一位波兰人看2026年9月的世界：从霍尔木兹海峡到自家取暖

Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating.

By Tom Wojcik · Figures as of 26 September 2026

I am a Pole. My country borders Europe’s largest war since 1945, heats itself with coal and imported gas, and arms itself on borrowed money. From here the news does not arrive as separate stories.

Every generation believes it is living through the end of something. What is different in 2026 is that the crises have stopped arriving one at a time. A war in the Gulf becomes the price of my diesel, smaller harvests from Sudan to Yemen and a half-empty gas cavern in Bavaria.

The world is not ending. But for thirty years we swapped buffers for dependencies, because a supplier is cheaper than a stockpile and a guarantee is cheaper than an army. When a dependency failed, we did not rebuild the buffer. We found another dependency. Every swap worked for as long as the thing at the other end was there. This year, several of those things were tested together.

One strait, three crises

Start about 4,000 kilometres south-east of Warsaw. US and Israeli military operations against Iran began in late February. Since March, Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed with drones, missiles, mines and small boats.

Tanker traffic through it has fallen by more than 90 percent. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest supply disruption the oil market has ever seen. What follows is that closure travelling in three directions at once: into fuel, into food and into this winter’s heating.

Markers on the chart open when you hover over or tap them.

A ceasefire that did not hold

A fragile ceasefire pulled prices back to pre-war levels in early summer, then broke down. By early September Brent crude was near $97 a barrel, up 19 percent in a month, by mid-month it was around $105, and on 24 September it touched $108.

On 22 September Iran handed Washington a written road map: a regional ceasefire of up to 60 days, a phased reopening of the strait and an end to the American naval blockade. Washington rejected it, and by one report the president expects to resume bombing after the November midterm elections.

The detour around the Gulf runs through the Red Sea’s own chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandab, where Houthi forces seized a key Yemeni port this month.

Somebody is getting rich

A chart doing the rounds on investing forums this month shows a tanker-shipping fund going parabolic. It is real. The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF, which tracks the cost of hiring a crude tanker, rose more than 600 percent in the first two months of the war and was up more than 2,300 percent for the year by early September. Day rates for some supertankers went from under $100,000 before the war to a record of about $860,000 on 10 September.

Shipping stocks+68%

Tanker stocks+120%

Tanker freight ETF+2,300%

Gain in 2026 to early September, drawn to the same scale.

The fund is tiny, and its own manager says rates will fall if the strait reopens. But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account.

The war next door is burning the same fuel

Ukrainian drones have hit Russian refineries at least 70 times this year, roughly once every four days by the IEA’s count, pushing Russia’s refining output to a two-decade low. Half of its six biggest diesel plants cut or halted output this month, and Moscow has restricted fuel exports.

US diesel passed $6 a gallon for the first time on 10 September. The American president has phoned Kyiv to ask it to stop hitting diesel targets.

France: a run on the pumps

A viral post in mid-September declared that France was running out of fuel. The official data is less dramatic and more instructive. On 20 September, 15 percent of stations had run out of petrol or diesel, up from 11 percent two days earlier. In Grand Est it was 20 percent.

The government rules out a shortage. About nine in ten of the dry stations belong to TotalEnergies, which caps petrol at €1.99 a litre, and drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. The official count also understates the gaps: a station is listed only when it is out of every petrol grade or out of diesel.

A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.

Diesel moves food, and Hormuz moves what grows it

The strait normally carries up to 30 percent of internationally traded fertiliser. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that scarcity will cut yields and tighten food supplies through late 2026 and into 2027.

The damage is delayed. Fertiliser that arrives late cannot recover lost yield, and because people keep eating grain planted before the disruption, the system looks fine until the smaller harvests come in.

The baseline was already grim

2025 was the first year in the history of the Global Report on Food Crises with two confirmed famines, in Gaza and Sudan. Funding for food assistance fell an estimated 59 percent between 2022 and 2025.

The World Food Programme estimates that sustained high oil prices could push up to 45 million more people into acute food insecurity.

The harvest at home

Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season. Last year there was a glut across the continent; in Poland alone growers lifted about 7 million tonnes, 18 percent more than the year before, and by spring farmers were selling below cost. So growers in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany planted 14 percent less. Then came five heatwaves and a drought. Their growers’ organisation now expects a harvest down 25 percent, one of the smallest in a decade, and in Belgium the price of potatoes for processing went from €10 to €150 a tonne within days.

