It is getting serious in Lützerath, where the last trees and houses will soon be felled for the lignite. Hardly anyone here believes that this serves the common good.
Much of the uncertain mood that prevails these days in the Rhenish lignite mining area is reminiscent of the weeks and days before the clearance in the Hambach Forest in 2018. At the Hambach open-cast mine, the energy company RWE threatens once again to tear down a road without first helping the residents Having created a replacement. The Bochheim forest, which is actually intended to be an important part of a biotope network in the structural change region together with the Hambach forest, is also to be cleared there.
Above all, however, the focus of the energy company is on the village of Lützerath at the south-western end of the Garzweiler opencast mine. The trees and the last houses should fall there this autumn. Particularly spicy: Against Eckhardt Heukamp, who is currently harvesting his this year’s harvest on his almost eight hundred year old farm, RWE has applied for an early property briefing, a measure prior to expropriation that is possible if a structural project in the public interest needs to be implemented with particular urgency. But Eckhardt Heukamp defends himself legally – and he is not alone in his struggle over the question of whether the destruction of his business to produce the climate-damaging energy source lignite in 2021 will still serve the common good.
“What we are seeing here is the failure of the departing GroKo in terms of climate policy,” says Bastian Neuwirth, climate expert at Greenpeace, who came to Lützerath on Friday, October 1st, the start date for possible clearing and demolition work. “At the same time, RWE threatens to create a situation that will make it impossible for the coming federal government to meet the Paris climate targets from the outset.” The 1.5 degree limit runs: “In order to comply with the internationally agreed climate protection targets, additional downsizing of the opencast mines must be calculated, which result from the necessary earlier power plant closures,” concludes the study, which sets a very concrete framework for action for politicians.
But so far there have been no political signals and the local people remain in the dark, not only about their future in general, but also the very specific question of where they will be woken up by demolition excavators and chainsaws next.
“You can see it here, the coal excavators continue to run undisturbed,” says the farmer Eckhardt Heukamp at a press conference in Lützerath that literally took place on Friday in the shadow of the grinding paddle wheel. “And the power plants burn what is mined here. I think all parties should deliver now and think about the climate protection they promised in the election campaign. “
He is not alone with this demand either: “If the new coalition wants to show that it understands what the climate crisis means and what destruction we are causing with our fossil-based way of life, not only here but all over the world, then a lignite moratorium would be the very first Step that she would have to take, ”says activist Carola Rackete, who has been living in Lützerath for several weeks.
In addition to appeals to politicians, there are also more impatient voices in Lützerath on this sunny autumn day: “We are convinced that protests on the street will continue to be needed to make us heard and to really bring about change,” says Pauline Bünger, who came to Lützerath for the “Fridays for Future” movement. To illustrate this, residents of the other Garzweiler villages have come to sit in front of Eckhardt Heukamp’s courtyard. Actually just a symbolic solidarity action – until a vehicle with construction fences actually arrives to prepare for demolition and is happily dumped by the climate protectors. So things are getting serious in Lützerath – but destruction without critical observation by the general public, whose well-being is cited as the reason for the measures, will no longer exist there.
