"Lützerath: How the government broke German climate activists’ hearts", 5. October 2022

Germany’s well-organised climate protection movements, which enjoy broad public support, are rallying around the town of Lützerath, which is under threat from coal strip mining and slated for demolition.

The German climate activists, closely allied with the Greens, have had a rough year, despite their party being in government. The long-awaited nuclear exit is shaky at best, the government is funding expensive gas purchases and extensive infrastructure to import liquefied gas (LNG), and coal power plants remain essential to energy security.

On Tuesday (4 October), the government announced its intention to re-activate two additional lignite power plants, which would see energy company RWE bulldoze one last town for the sake of coal mining.

Germany’s climate activists are outraged. “The Greens have folded before RWE. Not us,” explained Luisa Neubauer, likely the most well-known German climate activist and Greens member.

Lützerath, a tiny town of eight people as of June 2022 and the surrounding movement called “Lützerath stays” was a catalyst for the German climate movement.

As part of a compromise that resulted in the fate of Lützerath, the Greens forged an agreement that while the town would still be destroyed, coal would be phased out in the region by 2030. But considering the federal government’s envisioned coal exit date is “ideally” 2030, this is not much of a victory.

The core aspect of the agreement between the government and RWE was to turn off two coal power plants with a capacity of 3 Gigawatts (GW) in 2030, eight years earlier than the current legal framework foresaw, in exchange for sparing two plants of 1.2 GW a scheduled 2022 shut-off and letting them run until March 2024.

“Putin’s war of aggression is forcing us to temporarily make greater use of lignite so that we save gas in electricity generation. This is painful but necessary in view of the gas shortage,” explained Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens.

The Greens presented themselves in a jubilant mood. “Good news at the start of the week: The coal phase-out in the Rhenish lignite mining region is a done deal,” the party explained.

For the climate activists, though, protecting the town from strip mining for coal has become synonymous with staying on track to meet the 1.5 °C targets set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“Bad news: At the same time, you have allowed RWE to mine another 290 million tonnes of coal. That is much more than necessary and the final turning away from 1.5°C,” said Fridays for Future Germany.

The rocky path towards COP27

Heading into COP27, the international climate negotiations between the parties of the Paris Agreements, experts are worried that bulldozing Lützerath could add to Germany’s lack of credibility.

“Luetzerath is becoming a symbol for the fact that Germany is not prepared to leave enough coal in the ground,” noted Pao-Yu Oei, professor for the economics of sustainable energy transition at Europe-University Flensburg.

“Possible images of evictions in the run-up to COP negotiations can thus cause lasting damage to the international reputation of German climate policy,” he added. [...]