‘For climate protesters, we are like filth’: the German village where coal is still king | World news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/...ractive/2020/jun/01/climate-protesters-german-village-coal-still-king
Germany pledged last year to end all coal mining by 2038 in line with its EU and global climate obligations. This has deepened existing political tensions in its coal-dependent regions.
In Lusatia, it has placed climate activists on a collision course with local politicians, the coal companies and the communities whose incomes depend on coal.
“Coal is a very emotive topic here,” says Adrian Rinnert from the local NGO Strukturwandel Jetzt, which has opposed the expansion of these mines for nearly a decade.
The big problem, he thinks, is the lack of alternative economic opportunities. Although tens of thousands of mining jobs have been cut since the 1990s, most available employment in the region is still tied to coal.
Mainstream German parties still champion the industry, and as in other parts of Europe, the impact of green policies on traditional or left-behind communities has become a convenient agenda for populists and far-right politicians to latch on to.
“When people here discuss whether environmental protection or jobs are more important, it’s always the jobs that win,” Rinnert says.
Coronavirus brought the coal plant sit-ins and the conflicts to a temporary halt in March, but the battle is resuming as Germany gets back to business.
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Belgium, Austria and Sweden are already coal-free. The UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia will all exit coal before 2025. Spain produced 70% less coal-powered energy in 2019 and is predicted to achieve full closure by 2027. But Germany wants to keep production going well into the 2030s and some mines are expanding. Witt cites the new Datteln IV coal plant that Germany will add to the grid this summer, a move protesters call “climate policy madness”.
The coal lobby, and many politicians, argue that Germany still needs lignite because it is already committed to shuttering nuclear power plants by 2022. And renewables are being built at a pace too slow to meet the country’s current energy needs.
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Away from the eastern German coalfields, the climate crisis has mobilised public consciousness across Europe, uniting anti-coal campaigners with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school movement.
In Brussels, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, a former German defence minister and ally of Angela Merkel, is pushing the so-called EU green deal under which the 27-nation bloc would become carbon neutral by 2050.
Poland is the only EU country that has refused to sign up to that goal, and its rejection is driven by coal. Lusatia runs along the German/Polish border. It is hard to find anyone on either side who does not reject the need for a fast exit from fossil fuels.
Miners feel unjustly scapegoated. “For climate protesters we are like filth and to be blamed for climate change. It feels unfair,” says Ortmann. “If we could, we would earn our money in another way. But moral lectures don’t really help when people’s livelihoods are at stake.”
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party disputes climate science, but in Lusatia has matched its campaigning to the sentiments of people such as Ortmann, focusing (with strong echoes of the “gilets jaunes” demands in France) on the individual’s right to drive their own car and the unfairness of fuel taxes.
Toni Schneider, an AfD politician in the Lusatian town of Hoyerswerda, claims the coal protest movement is not organised by local activists, but by people from “big cities”. “I have seen how they arrive here by train. From how they act it seems like these protesters come on a fun weekend trip and not a serious demonstration.”
This culture war framing – rust-belt people being lectured to by outsiders and metropolitans – helps the AfD to manipulate local emotion and discredit local protesters, according to Rinnert. “The populists know how to address people’s feelings, which is why the AfD has such a large supporter base here in the Lusatia region.”