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Inside Germany's last occupied village

Lützerath, climate protests and the state of brown coal mining in Germany

On the 4th of October 2022 Economics and Climate Minister Robert Habeck, of the Green party, said that, in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, the government intends to cease digging for brown coal (lignite) in 2030, eight years earlier than originally planned. Nevertheless, he said, the town of Lützerath will be torn down to make way for more mining.Implications:Even though ceasing mining way earlier than originally planned, energy company RWE, one of Germany’s biggest energy players, will be able to access around 280 million tons of lignite under Lützerath, enough, after some estimates, to overshoot the climate goal of the Paris Argeement.This is a blow in the face of green activists and of the fundamentals of the Green party, as they fought for ages not only against surface mining of brown coal in Germany, but also to keep the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. Lützerath’s inhabitants have been relocated (the last one moved out just a week ago), but the village is occupied by climate activists and with the visit of Greta Thunberg last year became a beacon of hope for the „Fridays for Future“ activists. The fact that RWE is allowed to proceed with the hitherto postponed erasement of the town is drawing forceful resistance. („The frontier of 1,5 degrees runs through Lützerath“, is one slogan. On the weekend of the 12th of November, thousands of people dropped in to demonstrate against this further extraction and the erasure of the town.I went to Lützerath to live with the occupiers to understand what drives them and to see how they dig in for the final fight, which they fear will be the eviction by police force in the nearest future.

The activists of "Lüterath lebt!" not only fight for the preservation of the village but are world wide connected to other activist - be it in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, the Zapatista movement in Mexico or the "Fridays for future" movement. Background:
- Until today Germany is the world’s biggest producer of brown coal (lignite).
- Until today 18 percent of Germany’s electrical energy stem from power plants heated by coal (the second biggest energy source after renewables).
- Lignite is the dirtiest coal to burn as it produces more CO2 than (hard)coal and three times more than natural gas.
- Lignit is produced in open pit mining with surface areas that stretch over areas which combined are almost equal to the size of the German state Saarland, (20 times the size of Paris with its suburbs).
- Until today almost 400 towns and more than a 125,000 people have been dislocated, many more affected by by-products of lignite mining.
- According to some estimates, the mechanical extraction of lignite uses 40 percent of the energy lignite burning sets free.