Lützerath: the picturesque village at the heart of Germany’s climate controversy

“It seems unbelievable that in 2023, climate activists in Germany should need to block massive excavators readying to devour a village and the coal seam below it,” said Stuart Braun in Deutsche Welle (Bonn). Yet that’s just what has been happening in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

For the past two years, energy giant RWE has been digging up 35km2 of countryside around the picturesque village of Lützerath, destroying 20 other villages in the process and turning the whole area into desert. Why? Because 25 million tonnes of lignite, the most polluting sort of coal, is pulled up from the ground beneath it each year.

Last Saturday, 35,000 people – Greta Thunberg among them – marched to Lützerath to demand the village be spared and to protest any further extension of the Garzweiler opencast lignite mine. Too late: the village’s last residents left weeks ago, having sold up to RWE.

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The previous week things had turned nasty when police in riot gear moved in to try to clear 1,000 or so activists holed up there and were met with Molotov cocktails. Yet however ugly the reaction, the activists’ aim is a worthy one. Germany is already Europe’s biggest polluter: this deep mine will just add to its emissions.

A green success story?

Lützerath has become a “place of pilgrimage” for climate activists, said Rainer Haubrich in Die Welt (Berlin). But what they prefer to overlook is that Garzweiler is small potatoes compared with what is going on elsewhere. Some 1,380 coal-fired power plants are being planned or built worldwide: China alone has commissioned 226 in the past five years.

In fact, you could argue that Lützerath is a green success story, said Mathias Brodkorb in Cicero (Berlin). Under a deal struck with local and national governments in October, RWE pledged to phase out coal entirely in North Rhine-Westphalia by 2030. That’s eight years earlier than scheduled: according to ministers, it will cut the amount of lignite that would otherwise have been mined by 280 million tonnes.

It also meant that five other villages due to be destroyed were saved. “That alone would be enough to justify the evacuation and demolition of Lützerath”, even before you factor in that Russia’s war on Ukraine is putting Germany’s energy security at risk.

Actually, the lignite beneath Lützerath won’t do anything to improve Germany’s energy security, said Anja Stehle in Die Zeit (Hamburg). Studies show that coal from the current mining area will be sufficient to tide Germany over as it switches to renewables.

Damage to climate goals

It’s all the more extraordinary that a coalition government that includes the Greens should have given the go-ahead to this plan, said Markus Balser in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich). It will do huge damage to its climate goals: Germany is already Europe’s biggest consumer of lignite – it generates a third of its electricity from coal. After this, the chances of it hitting those goals look very slim indeed.

A second major casualty, however, is the Green Party itself. Many of its younger members will never forgive the Green ministerial team – and the vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, in particular – for what they see as a betrayal. He may be doing the right thing, but he may not survive the doing of it.