Erkelenz, Berlin It’s still dark when the sirens wail in Lützerath on Wednesday morning. For the activists who occupied the village to protect it from opencast lignite mining, this means the highest alert level: the evacuation of the village has begun.
With emergency services from all over Germany, the police surrounded Lützerath completely in the course of the morning. On the edge of the Rhenish Garzweiler lignite opencast mine, demonstrators and officials are sometimes only one meter apart. Hundreds of climate protectors have been making a pilgrimage to the west of North Rhine-Westphalia for weeks. Here, the energy company RWE plans to dredge the lignite deposits under Lützerath. And the same there.
Officials stand in small and large groups in front of the houses, tree houses and self-erected barricades and hardly move. It’s the calm before the storm. Finally, the hundreds break through the blockades and advance into the village, dismantle barricades and arrest the first activists. At the same time, for the first time, heavy equipment with utensils for fence construction is approaching near the demolition edge.
Things are getting serious for the activists. For the last time, the police are calling for a peaceful evacuation via loudspeaker, and from now on coercive measures will be used. Safe conduct had previously been assured at the trigger, “without further police measures”.
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However, the atmosphere on site remains mostly peaceful in the morning, with occasional reports of scuffles and stone-throwing. Firecrackers, Bengal torches and small fires are lit at some barricades. The Aachen police call on Twitter for Molotov cocktails to be thrown to stop.
Lützerath is the last village that is to make way for lignite
Before the evacuation was initiated, the energy company RWE had called on the squatters to be non-violent. “Violence against the police or deployed employees is completely unacceptable,” emphasized the utility in a statement published in the morning. RWE is calling on the squatters to respect the rule of law and peacefully end the illegal occupation of the houses, facilities and areas belonging to RWE. “No one should put themselves in danger by doing something that breaks the law.”
According to estimates by the responsible Aachen police, there are around seven barricaded houses and around 30 tree houses in Lützerath. Similar to the clearing of the Hambach Forest in 2018, the goal of the squatters is unmistakable: “Lützi”, as the village is called among activists, must remain. As “Hambi” was supposed to stay and ultimately stayed.
Clearing of Lützerath has begun
Four years ago there were mass protests against the expansion of RWE’s brown coal production in North Rhine-Westphalia. At that time it was about the Hambach opencast mine. In the end, the activists won the fight for the forest. The compromise was the planned continued operation and expansion of another area: Garzweiler.
Lignite has been mined in this opencast mine for a hundred years. Almost 25 million tons every year. Countless villages had to give way over the years for the extraction of raw materials. Lützerath is now the last community that is to be dredged away despite the legally stipulated phase-out of coal. For many environmental activists, this is incomprehensible.
Symbol of resistance
The small village in North Rhine-Westphalia has been virtually uninhabited for ten years. Very few buildings are still standing. The resettlement of the local residents was officially completed in 2017. These are long-term processes in which new housing estates are created elsewhere, as the example of Immerath (neu) shows.
The last farmer had sold his farm to RWE in the fall of last year after a long period of resistance. In the place of the 100 former residents, climate activists have moved into the empty houses in recent months.
The camp in Lützerath is intended to offer protection from the weather – and from eviction.
(Photo: Kathrin Witsch)
To prevent the site from being evicted, they have erected countless barricades and obstacles, 100-foot-tall tripods (three-legged wooden platforms), holes in the asphalt, and massive wooden spears lined with bricks. Some have been here for months, others for a few weeks or just a day. They hang in trees, sit in the abandoned houses, stand prominently in a chain at the edge of the demolition line and call out their message to the police: “Lützi stays”.
The strategy of the police: clear the occupied area bit by bit. According to its own statement, the authority expects that this could take several weeks. “But it seems to be going better than expected,” said a person familiar with the events on Wednesday. As soon as an area is cleared, RWE employees can start with the tree felling work. This is exactly what the activists want to prevent for as long as possible. Possibly also out of the hope that the ban on cutting and felling trees and shrubs in force from March to September will then buy more time.
The place has become a symbol of climate activists’ resistance to the dirty generation of electricity from fossil fuels. Only a few hundred meters now separate Lützerath from the edge of the open-cast lignite mine: “The dredging of Lützerath has absolutely nothing to do with the necessity of the energy industry. We are therefore appealing to stop this fossil madness, ”says Greenpeace energy expert Karsten Smid in an interview with the Handelsblatt. The activist is convinced that the coal under the site is not needed, “the state government has miscalculated”.
In the morning the situation is peaceful at first.
(Photo: Kathrin Witsch)
There is indeed a dispute as to whether the lignite under Lützerath is necessary to ensure Germany’s security of supply. The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia and the energy company RWE refer to reports and describe the development of the area and the mining of the underlying coal as the only alternative for Germany’s energy security.
The activists describe it as a danger to the climate, which guarantees that the 1.5 degree target of the Paris climate agreement will be missed, referring to studies such as those by the energy analysis company Aurora Energy Research on behalf of the anti-coal group “Europe Beyond Coal” who come to the opposite conclusion.
“When calculating the necessary amounts of coal, the greatest differences between the studies lie in the consideration of the lignite requirement for coal processing. The alternative studies do not address this need, but focus on pure electricity generation,” explains Manfred Fischedick, Managing Director of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.
RWE: “Timely use necessary in the current energy crisis”
In such refinements, the coal serves as a raw material for chemicals and other fuels, such as lignite dust, which is used in industrial power plants. Studies by the state government put the need for refined products at 55 million tons of coal by 2030, with consumption falling.
This figure is disputed by environmentalists. Greenpeace expert Smid also assumes that the need for the refined products from other opencast mines could be covered. Especially when demand is falling.
According to RWE, however, mining conditions also play a role in the question: “Without the possibility of continuing opencast mining in this direction, the coal could no longer be uncovered at a depth of up to 200 meters elsewhere, which would lead to considerable deficits in the coal supply of the power plants and the overburden to be extracted would result,” said an RWE spokesman when asked by the Handelsblatt.
In addition, “the timely use of the former Lützerath settlement for the energy supply in the current energy crisis is necessary,” emphasizes the group, alluding to the lack of gas supplies from Russia.
It was only in October 2022 that RWE agreed with the state government in North Rhine-Westphalia from the CDU and the Greens to bring forward the coal phase-out by a total of eight years to 2030. In return, RWE is allowed to produce larger amounts of lignite in the short term. Also the coal under Lützerath.
All other villages in the region, which were originally also supposed to give way to open-cast mining, will remain standing. However, whether this new coal phase-out path saves emissions overall is controversial.
That is why there is a lot at stake for the Greens in Lützerath. At the moment, the party leadership fears above all confrontations between climate activists and the police and pictures of injured environmentalists.
On Monday, Green Party leader Ricarda Lang called for de-escalation. Although the energy company RWE has a legal right here, negotiations have succeeded in ensuring that coal in the Rhenish mining area will end in 2030 and that several villages where people still live will not be excavated, Lang emphasized, but added “nevertheless” to have understanding for people who were now demonstrating there.
The party is convinced that the path taken is the right one and that the political price for the deal with RWE is not too high. The next goal: Germany’s phase-out of coal by 2030, also in the eastern German states. In the lignite states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, according to the current legal situation, the last coal-fired power plant will not be shut down until 2038.
All of this is still a long way off for the demonstrators in Lützerath this Wednesday. Only a few left the site voluntarily that day at the request of the police. Most stay in the tree houses. The only question is how much longer.
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