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Comment by danduma | Hacker News Reader

But... how?

There are many houses in Poland that are using coal heating, and unfortunately a lot of people burn there their thrash. Kraków is surrounded by smaller towns and villages, where single family houses are common. To make things even worse, Kraków is in a basin, which makes the air flow even more difficult. If you add there years of city mismanagement when it comes to air flow, you land in such a situation

From this source: https://www.iqair.com/mx-en/newsroom/krakow-among-top-10-mos...

"Krakow’s pollution stems from a mix of local and regional sources. A primary culprit is domestic heating, the burning of coal and wood in older, inefficient household boilers and stoves remains widespread in the Małopolska region (1).

Car traffic also adds nitrogen oxides and fine particulates, exacerbated by an ageing vehicle fleet. Topography and meteorology worsen the problem, Krakow sits in a basin-like region prone to temperature inversions and limited ventilation, allowing pollutants to accumulate.

Additionally, emissions drift in from surrounding municipalities and industrial zones, making regional coordination crucial to air quality. Despite a solid-fuel ban in the city since 2019 and the replacement of many coal boilers, compliance is uneven and some residents still use banned fuel."

The issue with solid-fuel ban is that its banned only inside of the city itself, not in the surrounding towns

I think it’s topology (concave) + widespread poor heating methods in the agglomeration + a very bad day + inefficient combustion engines.

I’d maybe include accurate measurements. The government isn’t trying to hide that and doesn’t have the means to, and highly quality sensors are widespread.

Plus continental, so it picks up dirty air from around.

It’s in the valley and because Polish state is kinda weak they cannot enforce nearby villages to stop burning garbage to heat their homes.

at least try to hide your racism

LOL, there is nothing racist about it, neither Poland nor Czechia are really into environmental enforcement against individuals, and you can definitely smell it in winter. As of now, "small sources of pollution" (e.g. mostly individual homes) are at least comparable to industry when it comes to releasing bad stuff into the air.

I hate the acrid smell of burning plastic, but no one will do anything about it.

It's the same in Latvia. Riga wants to set up a zero-emissions zone and a toll to enter the city center, but won't ban open stoves or solid fuel burning, which pollutes much more than cars in winter.

Kraków just set up a clean transport zone; it went into full effect just few weeks ago. And people just can't shut up whining about it, even though it doesn't really put much burden on ~anyone. Most people drive petrol-powered cars (usually converted to support LPG, too), and the minimal norms for the clean transport zone are so low, it's hard to find a car that doesn't meet it. You can buy a used petrol-powered car with pocket change and it would already meet the norms.

Kraków badly needs a metro network, just like Prague and Warsaw have. That would alleviate the transport pressure a lot.

Those are useful, but not very effective usually as no one controls it after a few months, unless you set up a costly and complex certification and licence-plate monitoring system.

I am Polish and I don't see any racism in the previous comment because it was just a statement of the fact (disputable at best). I see some in yours, because you seem to suggest that race is somehow involved in what we are talking about.

I’m Polish, I don’t have to hide anything.

Despite government incentives and regulations some people burn garbage in stows. It's a local cultural thing and the state seemingly is powerless to do anything about it despite being the 20th economy in the world.

Are people not aware that is absolutely terrible for their health?

Common uneducated answer is: everyone needs something to die from. Same with cigarette smoking.

Freezing to death is even more terrible for their health. It's also much more immediate. And so is being poor.

Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen.

Hell, it's one reason I myself considered air quality issues to be overblown - I don't perceive smog. I couldn't tell you whether it's bad or good air day in Kraków - I could only tell you when the air is too clean because I get sore throat then. I no longer consider air quality to be an overblown fad, but that's because I have small children and they start coughing non-stop when the air gets bad.

It's not just poverty, but education about pollution and a common view in the post-communist countries that the common good (clean air in this case) isn't so important. It's the same with things like noise or graffitis for instance.

In Latvia you commonly see rich people with BMW SUVs behaving like this. My friends see no problem with having coal barbecue or very heavy music in the center of Riga. We often have to remind new tenants in our building the benefits of sorting waste - and they are not poor.

I wonder why post communist countries lagged behind so much in this regard? Seems like this awareness only really hit the US in the late 90s and early to mid 2000s, well after the iron curtain came down. I guess mass media must have been still siloed by language and there might not have been much english language media presence by that point sharing these ideas.

You are right in the language silo, many of those countries have also small populations, which means fewer content to consume, and a certain intellectual insularity.

I understand keeping warm, but the idea of burning garbage seems like there could have been many steps to avoid that. Raiding nearby forests. Finding scrap wood. Informal charcoal industry. I guess the trash is "free" and "effortless" but I don't understand how the smell alone doesn't put people off. I guess it has been going on so long to be normalized.

Out of curiosity, why would you burn your trash, and especially plastics? It smells and is clearly unhealthy and the caloric content is worthless compared to wood.

But it's free :)

It smells to other people. Not in the house.

Old/low quality stoves leak a lot of emissions in the house, but people don't realize it. Also, smoke finds its way back in the house quite easily. Sad that such extreme tragedy of the commons still happens.