Grain is dearer too. Milling wheat on the Paris exchange has gone from €191 a tonne in January to about €245, a rise of 28 percent, and maize is up 36 percent. At Polish purchase points wheat has gone from 778 zloty a tonne to about 900, and maize from 748 to over 930. Back in May, traders were already pointing to frost and drought here, drought in France and America, and record energy prices.

Self-sufficient, and paying anyway

By Credit Agricole Bank Polska’s count, on FAO data, we are the most food self-sufficient country in the EU, covering our own needs in seven of nine food groups, everything except fish and vegetable fats. In a normal year we grow about a fifth more grain than we use, and we are among the world’s ten largest food exporters. If any country should be insulated from a food shock, it is this one.

It is not, because self-sufficiency is counted in tonnes and prices are set elsewhere. Polish grain buyers follow the Paris exchange with a lag of three to seven days. When the world pays more, our grain can simply leave, so the price at home has to match. And the harvest itself is made of things we do not control: diesel at a record, fertiliser that has to sail through Hormuz, and water that the Vistula no longer carries. Poland can feed itself. It cannot price itself.

We traded one dependency for another

After 2022 we Europeans replaced Russian pipeline gas with liquefied natural gas (LNG) bought on a global market, and Qatar, shipping close to a fifth of the world’s LNG through Hormuz, was one of that market’s pillars. QatarEnergy declared force majeure in March. Drone damage at Ras Laffan has taken about 17 percent of capacity offline, with repairs estimated at three to five years.

In August roughly one Qatari cargo made it through the strait, against a pre-war flow of some 6.5 million tonnes a month, dozens of cargoes.

Gas storage is at a record low for the date

EU storage67%

Germany56%

Share of capacity filled, mid-September. Dashed line: the EU’s 90 percent target, which countries may undershoot by up to 10 points in difficult market conditions.

The summer heat that drove up cooling demand also forced nuclear plants to curtail output, and wind generation was weak. The new dependency ran through a chokepoint about 39 kilometres wide at its narrowest.

Poland made the same swap, with oil

After 2022 we stopped buying Russian crude, and Saudi Aramco became the main supplier to Orlen, Poland’s state-controlled oil refiner, at about 40 percent. That oil reached us without passing Hormuz, through a 1,200-kilometre pipeline across the Arabian desert to the Red Sea. On 10 September drones shut that pipeline. Aramco cancelled late-September cargoes and has reportedly told its European buyers to expect none in October. The pipeline restarted on 22 September at a trickle, with no date for full flow.

Orlen is buying on the spot market from Norway, Britain, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and the Americas, and a new deal with Equinor covers up to a quarter of its refining capacity. Orlen says its refineries are being supplied without disruption. But an energy journalist, Jakub Wiech, writes that a pump price starting with a nine, 9 zloty a litre, is no longer out of reach.

We have been burned on the spot market before

Orlen set up a Swiss trading arm in 2022 to find oil that was not Russian, and gave it $600 million to work with. In November 2023, during a brief easing of US sanctions, that unit agreed to buy six million barrels of cheap Venezuelan crude. Within days it wired a $230 million advance to a Dubai intermediary, with no collateral and no bank guarantee. According to a Financial Times investigation, most of the money was turned into Tether, a crypto token pegged to the dollar, and handed over on USB sticks to brokers in Caracas hotels and restaurants.

One cargo worth about $29 million arrived. Chartered tankers waited off Venezuela for months, at a cost of some $72 million. The state now puts the total loss at about 1.6 billion zloty, or $424 million. In August, Warsaw prosecutors charged three former managers, who deny wrongdoing and face up to 25 years in prison.

It is worth remembering now, with the company shopping in a hurry again. A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know.

The old buffer, coal, is running thin

July 20255.65

July 20263.2

Coal held at Polish mines, million tonnes.

Then there is heat. Stockpiles at our mines are down roughly 43 percent in a year, and the country’s biggest miner expects its own heaps to shrink to practically nothing by December.

In mid-September the head of Orlen Termika told an industry conference that a frosty winter would mean running out of coal, with everyone “scraping along the bottom.” He was dismissed the next day, though the company did not give that as the official reason.

