In the middle of the afternoon, the demonstration escalated when part of the demonstrators penetrated into the excavation. Life-threatening according to the police, who tried to drive them back and, according to reporters present, hit people with batons. Later, police briefly deployed water cannons to prevent the crowd from entering the gated village. On several Telegram channels, activists called on the protesters to storm the village.
Lignite is controversial because it is more polluting than coal and because its excavation causes great damage to the landscape. In Germany, which has wanted to lead the way internationally for years in the transition to climate-neutral energy, many people see lignite mining as a bad anachronism.
Greta Thunberg also stood with her feet in the West German mud on Saturday afternoon, side by side with Germany’s most famous climate activist Luise Neubauer. And when the first demonstrators went home at dusk, the front woman of a global generation of climate activists urged further action: ‘Lützerath is still here. And as long as the cabbage is still in the ground, this battle is not over.’
Although the demonstrators failed to reach Lützerath within a few hundred meters, the mood remained grim and the hundreds of police officers present struggled to keep control of events. Perhaps because they had prepared for the arrival of a maximum of 8,000 people. Arrests were made and, according to German media, a number of demonstrators were injured. But the police do not want to give numbers until the demonstration is over.
Compromise
Under the previous German government, it had been agreed that lignite could only be excavated in a few areas in the east of the country in the coming years, before it was definitively banned. Garzweiler II, as the excavation near Lützerath is called, was actually already ‘closed’.
The fact that Lützerath has to give way is the result of a deal between energy supplier RWE and German Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, Robert Habeck, of De Groenen. In view of the energy scarcity caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they agreed that RWE may also extract lignite again in North Rhine-Westphalia in the coming years. In return, extraction in Germany will be completely banned from 2030.
Greta Thunberg, like other international climate activists, believes that Germany can fill the gap in the energy supply much better with nuclear energy. But that goes against German policy to close all nuclear power plants as quickly as possible. For the Greens in particular, this ‘Atomausstieg’ is a sacred house that they want to hold on to, even if that means burning coal and lignite for a little longer as an ‘intermediate solution’.
During the demonstration, Thunberg sharply criticized Habeck in an interview with the German news agency DPA. According to Thunberg, doing business with a company like RWE shows ‘where the priorities of the German government lie’.
Lützerath
RWE bought out all but one of the original inhabitants of Lützerath years ago, as the company has done in dozens of villages and hamlets in the area in recent decades. In recent weeks, hundreds of activists have moved to Lützerath and taken up residence in the empty houses and farms.
Since officers started the evacuation last Wednesday, the police have closed off Lützerath from the outside world with fences and hermetically. Since then, more than 400 activists have left the village, most of them voluntarily. At the moment, a few dozen people are said to be present in and around Lützerath, including in tree houses and in a self-dug tunnel.
The demonstration at Lützerath also led to traffic chaos in the wider area: there were traffic jams on several highways in the Ruhr area and trains to nearby stations were overcrowded. The demonstrators came from all over Europe.