fIn the past, Mona Neubaur regularly drove to the edge of the opencast mines in the Rhenish mining area. As a participating observer, she showed solidarity with the climate protection movement both during the clearing of the Hambach Forest at the end of 2018 and at a large-scale demonstration around Garzweiler II in June 2019.
Neubaur also stopped by in Lützerath, the last hamlet that is still to be dredged in the Rhenish Revier and which activists want to turn into a new symbol for an immediate end to lignite-fired power generation – back when she was still state chairwoman of the North Rhine-Westphalian Greens.
For almost six months, Neubaur has been Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, as well as Deputy Prime Minister of the first black-green state government in North Rhine-Westphalia. She is not currently planning another visit. “It will be a challenging time,” predicted the Green Superminister a few days ago instead, with a view to the upcoming eviction of Lützerath. “This will be a time when I will do my utmost to de-escalate wherever possible.”
How Neubaur intends to de-escalate remained nebulous. Today she is one of the enemy images of climate activists because she is on the side of those who are in favor of the demolition of the abandoned hamlet. Neubaur and her party are accepting something that they used to criticize harshly: a large, robust police operation. This is part of the price of a pact that Neubaur made together with her Green party friend and Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck with the opencast mine operator RWE: the end of coal-fired power generation in the Rhenish Revier will be brought forward from 2038 to 2030 at the latest. The towns of Kuckum, Beverath, Unter- and Oberwestrich and Keyenberg will remain. Lützerath, however, is being excavated.
100 eco-activists from all over Germany
Because of the energy crisis, significantly more coal is to be burned initially; two power plants are not going offline as originally planned, but will continue to run until March 2024. Habeck and Neubaur see the earlier exit, which has now been decided by the Bundestag, as a “milestone for climate protection” because it is now definitely certain that many millions of tons of lignite will remain in the ground.
On the other side are all those for whom that is not enough. They want to turn “Lützi” into “Hambi 2.0”: First and foremost, their own party youth, who almost succeeded in organizing a majority against the Habeck-Neubaur Pact at the federal party conference of the Greens in Bonn in mid-October, as well as the Fridays for Future, the organizations that have been so important for the Greens, as well as the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz (BUND) and finally the more than 100 eco-activists from all over Germany who have set up in and around Lützerath in empty houses and tree huts. They believe that the “red line” that will decide whether Germany breaks the Paris climate agreement and misses the 1.5 degree target runs right in front of the small hamlet.
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