Absurd that happens in 2023

On Saturday morning, the two Nature and Youth central board members Elise Sørensen and Elin Marie Schopmeier are on their way to the small, German town of Lützerath to take part in an announced, large demonstration against the abandoned village being dug up and turned into Germany’s last coal mine.

– Climate change knows no national borders, and we must stop the start-up of a new and polluting coal mine. We are talking about 280 million brown coal, the worst kind, and not something we need when we are to halve emissions by 2030, says Sørensen to Dagbladet.

– Totally absurd

The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is already in place, and condemns “police violence” in connection with the fact that climate activists have been taken away from the village.

– It is completely absurd that this is happening in 2023. The carbon must remain in the ground. Germany is making a fool of itself, but we want to show what people’s power looks like, and what democracy is. We must act when authorities and companies put people’s lives at risk, says Thunberg to the BBC.

The abandoned village of Lützerath has become a symbol of the climate fight. Hundreds of activists have announced that they will do what they can to stop the mining project, which the energy giant RWE is behind.

It has been a long time since the battle for Lützerath, or Lützi as the activists call it, started. The last resident moved from the village a year ago. In October last year, national and local authorities agreed with the energy giant RWE to extract coal from Lützerath.

Activists in tunnel

Now comes the decisive battle. On Wednesday morning, German police accused activists of throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at police as they began to remove activists from the area, according to Financial Times. Most of the activists have left the scene, but two activists – with the nicknames “Pinky” and “Brain” – have locked themselves in a tunnel.

– The police and energy company have not followed the regulations and it is now dangerous to be there. It has all become a rescue operation. The police did not take into account the tunnel where the two are when they brought people down from the wooden cabins, Norwegian Sørensen says, before she continues:

– We are in the middle of an energy and climate crisis, and must avoid such an unsustainable project.

Political gossip

The activists are disappointed that the German government, which previously promised to be the greenest government ever, is allowing the development of a polluting coal mine. The Greens’ vice-chancellor Robert Habeck in particular is in a political quagmire.

Germany has promised to phase out coal power by 2030, but has now postponed this until 2038. Lützerat is expected to be the country’s last open-pit mine, but is increasingly criticised. A new survey shows that 59 percent of Germans are against an expansion of lignite mining, according to the BBC.

– When we demonstrated for Repparfjorden and Førdefjorden, we received broad support from abroad, which led to the German company Aurubis withdrew from the Repparfjord project. They said it was not sustainable. The fact that they pulled out was very big, so we are on our way to Lützerath now, says Sørensen and continues:

– We will not participate in civil disobedience actions, but it is important for us to be there.

New symbol

Lützerath has become a symbol for activists across Germany.

– People are already suffering in the global south. We are the privileged and we have to use that privilege to put an end to fossil fuels, says an activist to the BBC.

The two young activists in the tunnel under the abandoned village, Pinky and Brain, have taken their names from a cartoon from the late 1990s, which was about laboratory rats.

– We are trying to be here as long as possible so that the people above us have time to mobilize even more so that the protests become even bigger, they reported on Thursday evening.

– It is much more difficult to force people away from a tunnel than from a wooden house. They don’t quite know where we are. And we have barricaded the doors so that it is difficult for them to get in, the two continued, according to the BBC.

Police Chief Dirk Weinspach warns the two activists that the tunnel may collapse.