Michał Kurtyka

Michał Tadeusz Kurtyka is a Polish economist, and civil servant who currently serves as Secretary of State in Poland's Ministry of Energy and Environment Ministry.[1] He is the deputy minister to the Minister for Energy and Minister for the Environment, although unlike either of those ministers, he is a technocrat and non-partisan figure.

Michał Kurtyka
Secretary of State, Ministry of Energy
PresidentAndrzej Duda
Prime MinisterMateusz Morawiecki
Personal details
Born
Michał Tadeusz Kurtyka

(1973-07-20) 20 July 1973
EducationWarsaw School of Economics
École Polytechnique
Université catholique de Louvain

Kurtyka served as President of the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Katowice. The Katowice Climate Change Conference served to effect the practical implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Education

Kurtyka was educated at the Parisian École Polytechnique. He was additionally a scholarship student studying quantum optics at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, America. At NIST he worked under William D. Phillips, a Nobel laureate in physics. During his studies he also specialized in economics, in which discipline he also studied under a Nobel laureate, Jean Tirole. In economics he studied at the University of Louvain La Neuve in Belgium, and later obtained a master's degree in the subject at the Warsaw School of Economics.

Career

Kurtyka began his civil service career in 1998 as an official in the Office of the Committee for European Integration, then headed by Jan Kułakowski, in which capacity he worked on Poland's accession to the European Union.

From 2006-2008 he was a member and vice-chairman of the supervisory board of Gaz-System, Poland's natural gas infrastructure organisation.

From 2016-2018, he served as the Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Energy, before being promoted to Secretary of State (the second ranking position in the department, behind the Minister). In addition to being Secretary of State for Energy, he is also Poland's representative to the International Energy Agency.

In April 2018 it was announced he would chair the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which was held from 2–14 December 2018. The appointment of Kurtyka, as a relatively anonymous bureaucrat, marked a break from the diplomatic norms of previous climate change conferences, where more senior politicians have traditionally presided.[2] The conference agreed to cuts to pollutants, especially carbon dioxide. At the conclusion of the summit Kurtyka noted: "putting together the Paris agreement work programme is a big responsibility. It has been a long road. We did our best to leave no-one behind."[3]

In July 2018 he was additionally appointed Secretary of State in the Polish Environment Ministry, complementing his Energy Ministry function.

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References
  1. "Bio Michał Kurtyka" (PDF).
  2. Mathiesen, Apparicio, Karl, Soila (30 April 2018). "Poland appoints deputy minister to run biggest climate talks since Paris". Climate Change News. Retrieved 16 December 2018.
  3. McGrath, Matt (16 December 2018). "Climate change: COP24 deal to bring Paris pact to life". British Broadcasting Corporation. BBC News. Retrieved 16 December 2018.
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