The household fallback is gone by law

Since September 2019 Kraków has banned coal and wood in boilers, stoves and even fireplaces. Residents are left with gas, heating oil, electricity or district heat.

The ban was a serious answer to a serious problem, in a city notorious for its winter smog. But it shows the same pattern as everything else here: a sound policy that removed a redundancy on the assumption that the replacement fuel would always be there.

A strong El Niño points to a milder winter. How hard this winter is now depends on the weather.

The bill comes due

Now go about 8,600 kilometres east of Warsaw. For years the Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero, so Japan’s savings went abroad. Pension funds and insurers poured trillions into foreign bonds, and Japan became the largest foreign owner of US government debt, with about $1.2 trillion of Treasuries. It was the world’s most reliable lender, and it helped keep borrowing cheap for everyone, America above all.

The patient lender is going home

That era is ending. On 18 September the Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to 1.25 percent, the highest since 1995, and a former board member expects a rise roughly every three months, towards 2 percent by the middle of 2027. Japan’s 10-year yield crossed 3 percent and reached 3.1 percent on 25 September, the highest since August 1996, pulled up by oil in the inflation numbers, by the Bank’s own hikes and by American yields. Japanese investors sold $29.6 billion of US debt in the first quarter alone.

Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result.

America: the borrower at the other end

The US 10-year yield reached 5.2 percent on 25 September, the highest in nineteen years, since the summer before the 2007 crash. On 16 September the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023, and markets price another rise. The drivers are the ones this essay is about: oil showing up in inflation expectations, a deficit that keeps growing, and weak demand at a Treasury auction, which is what happens when the patient buyer stays home. A 30-year mortgage now costs 7.12 percent, up from 6.09 in February.

Home purchase−19%

Refinancing−65%

Mortgage applications, week to 11 September, against the same week last year.

Buyers are pausing and builder confidence is at a 12-month low. This is how a bond sell-off reaches a household: through the monthly payment.

Does America’s housing weather reach Poland?

My instinct says that whatever happens to American mortgages arrives here a little later. The research half agrees. House prices across rich countries move together, more so with each decade, and the IMF’s explanation is financial conditions that mirror America’s. After the American bust of 2006 it took about two years to reach us. In 2021 our central bank raised rates five months before the Fed, and both markets froze in the same year.

This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. The headline says Polish banks lent a record 14.8 billion zloty for housing in July. Look underneath it. The average loan is at a record because prices are, and more than a fifth of new lending is people refinancing old loans. Meanwhile developers in the seven biggest cities sit on a record 70,000 unsold flats, nearly 30 percent of them stale stock. Sales fell by about a tenth in the second quarter, though they were still above a year earlier, new supply is shrinking, selling takes longer and prices have stopped rising without coming down. Analysts disagree on why: some point to dearer credit, others to fear, with four in ten consumers expecting unemployment to rise. It looks like the American picture, for partly different reasons. Volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait.

And the Polish loan is the worse product. An American locks in a rate for thirty years. Here the regulator’s minimum is five, which is what most banks offer, and a single bank, BNP Paribas, goes to ten. Its own example this month shows a five-year fix at 5.95 percent, about a point below America’s 6.97, for one sixth of the certainty. After five years the rate floats, and the risk is mine.

Meanwhile, shares are at records

The S&P 500 set an all-time high in August. Seven technology companies make up about a third of the index, the same concentration as at the peak of the dot-com bubble, and JPMorgan’s chief technical strategist says the pattern in AI shares resembles the months before that bubble burst.

The bulls have an answer. Nvidia trades at about 45 times last year’s earnings, where Cisco traded at 472 times in 2000, and today’s leaders are hugely profitable.

Whether it is a bubble I cannot tell you. What I can see is a stock market priced for perfection sitting on top of a bond market that is repricing everything, and anyone with a pension owns both.

Europe pays more too

The same repricing is running through my own continent. Germany’s 10-year yield reached 3.57 percent in mid-September, the highest since 2009. France pays about 4.5 percent, the most since 2008, and has lately paid more than Italy as its debt heads for 118 percent of GDP before the 2027 presidential election. Britain’s 10-year gilt touched 5.29 percent, the highest since 2007.

