According to World Coal Institute figures for 2007, Poland -- beside South Africa -- is the most coal-dependent country in the world, producing 94 percent of its electricity from the fossil fuel.

By comparison, Europe's biggest industrial power Germany relies on coal for only 47 percent of its power.

Each year Poland chokes out almost twice the EU average in carbon dioxide (CO2), by far the main culprit among the greenhouses gases which contribute to global warming.

Professor Wladyslaw Mielczarski of the European Energy Institute think tank attributes Poland's addiction to coal as a hangover from its communist past.

Its "dirty" power sector is part of the "inheritance from the communist era," Mielczarski told AFP.

Since the 1989 collapse of communism other pollutants such as "sulphur and nitric oxide gases have been practically eliminated from emissions but where you have coal you also have CO2," which is difficult to intercept, he said.

Even so, Poland has been making some significant headway.

By closing several communist-era industrial plants that were among the main emitters of carbon dioxide, it has managed to far exceed its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

Despite rapid economic growth and roads packed with three times as many cars as two decades ago, Poland has lowered CO2 emissions by 32 percent from 1988 levels -- Kyoto had only asked for a six percent reduction.

With more than a century's worth of hard coal reserves, experts predict it will remain Poland's dominant energy source for years to come.

Poland has no other fossil fuels to speak of and lacks the necessary conditions to take a large-scale jump into renewable energy sources such as wind farms or hydro-electric plants.

"Poland isn't ready, be it in the legal, financial or psychological sense, to launch a vast nuclear energy programme," added Mielczarski.

Instead the Polish government is focused on trying to increase energy efficiency and developing new coal technologies as it seeks to achieve stringent EU energy targets.

The EU has fixed an ambitious triple objective for itself to achieve by 2020, the so-called 20-20-20 goals; a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels, bringing renewable energy use up to 20 percent of the total, and an overall cut of 20 percent in energy use.

Poland, along with several of the EU's newer eastern European member states, is much more coal-driven then its western European colleagues and feels the blanket CO2 targets don't take sufficient account of its starting point.

It is threatening to torpedo the package by vetoing it at the EU's December 11-12 summit in Brussels.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, seeking to tie up his country's EU presidency with a green bow before it ends on December 31, intends to travel to Poland on December 6 to appease Warsaw and its fellow eastern European member states.

The UN climate change conference in Poznan, running from December 1 until December 12, aims to advance towards a new global agreement for slashing greenhouse gases and helping poor countries exposed to climate change.

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