Culture and Environment: Poland's Coal Pit vs Miliband's Net Zero Gamble

Editorial digest April 20, 2026
Last updated : 08:21

The war with Iran has shoved fossil fuel prices through the roof, and suddenly every European government is having the same argument with itself. Double down on the energy transition, or hedge? In Silesia, 80,000 miners are watching Brussels decide their fate. In Westminster, Ed Miliband is about to pick a side. And somewhere between the coal dust and the culture pages, a Hamnet-era jewel has just resurfaced — a reminder that Britain has been arguing about what to preserve for a very long time.

Why is Poland still digging coal when the rest of the EU is walking away?

The Guardian's photo essay from the Murcki-Staszic mine in southern Poland lands like a slap. Rafal Dzuman, 49, descends 700 metres every day. He has for two decades. Coal dust has permanently tattooed a black line around his eyes — the kind of detail no think-tank modelling captures. The mine, opened in the mid-17th century, still feeds the last coal economy in an EU officially committed to the energy transition. Eighty thousand Polish jobs depend on it.

The contradiction is brutal. Worldwide, coal extraction is hitting record rates. The Iran war has sent oil and gas prices soaring. And inside Poland, the Guardian reports, voices are starting to ask out loud whether full phase-out is still worth it. This is not climate denial. This is the argument the transition was supposed to avoid — the one about whose paycheck pays for the planet.

Former pits are being converted to museums, tech parks, green spaces. Symbolic. Necessary. Not enough to feed 80,000 families.

Can Miliband sell net zero during an energy shock?

London's answer, apparently, is to accelerate. The Guardian reports that energy secretary Ed Miliband will use a speech this week to double down on Labour's net zero commitment, framing it as a direct response to Donald Trump's war with Iran. His line: "the era of clean energy security must come of age." Translation — the fossil fuel price spike is not a reason to slow the transition, it is the reason to finish it.

It is a politically audacious bet. British voters are about to feel the Iran shock on their bills. Miliband is telling them the answer is not more North Sea gas but fewer fossil fuels, faster. Whether that argument survives contact with winter heating invoices is the question nobody in Westminster wants to answer out loud.

The juxtaposition with Silesia is the whole story of European climate policy in one frame. Britain, no coal left to defend, preaching transition. Poland, still underground, asking who pays.

What does Siri Hustvedt's grief tell us about cultural memory?

Away from the pit-heads, The Guardian publishes an extraordinary piece by Siri Hustvedt on the death of her husband, the novelist Paul Auster, in April 2024 from non-small cell lung cancer. Auster, she recalls, told her that if he died of cancer it would "make a bad story" — a writer's joke that reads now like a final edit. Hustvedt writes from the Brooklyn house where he died at 6.58pm. The precision is the grief.

This is not the kind of piece that trends. It should. British and American literary culture has just lost one of its defining voices, and the account his widow gives — a diagnosis in January 2023, a scan shadow in November 2022 — is a masterclass in how serious writers treat mortality. No sentimentality. No redemption arc. Just the room, the time, the fact.

France is mourning in parallel. Nathalie Baye, four-time César winner and Spielberg's co-star in Catch Me If You Can, died on Friday aged 77 of Lewy body dementia, her family told AFP. Eighty films. Three consecutive best actress Césars from 1981. A generation of French cinema closing a door.

Why does a 1635 jewel matter in 2026?

And then, the rediscovery. The Guardian reveals exclusively that a heart-shaped mourning pendant — depicted in John Souch's 1635 painting Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of His Wife, now hanging in Manchester Art Gallery — has turned up four hundred years later. A Hamnet-era object surfacing in a Hamnet-era cultural moment, thanks to Maggie O'Farrell's novel and its film adaptation feeding renewed interest in early-modern mourning.

It is a small story with a big pulse. Mourning jewellery was how 17th-century Britain metabolised loss. A portrait turned that private grief into public art. Four centuries on, the object returns to the visible world just as Hustvedt, Baye's family, and a Polish mining town are each, in their own register, working out what to hold onto and what to let go.

What to hold onto

The Iran shock is forcing Europe to choose between protecting workers and protecting the climate, and neither Poland nor Britain has found an honest answer yet. Miliband's speech this week will test whether net zero is a policy or a slogan. And in the culture pages, from Hustvedt's Brooklyn to a Manchester gallery wall, the same quiet argument is running — what survives us, and who decides.