The ECB has raised rates twice this year, with energy prices in the eurozone up 14 percent on a year ago. Each chip on the chart is what a government paid to borrow for ten years in mid-September.

Why a Pole watches Tokyo

Our own 10-year yield went above 6.4 percent this month, the highest in about three and a half years. It was 4.88 percent in February, before the war. Servicing the national debt will cost 90 billion zloty this year, 19 percent more than last, and Poland has raised defence spending faster than any other NATO member.

A state that must arm itself, heat its cities and look after an ageing population needs patient lenders. The largest pool of patient savings in the world is drifting home at exactly the moment everyone needs to borrow.

The buffer we are missing at home

The draft 2027 budget keeps the overall public deficit at 7.1 percent of GDP, and the state budget alone is a record 282.6 billion zloty in the red, with defence at 4.5 percent of GDP. Public debt passed the EU’s 60 percent ceiling for the first time early this year. Fitch and Moody’s have both moved Poland’s outlook to negative, and both point to the stand-off between the government and President Nawrocki, who has issued more vetoes than any president before him.

The sharpest was over €44 billion in EU defence loans. The president says they would indebt Poles for decades and threaten our sovereignty. The prime minister says blocking them weakens our defences. Whoever is right, lenders see a state that cannot agree on how to pay for a war it fears, with an election due in autumn 2027.

This is what the 6.4 percent is. A country on NATO’s front line pays it for a reason. Some of that premium is the front line, and some is a 7 percent deficit and a world that has repriced all debt. Either way, the number is what lenders think of us, and nobody wants to find out what those bonds are worth on the day Article 5 is invoked. The counter-argument is that the yield is the payment for exactly this risk, and every “safe” currency in this chapter has a debt problem of its own.

The security umbrella folds

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in its fifth year. Poland joined NATO in 1999 on the premise that the American guarantee would never be in question. The Pentagon is now weighing a withdrawal of 25,000 to 40,000 of the roughly 80,000 US troops in Europe, with a final recommendation due on 6 November and no decision yet made.

Congress has written speed bumps into law, requiring certification and consultation before troop levels drop below 76,000. The 5,000 already leaving Germany would by themselves take the force below that line. On 17 September Donald Trump announced “major progress” towards a permanent US Army base in Poland. In May the same administration halted a 4,000-strong rotation here without warning. I will believe in the base when I can see its fence. Deterrence rests on belief, and mine is not what it was.

Two kilometres from my country

On Sunday 13 September a Russian jet-powered drone destroyed a locomotive at Yahodyn station, two kilometres from the Polish border. A diplomatic train carrying the former British prime minister Boris Johnson, Britain’s national security adviser and other European officials home from a conference in Kyiv had crossed into Poland about half an hour earlier, running ahead of schedule because of the threat of strikes. The train that was hit had been evacuated fifteen minutes before, and nobody was hurt.

Russia says it struck railway infrastructure. Ukraine’s railway says the diplomatic train could have been the target. Donald Tusk called an emergency meeting and said Russian actions were “getting closer and closer to our border.” Four days later he gave the speech on the next card.

A warning from my own prime minister

On 17 September, the 87th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of 1939, Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament that Russia intends to send drones or missiles into the territory of Ukraine’s allies this autumn and winter, and then call the strikes accidental. He cited intelligence from NATO allies, Ukraine and Poland’s own services.

The aim, he said, is to paralyse NATO, or at least to show that Article 5 exists only in theory. He stressed that nothing suggests an invasion. Germany has meanwhile blamed Russia for a drone attack in August on Leipzig airport, a NATO logistics hub. Moscow denies it.

The week after the speech looked like the thing he described. On 23 September a Russian military helicopter crossed briefly into Polish airspace from Kaliningrad, north of Braniewo. The same day a fire broke out at a Starlink ground station near Warsaw that connects Ukraine, among others, to the satellite network. The digital affairs minister called it arson in a “clearly Russian” style, then conceded he could not say for certain. Two days later the interior ministry published instructions for an air attack and said the country’s 85,000 shelter points, with room for 64 percent of the population, will be signposted by the end of the year. The foreign minister’s words were that Russia is planning something big this year.

Read this next to the last two cards. The test Tusk describes is a test of belief, and it arrives just as the Pentagon decides how many Americans stay.

