In Lützerath

German lignite coal makes an appearance in the Annals of Tacitus, who described ‘fires breaking from the ground’ in 58 AD. Rain did not quench the flames, and desperate locals thrashed them with clubs as the blaze raced towards Colonia Agrippina, now Cologne. Cheap and peaty, lignite is the world’s most polluting fossil fuel; no country has burned more of it since the industrial age began than Germany. Extraction requires open-cast mining, which has displaced tens of thousands of people, razed hundreds of settlements, and disfigured an area larger than Surrey. Lützerath, a village an hour west of Cologne, will be lignite’s last victim in the Rhineland, soon to be swallowed whole by the vast Garzweiler pit.

For two years climate activists travelled to the farm of Eckardt Heukamp, the last remaining resident, as he tried to prevent the expropriation of his land by RWE, a German energy multinational. Several hundred people dug in to resist the final eviction, which began with the drone of sirens before dawn last Wednesday. Apart from an early volley of stones, fireworks and a Molotov cocktail, the police operation met with little violent resistance. There were militant autonomists among the occupiers, but many were students, parents, scientists. Since my first visit in 2021, Lützerath had been heavily fortified. Doors and windows were barricaded; overhead, protesters clambered across ropes that connected a network of poles, farm buildings, treehouses and a wooden tower with a banner in memory of the Ogoni Nine.

The police worked quickly, dismantling the protesters’ tall wooden tripods to make space for boom lifts, which chugged around the steel girders cemented into the road. By evening the ground level had been cleared. Specialist climbing crews removed activists from a raised platform under a barn roof, lining them up outside against a banner that said ‘1.5 degree limit’. Despite the stormy weather, officers pulled cavalierly at a man hanging from a corrugated shed roof. From above, protesters jeered at ‘die Bullen’ below, or sang to keep their spirits up as the beams of police torches chased them across the treetops.

‘We’re giving it our best,’ one told me, waving a box of wine from the porch of his treehouse. Another, perched on top of a five-metre wooden pole and wrapped in a gold mylar blanket, said she was afraid, but felt she had to do something. Legions of RWE workers assisted the operation. They surrounded the village with two lines of metal fencing, emptied protesters’ food stores onto trucks, and wasted no time in ripping up trees. The police drove protesters away in vans bearing the company’s logo.

RWE’s origins lie in the 19th-century Ruhr Valley coal boom, and around a quarter of the company is owned by local municipalities. It is popular in the area as a source of public wealth and employment, and a generous donor to regional politicians. Its Neurath power plant, fed by the Garzweiler, is Europe’s second biggest source of CO₂ emissions. Two of the plant’s seven units had been scheduled for decommissioning at the end of last year, but have had their lifetimes extended until March 2024. Germany has temporarily turned to domestic lignite to help make up for the loss of imported Russian gas, just as governments on both sides of the Wall did in response to the oil crises of the 1970s. All the same, RWE claims its green transition plans are industry-leading, and promises to be carbon neutral by 2040. The Garzweiler is ringed by wind turbines.

The optimism that activists had when the Green Party entered government in 2021 has long since disappeared. The eviction at Lützerath is supported by all major parties and backed by the courts, but a misjudged piece of realpolitik has made the Greens the face of the destruction. The party struck a backroom deal with RWE last year: Lützerath would go, but five neighbouring villages would be spared, and the Rhineland’s phase-out of coal would be brought forward eight years to 2030. Yet a recent study found that expansion is not required to meet predicted demand, and EU carbon-pricing could make coal unprofitable within the next decade anyway.

According to a snap poll, almost 60 per cent of the public want the coal to remain in the ground. The Green minister for economic affairs and climate action, Robert Habeck, said that Lützerath was the ‘wrong symbol’. Luisa Neubauer, a party member and leading figure in Germany’s Fridays for Future movement, said the Greens were destroying the environmental lines they were supposed to protect. ‘They have betrayed us,’ people chanted from the trees.

Both sides had prepared for a weeks-long siege, but the eviction was largely complete by the weekend. A pair of activists known as Pinky and the Brain remained buried in a tunnel, while above them heavy machinery caved in the roof of Heukamp’s farmhouse and toppled the empty treehouses. At a rally on Saturday addressed by Greta Thunberg, a crowd of at least fifteen thousand surged past police lines and through open fields towards the mine and the village. The police beat, pepper-sprayed and baton-charged lines of largely peaceful protesters, leaving dozens bruised and bloodied in the thick mud as night fell.

In a quieter moment during the week, around a hundred protesters sat in heavy rain for hours, kettled by the police and huddled together for warmth as they blocked an access road to the village. Among them were Neubauer and Martin Kaiser, the head of Greenpeace Germany. ‘Politicians have tried to position the protests in Lützerath as a symbolic thing, but it’s not,’ he told me. ‘It’s real that the coal under Lützerath remains in the soil, to have a slight chance to stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius.’ Past the mine’s edge the arched back of a behemoth excavator was visible. Above our heads the blades of a wind turbine thumped steadily into the headwind. Along with several others, it will be dismantled to make way for the encroaching pit.