Europe’s Climate Movement Is Radicalizing in Real Time

Along the five city blocks that border the western edge of Friedrichshain park in Berlin, every campaign poster advertising the German Greens was torn down—only to be replaced and then torn down again. In neighboring districts, one placard after another has been vandalized, often with the eyes of Greens frontperson Bettina Jarasch blacked out. On the backside of one roadside billboard is scrawled Aus grün wird braun (“Green is becoming brown”), implying that the Greens are undergoing an extreme-right transformation—brown being the color traditionally associated with the World War II-era Nazis.

In the past, it was largely the far right itself that trashed the campaign materials of Berlin’s leftist parties. But Green officials are certain that today much of the stepped-up vandalism and graffiti is the work of an ever more radical climate movement that is deeply disillusioned with the Greens’ compromises. This disaffection could well chip away at the party’s vote count in the Feb. 12 election in Berlin, where the Greens under Jarasch are the center of a leftist city government of Social Democrats, Greens, and the democratic socialist Left party. More critically, it portends a nationwide—and possibly Europe-wide—break between the grassroots climate movement and the Greens, which have written climate protection on their banners since the late 1980s.

The simmering tensions between the youthful climate activists and Germany’s premier environmental party boiled over in January, when around 3,700 police officers in full riot gear stormed and carted away several hundred activists who had barricaded themselves in the abandoned hamlet of Lützerath in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, near the Dutch border. The fleck of a village lies on the rim of the sprawling open-cast coal pit of Garzweiler II, owned—as are the ruins of Lützerath—by the German utility giant RWE. The Rhineland is one of three regions in Germany with a total of ten open-cast mines, the source of about a tenth of the hard and brown coal that the country burns to generate a third of its power.

For three years, denizens of the broad-based climate movement—a hodgepodge of several dozen loosely organized groups, including the likes of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future and Greenpeace—had holed up in the condemned village and fortified treehouses. The mission: to hinder RWE bulldozers from razing the former settlement and expanding its 19-square-mile pit, which would claim Lützerath. RWE possessed the mining rights and had won every legal battle that the climate movement had thrown up to stop it. The protesters argued that Garzweiler II’s brown coal—the most polluting of coals—had to remain in the ground for Germany to meet its climate goals: namely, a 65 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2030 and greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045.

The brawl over Lützerath boils down to the question of Germany’s need for coal. Even as the clean energy pioneer weans itself off fossil fuels, Germany remains dependent on them. This has been underscored by the war in Ukraine and subsequent embargoes of Russian fossil fuels, which have cut Germany off from Russian oil and gas, throwing the country, as well as the rest of Europe, into its worst energy crisis since the 1970s. Germany has had to reopen shuttered coal-fired power plants just to make it through this winter—and next winter could even be more dire.

The activists fire back with think tank calculations that Germany can’t meet its emission goals if ever more coal is mined and burned—and that Germany simply doesn’t need more coal production than it already has. There’s enough coal and coal mines to take up the slack that renewables can’t currently handle, they charge, quoting studies and renowned experts at Flensburg University, Berlin’s Technical University, and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), among others. Moreover, given the climbing cost of carbon emissions—Europe has an emissions trading system—neither RWE nor any other utility will be burning coal by the late 2020s.

Green voters and party officials overwhelmingly sympathize with the activists and largely accept the experts’ math. This is why the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the left-center German government, both of which include the Greens, jumped into the fray in search of a solution. Green party politicos head up both entities’ economy and climate ministries: In Berlin, that’s Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, long the Greens’, and indeed all of Germany’s, most popular figure. The Greens brokered a deal—the best they could in light of the court rulings—that dramatically cut back the area RWE could excavate, saved five other (populated) villages, and, most sensationally of all, pushed the country’s coal exit date from 2038 to 2030.

But the compromise—and the fact that Germany of all countries is still bulldozing villages to mine brown coal—infuriated the climate campaigners, including Germany’s foremost activist, Greens member Luisa Neubauer, who ripped the compromise for dooming Germany’s emissions reduction pledges. “So, in the case of Lützerath,” she inveighed last month, “all of a sudden it’s top Green politicians who are basing fundamental decisions on disproven figures from a notoriously untrustworthy coal company.”

Despite driving rain and high winds, Neubauer, Thunberg, and around 35,000 others were on-site on Jan. 14 to express their indignation at what all knew by then was a lost cause. Over several days, hundreds of activists defended Lützerath tooth and claw: burning barricades, burying themselves in underground tunnels, and waging a scrum-like melee in the Rhineland mud with the police, who responded with pepper spray and billy clubs. Around 200 protesters and police reported injuries. This was a completely different story from the warm-and-fuzzy school strikes organized since 2019 by Fridays for Future.

The Lützerath debacle may go down in history as the Alamo moment of the climate movement, a defeat that definitively transformed the larger campaign. Until now, the German protesters saw the leftist parties—the Greens and the Left party—as conditional allies. If not perfect by far, they were the parliamentary forces that represented their cause, in tempered form. The movement exploited the streets, the Greens and the Left the legislatures.

Today, this bond is broken. “Lützerath was a bitter defeat, not a victory of any kind, even though the Greens did their best,” Jarasch said on the campaign trail in Berlin, where she asserted the Greens’ ardent opposition to a new autobahn stretch through central Berlin.

For over a year now, other, more in-your-face tactics of civil disobedience have reflected the climate movement’s frustration and anger, which in contrast to the defense of Lützerath (nearly 40 percent of Germans in one poll said they wanted RWE stopped) garners next to no sympathy among ordinary citizens—in fact just the opposite. Letzte Generation, or Last Generation (in the United Kingdom, it’s called Just Stop Oil), activists—who say theirs is the last generation that can stop climate catastrophe—regularly glue themselves to street intersections in major German cities, stopping rush hour traffic while police forces carefully unglue them—a process that can disrupt business as usual for hours.

In Rome, London, Potsdam, and Paris, they splattered (glass-protected) artworks with paint and soup, among them a Van Gogh, a Klimt, and a Monet, raising cries of outrage far beyond the art world. The activists explained that by defacing paintings protected by glass, they were drawing attention to their cause but not damaging the great works of art. The message: If we do not stop using fossil fuels, scenes like these will be gone forever. Though these actions elicited little solidarity from the greater public, or even from the Greens, they won headlines for weeks on end across the world—at a time when Fridays for Future’s school strikes and the grim news stories about 2022’s droughts and forest fires received ever less coverage.

The climate movement is extremely diverse and includes an array of groups with names such as Ende Gelände (Stop and No Further), Sand im Getriebe (Sand in the Gears), and Alle Dörfer Bleiben (Protect the Villages), among others. Yet one key conclusion from the Lützerath action is that the more moderate and the more radical groups united behind the issue. Thunberg and Neubauer obviously felt comfortable alongside the masked activists of the more radical groups. It’s one movement, Neubauer says, with a spectrum of views – and that’s its strength. The more radical groups practice legitimate civil disobedience, not terrorism like that of the 1970s Red Army Faction.

The Berlin vote on Feb. 12—in which an independent party called Klimaliste (Climate List) is running with far-reaching climate policy demands in line with the desires of activists—will issue an impression of how far the rejuvenated climate movement is from the mainstream political parties. The Greens hope that Germans concerned about the climate crisis will vote Green because they are making progress on renewable energy expansion, smart grid rollout, and emissions reductions—also, figured the Greens, because there’s nowhere else for such a voter to go.

This thinking, though, may have been overtaken by Lützerath.