Peace talks, again

US-led talks resumed in early September after a six-month pause, with Donald Trump’s envoys carrying a proposal whose contents nobody outside has seen. In July, people close to the Kremlin said Vladimir Putin has no plans to resume talks with Ukraine until his forces take the rest of the Donbas.

For Poland the outcome decides what kind of neighbour we get. It also decides the future of almost a million Ukrainian refugees who are still here. Their special status ended in March, most of them work, and they fill jobs that a shrinking country cannot.

The underwriter walks away

The American guarantee was never only military. The same country underwrote the world’s aid budget and the public-health institutions much of the world copied. In 2025 it began to withdraw from all three.

USAID supplied more than 40 percent of global humanitarian funding until January 2025. Then Washington gutted it, other donors followed, and global health aid fell by nearly 27 percent in a year. Deaths of children under five rose in 2025 for the first time this century, from 4.6 to an estimated 4.8 million. Modelling in The Lancet Global Health projects how many additional deaths follow by 2030 as the US and other donors cut aid.

The retreat from expertise shows inside America too. Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000. The country logged 2,288 cases in 2025 and has already passed that this year, with about 3,500 by mid-September across 47 jurisdictions, and is judged highly likely to lose its elimination status in November.

The lazy word for this is “idiocracy.” I have used it myself, and it is wrong. Measles did not come back because people got stupid. It came back because vaccination had been slipping for years, and the government that should have pushed back began arguing with its own experts instead.

Little of this touches Poland directly. It matters here because it shows what kind of guarantor we have. The troop review, the aid cuts and the vaccine politics are one government changing its mind, and a country that built its safety on a single American promise should notice how quickly the other promises were withdrawn.

Everything so far happened in the last year and a half. Underneath it, three slower clocks are running, and they set the terms on which we meet the next shock.

The climate is changing what our land and rivers can carry. The technology that is making a few companies very rich is letting them hire fewer of us at the bottom. And my country is running out of people. None of these will be settled by a ceasefire, and each of them takes away a buffer we used to take for granted, or adds a dependency we have not yet paid for.

The physical world isn’t waiting

August 2026 was the warmest August on record and tied July 2023 as the hottest month ever measured.

The developing El Niño has already broken the record for strength and is still growing, and scientists say 2027 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record. On 22 August the average surface temperature of the world’s oceans reached 21.1°C, edging past the record set during the last El Niño in 2024. At home, in June, Poland used about 7 percent more electricity than a year earlier, mostly because air conditioners ran through a record heatwave, and in the same summer the country set a new national heat record of 40.5°C, beating a mark that had stood since 1921.

On water, a UN University report published in January argues that more and more river basins and aquifers can no longer return to their historical normal. Its point is that the word “crisis” implies a temporary emergency followed by recovery, and in many places that no longer describes reality. The report’s term is “water bankruptcy.”

The abstraction ends at the Vistula. In Warsaw the river fell to 94 centimetres this month, the lowest since standardised measurements began in the 1950s, after records of 102 and 100 in August, 98 early this month and 104 last September. The bottom of the normal range at that gauge is 180. The weather institute has 90 hydrological drought warnings in force across the country. At Annopol the level is the lowest in more than 70 years. In Warsaw the city ferries have not sailed since late July, and 56 percent of Poles say they notice the effects. Low water also took about 2,000 megawatts of coal-fired power offline in August, because the plants at Kozienice and Połaniec are cooled by the river, and the grid operator invoked emergency measures three times over the summer, against twice in the previous eight years.

Poland is not without buffers here. It has about a hundred reservoirs big enough to count, half of them built before the war, for a climate in which rain came steadily. Less of it falls now, and what falls comes in bursts that a reservoir on one river cannot catch. One Warsaw paper wrote that the river is scraping along the bottom, the same words the sacked heating boss used about our coal.

An economy that needs fewer of us

The IT eldorado is over, and the people who built their lives on it are finding out what it rested on. The official statistics are slow to show it. The people living through it are not.

