Near a field of spinach and a row of shaved shrubs, Antje Pistel scans the horizon with melancholy. The weather is gray and chilly on this Tuesday in February.
“Over there, where there is a small excavator, that’s where Lützerath was,” almost whispers the speech therapist with blond-red hair circled by a beige headband.
The resident of the village of Holzweiler, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, resolved a few days ago to walk again in the direction of the northeast. In the last month, the emotion was too strong.
Lützerath is a small village near the Netherlands and Belgium that was recently destroyed to allow the expansion of an open-pit mine of lignite, a type of coal that supplies some of the most polluting power stations. from Europe. It had been occupied for about two years by a community of environmental activists coming to its defense. Its original inhabitants had left the area, forced to sell their homes to the energy company RWE.
Member of the movement Alle Dörfer Bleiben, which means “All the villages remain”, Mme Pistel went regularly to the camp to help the protesters and to make the link between them and the villagers, mainly opposed to the Garzweiler II mine. “It was such a colorful place,” she recalls ruefully.
In mid-January, environmental activist Greta Thunberg was briefly detained there during a protest involving thousands of people. This was during the evacuation of the scene by the police, which met with resistance, about three months after the unveiling of an agreement between RWE and the federal and regional governments confirming the plan to dig under Lützerath.
“They told us that Lützerath had to be destroyed because of the war in Ukraine, because we need more energy from coal,” laments Ms.me Pistel.
Indeed, for the past year, coal-fired power plants have been restarted or have been able to increase their production in Germany. All this to compensate for the lack of Russian natural gas, on which the country was dependent.
Thus, according to calculations by the think tank Agora Energiewende, electricity production from lignite in Germany will increase by 7% in 2022 and that from hard coal, another form of coal, by 20%. This production would compromise the greenhouse gas reduction objectives of the most populous country in the European Union, according to Simon Müller, director for Germany at Agora Energiewende. These emissions have stagnated in 2022, despite energy consumption down 4.7% by Germans, according to the report Energy transition in Germany, state of play in 2022. The greater amount of coal burned in the power plants negates the positive effects of this energy saving, Müller believes.
Moreover, the two power stations where Garzweiler coal is used, Neurath and Niederaussem, were already part of the three most polluting power stations in Europe in 2021, according to an analysis by the think tank of energy company Ember, based in London. Two blocks of the Neurath power station which were due to be shut down in 2022 have been allowed to remain connected to the electricity grid for at least 15 more months.
RWE declined our interview request. For its part, the Green Party of North Rhine-Westphalia, which is part of the government coalition, was delighted that RWE had announced that it would stop producing coal-fired energy in 2030 rather than in 2038.
A long fight
Holzweiler is a charming town, with a dense heart of brown brick houses and a surrounding area dotted with elegant rustic villas. By 2030, the mine must be 500 meters from it. This prospect frightens Antje Pistel, since she and her husband are already feeling its effects on a daily basis, while the pit is still about three kilometers away.
“In the summer, when we’re sitting outside, or when we’re sleeping in our room, we hear the excavator. It’s never quite dark at night, because they work 24/7. There’s a lot of dust in the air. In the summer, you have to wash the surfaces every day,” she notes.
The threat, however, is far from new. Active for decades, Garzweiler is slowly progressing, swallowing up village after village, with a vested right to land granted by former governments. So far, 34 villages have been swallowed up by the mine. Until 2019, five more hamlets were planned to be wiped off the map.
Many citizens demonstrated, challenged elected officials, spoke in the media, and legally challenged the expropriations. Their actions would have pushed the governments to negotiate with RWE to save these villages, successfully. The expansion of the hole was limited to Lützerath and agricultural land.
This victory is however far from fully satisfying David Dresen, who lives with his parents, his sister, his grandmother, a dog, a cat, horses and chickens on a farm in Kuckum, one of the villages once threatened.
“As long as the excavators continue to advance, I will continue to fight”, assures the thirty-year-old with curly brown hair, wearing oval glasses and an earring in his left ear.
Global problem
The Dresen family are among a small minority of village residents who have refused to sell their property to RWE.
“We started fighting this mine because we didn’t want to leave our house, which we have lived in for generations. But I realized one day that this fight was not just about us. It’s about the climate crisis, water, animals, nature, human rights. This mine is so unjust that I feel the responsibility to do everything in my power to stop it”, declares this member of the group Alle Dörfer Bleiben.
Pointing to the deep pit, streaked with black and brown, Mr Dresen explains that lignite is the very dark material, which is found in a thick layer at the very bottom of the mine, then in two thin layers a little higher. He does not believe that RWE needs as much coal as it claims, nor that it will be possible to get the one under Lützerath quickly enough to make a difference in the current energy crisis.
Not far away, seven white wind turbines are spinning rapidly. These will soon have to be dismantled, as they are in the way of the huge machine that is constantly digging the ground.
Treehouses
Where have the environmental activists who squatted Lützerath gone? For nearly a month, hundreds of people gathered in tents in Keyenberg, a nearby deserted village. The camp has since been dismantled, but a handful of diehards have set up another one in the adjacent wooded area.
When passing the Duty, there were about ten of them living in colorful makeshift huts, four or five of which were built in trees. In this community, the way of life is simple, assures Avik Majumdar, member of the communications team. The participants use solar panels, a small wood-fired oven and a gas one, dry toilets. Their diet is vegan. The smiling activist recognizes that they receive help from sympathetic villagers to recharge their cell phones and his computer.
“The temperature sometimes drops below zero here,” he says, on the second floor of a cabin that has four. But I love this. With good blankets and a good sleeping bag, we are fine. »
Citizens of industrialized countries must reduce their energy consumption, believes this journalism student. “We want to show that it’s possible to live differently,” he says, as a guitar tune resounds started by one of his colleagues.
Coal exit complex
The view of the mayor of Bedburg, where thousands of workers and hundreds of businesses depend on the Garzweiler mine and power plants, is a little different. Sascha Solbach fully agrees with the energy transition. However, the entire economy of his region cannot change overnight.
Here, many industries, such as aluminum and chemicals, need cheap energy. A short power outage can cause production to stop for several weeks, he says.
“We must rely on lignite and fossil fuels in the next two years, to be able to abandon them completely in 2030 without losing the inhabitants of the region or creating a major social conflict”, judges the mayor.
Mr. Solbach assures that his region is working hard on its transformation towards a green energy-oriented economy. For example, a wind farm project with 21 turbines was developed by the City of Bedburg in collaboration with RWE. Several areas uninhabited due to the mine could accommodate others. “We have the opportunity to show the whole world that it is possible to succeed in this turn,” he said. But it won’t be easy. »
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.