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Central Europe
December 7, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 17
coal incrementally and without job losses and societal degradation in coal regions.
Poland also proposes to use forests as “carbon sinks” to capture CO2 emissions so as to ease emissions reduction demands on industry and therefore economies. That, however, could only have a limited effect, research has shown.
“There’s no strategy today to give up on coal in Poland,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said at the summit.
University founded by George Soros forced out of Budapest
bne IntelliNews
The Central European University (CEU) announced on December 3 that it will relocate all US- accredited degree programmes to Vienna from September 2019, as Hungary's higher education law forbids it to accept new students, putting
an end to a 20 month saga on the future of the university.
The university said that it has taken all steps over the last 20 months to comply with Hungarian legislation, launching educational activities in the US that were certified by local authorities. It met the legal criteria by reaching an agreement with Bard College in New York State a year ago.
The amended higher education act requires foreign colleges and universities in Hungary to operate on the basis of an interstate agreement and to run a campus in the country in which they are based.
The government of Viktor Orban has made it clear that it has no intention of signing the agreement,
For now, “coal is our strategic resource and giving it up would be difficult because it guarantees Poland energy independence,” Duda added.
Duda’s words will not go down well with advocates of a faster decarbonisation, who say climate science leaves little choice but to step up phasing out coal in Poland and globally.
Duda’s political declarations aside, the main task of the Katowice summit remains to ensure politics catches up with climate science.
A handful of protestors outside the CEU campus in Budapest on December 3.
which would have ensured the operation of CEU in Budapest for the long-term, it said in a statement.
A month ago, the institution's board of trustees set a December 1 deadline for the signing of the agreement.
It has been clear from the outset that the attacks on the university were not based on academic grounds as both the US and the Hungarian authorities have certified the excellence of the university's academic programmes. The CEU was the best ranked Hungarian university in global rankings.
The CEU was founded in 1991 by US-Hungarian financier and philanthropist George Soros, who also funds various liberal NGOs in Hungary, which has aroused the country's populist leader Orban's ire for offering a liberal education.
Ironically, Orban was granted a scholarship