I ran after Polish President Andrzej Duda in the corridors of the Baku stadium. I made sure he still believed that Poland had coal reserves for 200 years.
Since neither I nor other journalists from my newspaper have had much opportunity to ask the president questions in a live interview in recent years, I ran after him through the corridors at COP29 in Baku. I managed to get past the presidential bodyguards quite quickly, and then I pulled out the recorder.
I noticed (by the way, Duda himself emphasized this publicly in Baku) that COP29 was a moment that summed up his trips to climate summits. At COP24 in Katowice in 2018, Duda said at the opening as host that "Poland has coal reserves for 200 years", which carried around the world and became viral in Poland.
But thereafter, coal was not so strongly emphasized in his speeches at subsequent COPs. "And it will continue to be our reserves. I hope no one will try to take it away from us," Duda said.
This story was produced as part of the 2024 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organized by Internews' Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security. It was first published in Polish in Gazeta Wyborcza on November 13, 2024. It has been translated to English and lightly edited for length and clarity.
Banner image: Poland's president Andrzej Duda at COP29 / Credit: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov.
Aleksander Gurgul