About 120,000 tech jobs were cut worldwide in the first half of this year, and the first quarter alone saw more than twice as many as a year earlier. May was the worst month for US tech job cuts in almost two years. Amazon has shed 30,000 corporate roles in two rounds, Meta a tenth of its staff, Block nearly half. These are companies reporting record revenue, and Amazon’s chief executive has said in plain words that AI agents mean the firm will need fewer people for some of the jobs done today. Some analysts think AI is partly the excuse, and that the savings pay for data centres. For the person laid off, the difference is academic.

In Poland the party ended in 2023, when IT job postings fell by a third in a year. The market that has come back since is a different one. Postings are up sharply in 2026, but more than 90 percent of them are for mid-level and senior people. Juniors get about 5 percent, and an entry-level listing draws 47 applications on average, 146 for a junior frontend role. In Kraków, where nearly half of all corporate jobs are in business services, group layoffs have run into the thousands two years in a row. HSBC is cutting about 400 jobs there and moving the work to India, and Shell has let 300 people go.

I have to be honest about what the headline numbers say, because they say something different. Kraków’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent in August, up from about 2 percent at the end of 2024. In America recent graduates faced 5.6 percent unemployment against 4.2 percent overall, a Stanford study puts employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations about 19 percent below where it would otherwise be, and economists still argue about whether AI is the cause. Mass white-collar unemployment is not in the data. What is in the data is a ladder with its bottom rungs sawn off, and a middle class that has stopped feeling safe.

Remote work is where it bites hardest. Those who have a remote job mostly still have it, but new ones have dried up. Postings offering remote or hybrid work peaked at more than 10 percent of American job ads in 2022, and today only about 4 percent of new postings are fully remote, each drawing more than two and a half times the applications of an office job. On one of Poland’s biggest IT job boards, hybrid overtook remote this year for the first time in years.

So picture the engineer who spent the good years building a house two hours from any city, on a salary the local economy could never pay. While the job lasts, nothing has changed. On the day it ends there is nothing within driving distance, and the remote market that once competed for them now draws a crowd for every opening. They were rich, and on paper they still are.

And driving distance has shrunk. Petrol in Poland rose by more than a zloty a litre in the first days of September, when the reduced VAT on fuel expired just as Hormuz tightened again, and diesel reached a record 8.89 zloty in mid-September and has since passed 9 in some regions. Take the classic commute between Katowice and Kraków, about 160 kilometres a day. At today’s prices that is roughly 90 zloty of petrol for every day at the office, close to 1,900 zloty a month, and some 330 zloty more than in August. The job in the next city, which used to be the fallback, pays less every time the price board changes.

It is the same swap at household scale. A buffer, the job market within driving distance, traded for a dependency on one kind of employer staying generous. In 2021 it was the rational choice. So, a year later, was Qatari gas.

Growing old

Underneath all of this, my country is quietly disappearing.

Poland’s fertility rate fell to 1.07 in 2025, a record low and barely half the level of 1990. It is lower than Japan’s. About 238,000 babies were born last year, the fewest since the Second World War, and 406,000 people died. The population has fallen almost every year since 2012 and stood at about 37.2 million at the end of June. If birth rates stay where they are, the statistics office’s own simulation puts it at 29.4 million by 2060, and Eurostat’s forecast for 2100 is 25.6 million. Nearly a quarter of Poles are already of retirement age, against one in eight in 1990.

We are not an outlier, and we are not the extreme: South Korea was at 0.8 last year. A demographer who sits on the Polish president’s family council points out that practically all of Europe has seen fertility drop sharply in the last three or four years. Higher child benefit and renewed IVF funding have not halted the slide, and the social insurance institution calls it unrealistic to expect migration to fill the gap.

So who will do the work, and who will look after us? Migration, later retirement and more people in work can each cover part of the gap. For the rest, the answer on offer is machines. More than half of all the factory robots installed in the world in 2024, 54 percent, went into Chinese plants. China’s working stock of about two million robots is four and a half times Japan’s, and Chinese suppliers’ share of their own home market rose from 30 to 57 percent in four years. Beijing’s new five-year plan puts AI-powered robots at the centre of its industrial strategy, and by one industry estimate Chinese firms already account for close to 90 percent of the humanoid robots shipped worldwide. The frontier AI such machines will need is, for now, mostly American, though Beijing plans to change that.

