ABSTRACT
Because Poland has failed to take on a climate change policy leadership role on any of the domestic, EU and international levels, this chapter will focus on Poland’s attitude towards the adoption and implementation of EU and international climate change policy measures rather than on domestic climate change policies. The fi rst domestic modern-day environmental regulations were adopted in Poland at the beginning of the 1990s. It is to be expected that the EU will play an important role in the formulation of domestic environmental policy because its formulation is taking place in parallel with European integration. However, since the announcement of the EU climate and energy package (see Chapter 1 by Wurzel and Connelly and Chapter 5 by Oberthür and Dupont) Poland is no longer simply a follower of EU policy. Instead it has started to play an active role at European level during the negotiations of the climate and energy package. Although many commentators have stated that Poland had actually been blocking the very ambitious original proposal of the EU climate and energy package, in this chapter it is argued that Poland’s aim has rather been to try to reshape the EU policy in order to make it possible for Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries to attain the ambitious EU targets without suffering huge economic losses. According to Polish state offi cials such economic losses, would, for example, have resulted from the adoption and implementation of the Commission’s proposal for the revision of the EU emission trading scheme (ETS).