It doesn't smell therefore it doesn't leak. /s

Several garages near my house have people living in them, and they burn anything that burns -- plastic bottles, pieces of used tires, rags soaked in used motor oil. I'm pissed as hell at them, but the country is already poor, and they have even less.

(I'm not from Poland.)

I'd suspect just small amount of datapoints with maybe bias for people installing air sensors because that particular area's air quality is bad for whatever reason (near to road, neighbour have old coal boiler etc.)

There isn't much wind there at all so the pollution can't escape. I'm not saying this isn't the residents' fault, but it isn't entirely the residents' fault.

It's almost as if slowing down the transition away from coal for political and social reasons is not such a great idea.

Coal and cars?

Looks like it clears up quite quickly.

During covid, when car traffic went to almost 0, the air quality was also extremely bad. Its mostly coal in the houses plus some people are not even using coal in their heating systems

Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.

Wrong assumption, it’s been that way long before the energy crisis started.

Why would you jump to this conclusion? I wonder why some people on internet are repeating narratives like drones.

Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/

Polish coal is said to have a high sulphur content which won't help either.

Sulfur can counteract warming (although not the carbon dioxide itself obviously). There was a brief period, right before the world stepped back from releasing sulfur into the atmosphere, when our carbon dioxide emissions were completely countered by our sulfur emissions, when it comes to global temperatures only.

Sulphur produces acid rain though, which is bad news.

Yup.

Soviet Union was unwilling to put nuclear that far west, and then after Chernobyl most nuclear construction was cancelled.

> Soviet Union was unwilling to put nuclear that far west

That seems wrong; Dukovany (and IIRC then-planned Temelin) were further to the west than most of Poland and operated just fine.

In January Germany exported more than 900GWh, in December Germany imported about 1400, but Poland also imported 290.

Berlin's air quality is on par with what you find in the middle of the forest in Poland. I've done my measurements in both places.

Germany's emissions fell by 13% since the energy crisis started. Driven by reductions in the energy sector.

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/finale-daten-fuer-2024...

But coal and lignite power production in TWh in Germany went down over the last decades? [0] Are you saying Germany is importing form Poland who is using goal power plants?

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

So did fall both internal demand and german net exports

Germany isn't importing that much. Keeping nuclear would have helped exporting more clean power, including to Poland but that's another topic

Not clean, nuclear is dirty as hell.

Nuclear is one of the cleanest sources of power, if not the cleanest period.

It requires least mining and materials over lifecycle vs any alternative per KWh. It requires least land. It's final waste volume is similar to renewables while both sectors do create toxic waste that must be stored forever (used fuel in case of nuclear and forever toxic chemicals like arsenic/lead in case of renewables)

Saying nuclear is dirty as hell means you either are ill informed or spreading lies on purpose

To give an example with Germany, probably being outpaced only by Austria in hate for nuclear power. Germans are concerned about small amounts of nuclear waste that will be stored in deep geo stable facilities (just like onkalo, soon fosmark, terradura and alikes) but germans are perfectly fine having the biggest near surface facility for storing forever toxic and dangerous chemicals on the planet, Herfa Neurode.

Not just that, many are unaware that having a repository longterm is still a must even if they don't have nuclear power at all, due to medical and research sectors

Read stuff, you polluter: https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/factsheets/nuclearen...

Thank you for proving yet again how misinformed you are, up to even spreading some nonsensical links...

Here, read these as a starting point Carbon Neutrality in the UNECE Region: Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources-> https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...

Other stats too: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-... Or even from nrel https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

Or health impact in say Germany https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z

Those guys in nirs are clearly some wannabe antinuclear influencers which are concerned about nuclear supply chain and it's overall impact but are fine with ren supply chain with even bigger impact. They seem to be concerned about CO2 impact of nuclear due to concrete but fail to mention lifecycle data per kwh as in links I've provided. They are concerned about radioactive waste but not concerned about other toxic chemicals like arsenic. They are concerned about tritium when it's a low level emitter which you can drink and occurs naturally due to the sun. Most releases of tritium, including in Fukushima are below WHO limits.

They are even concerned about some french units going offline during summer due to heat, but fail to mention even then France is top net exporter on the continent, avg heat impact affecting about 0.18% of production per year. They also fail to mention this is happening in units without cooling towers and edf isn't fixing it precisely because there's no financial value- France is exporting like crazy in this period - can check the data this summer on energy charts for confirmation. The 'article' is written in a childish manner by someone cherry picking everything to confirm own bias

I heavily recommend you to look at this topic pragmatically instead of listening to some influencers like in your link or even greenpeace which did even more damage to the environment. Germany now is suffering due to such antinuclear movements. Not only more people died due to coal still being used, but existing nuclear fleet was cheapest firm power on the grid based on merit order data, while receiving significantly less subsidies than renewables. In fact, per official bundestag inquiry and later a parliament inquiry in Bavaria, nuclear in Germany didn't receive special subsidies for production at all, unlike renewables with EEG, which alone already outpaced the cost of all french nuclear fleet

And naming me a polluter just confirms your bias and unwillingness to be informed about the topic, only to attach labels to people with different point of view

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