The robotics federation itself cautions that humanoids in real production are still demonstrators and pilot projects, so this is a hope and not a plan. But follow it through. A continent that swapped Russian gas for Qatari LNG would be replacing its missing workers with machines made in China, running software written in China or America. For a country like mine that is a third dependency, on top of energy and defence, and it arrives just as the money to pay for it gets more expensive.

The common thread

What I see from Poland is not a dozen separate crises. It is one design flaw, viewed from a place with less slack than most: for thirty years we swapped buffers for dependencies, and called the saving efficiency.

Supply chains ran just in time. One strait carried about a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas, and when Europe lost its Russian gas it bought replacement gas from the same strait. One country’s savers kept everyone’s borrowing cheap. One ally guaranteed a continent’s defence, funded more than 40 percent of the world’s humanitarian aid and set the standard for what counted as expertise. A generation of engineers built their lives on one kind of employer.

The slower clocks work the same way. Our reservoirs were built for a wetter, steadier climate, so a dry summer now takes power stations offline. We are not having the workers we will need, so the best hope on offer is to buy robots from China. Each is a buffer we used to have, or a dependency we are about to take on.

None of it is irreversible, and not everything is getting worse. Europe burns 10 to 15 percent less gas than in 2021, partly thanks to renewables, and the American death rate fell to a record low last year. But a system without buffers gets through one shock at a time, and this year several arrived at once.

What I am preparing for

I cannot forecast any of this. What I can do is decide what I would regret not having done.

Two official statements frame everything below. The European Commission says there is no immediate security-of-supply concern for the winter of 2026–27. And the Polish government stresses that its household Safety Guide is voluntary and does not signal a rising threat. I believe both. I also notice that the guide exists, and that it asks every household to be able to cope alone for 72 hours.

So I prepare for the boring version of each crisis, because that is the likely one: hours without power, not months; queues and prices, not collapse. I also prepare for the version in which the strait reopens and everything looks fine, because that has happened once already this year. The early-summer ceasefire pulled oil back to pre-war prices within weeks, before it collapsed. A Qatari plant that needs three to five years of repairs does not care about the next ceasefire, and fertiliser that was not spread this season cannot be spread in retrospect. Relief is not repair. The buffers would be exactly as thin as before.

Fuel first, because that is where this year has already reached me. I cut the kilometres I must drive and the energy my home needs before I cut anything else. I fix the rate on what I owe for as long as a bank will let me, which here means five years, and I keep more cash than feels clever. I expect price caps and rationing, and I expect them to create queues, because that is what a price cap did in France.

Heat and power next. Before winter I want to know how my own heating behaves in a power cut, because a gas boiler, a pellet stove and a district-heating substation all need electricity to run. Ukraine has lived the schedule of two hours with power and eight without, and in tower blocks that meant no heating, no water pressure and no lifts, while houses with a gas supply coped far better. Ecuador reached 14 hours a day without power in 2024 with no war at all, because of drought. So I hold water and food that needs no cooking, a radio, torches and a battery I can recharge in the hours when power is on, and I have found out where my municipality would open a warm, powered room. People also die from running generators indoors.

Water, which surprised me. Our big coal plants are cooled with river water, and in 2015 a heatwave ended with power rationed for 1,600 of the country’s largest companies. So I treat water as something that can run out: a rain barrel, a garden that needs less, a look at where my town’s supply comes from. From 2027 our power plants will be allowed to cool with treated sewage water. That is what adaptation looks like: unglamorous, late and better than nothing.

And the test my prime minister warned about. Not tanks; he has said plainly that nothing suggests an invasion. It looks like September 2025, when Russian drones crossed into Poland, airports closed for hours and a NATO member fired shots for the first time in this war. So I know where the nearest shelter is, which is about to get easier once the shelter points are signposted, I keep documents and some cash at hand, and I have agreed a meeting place with my family, as the Safety Guide asks. Beyond that I would try hardest not to panic, because panic is the product being sold.

Read that list again and it is the same one every time: water, cash, a fixed rate, fewer kilometres, a way to stay warm without the grid. They are buffers, the small household kind. I cannot rebuild the national ones. I can rebuild mine, and I would rather do it in a boring year.

Sources

Figures reflect reporting available on 26 September 2026. Several are fast-moving and some come from single outlets; where a number rests on a vendor, an advocacy group or an industry estimate, the text says so.