, he says.
The fact that the officials of the Czech Industry Ministry or CEZ are incapable of imagining such a thing changes nothing about it, Svehla writes.
If the government had its own data and opinion, it would have concluded that it is better to end the coal mining more quickly: it would save people’s health, not burden the atmosphere, and speed up the transformation of the Czech energy industry into the modern shape, Svehla writes.
($1=24.450 crowns)
