press release on 10.10.22

The action alliance Ende Gelände announces its intention to prevent the eviction of the village of Lützerath. The now occupied village directly on the edge of the Garzweiler II open pit mine is already an important protest site against lignite-fired power generation. Last week, Robert Habeck, the Green climate minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Mona Neubaur and the CEO of RWE announced at a joint press conference that they wanted to demolish the village of Lützerath in order to extract the coal underneath.

Dina Hamid, press spokesperson for Ende Gelände in North Rhine-Westphalia, commented:

“It is absolutely irresponsible in the face of the worsening climate crisis to expand opencast lignite mining even further. The 1.5 degree limit runs in front of Lützerath. Continuing to mine coal here will accelerate the climate crisis, which is already causing untold deaths. The fact that the Greens, of all parties, are turning away from the Paris climate targets shows once again that the exit from fossil fuels can only be implemented by ourselves. Anyone who touches Lützerath is a climate criminal. We will stand in the way of RWE’s fossil fuel destruction with our bodies.”

Several scientific studies prove that if the 1.5 degree limit agreed in the Paris Climate Agreement is adhered to, only a residual budget of about 70 million tonnes of lignite may be mined in the Garzweiler opencast mine. However, after the surprising agreement with RWE announced by Federal Minister of Economics Habeck, this is now to be 280 million tonnes, including a particularly productive coal seam under Lützerath. At the same time, a recently published study by a research group from the European University of Flensburg, the Technical University of Berlin and the German Institute for Economic Research Berlin (DIW) had reconfirmed that even in the current gas shortage situation, coal under Lützerath would not be needed to ensure security of supply and would have to remain in the ground for climate policy reasons.

“The argument of security of supply is a fake by Habeck,” said Luka Scott, press spokesperson for Ende Gelände. “After fracking gas from the US, billions for LNG terminals and a gas levy that would have redistributed billions from the people to gas companies while many peo already don’t know how to pay their bills, this is Habeck’s next dirty deal with the fossil industry. That Lützerath should fall and climate destruction continue is the ultimate declaration of war on the climate justice movement. We will fight for Lützerath as we defended the Hambach forest. Those who attack Lützerath will pay a high price. We are all coming, we are standing together, we are intrepid, we stand with Lützi!”

As early as 2015, the Ende Gelände action alliance drew attention to the situation of the villages in the Rhenish lignite mining area in Lützerath through actions of civil disobedience and since then has repeatedly mobilised for blockade actions, often involving several thousand activists. The evacuation of the Hambach Forest in 2018, for which the largest police deployment ever in NRW was deployed, has since been declared illegal by the courts. The Hambach Forest is still standing today and may no longer be dredged.

Contact details
E-mail: presse@ende-gelaende.org

Charly Dietz: +49 163 681 1776
Luka Scott: +49 177 9705757
Dina Hamid +49 179 4166547

Press contact in Lützerath
+49 15753980277

Website
www.ende-gelaende.org

Twitter
https://twitter.com/Ende_gelande

On the Ende Gelände flickr account you can find photos of past actions: https://www.flickr.com/photos/133937251@N05/albums