Lützerath, then it's finally over!

The orphaned hamlet occupied by climate activists is the last place to give way to the Garzweiler II opencast mine.

Kuckum, Berverath, Unter- and Oberwestrich and Keyenberg will no longer be excavated, 280 million tons of the particularly climate-damaging lignite will remain in the ground.

The phase-out of coal in the Rhenish mining area is brought forward to 2030.

This is a political success for Robert Habeck and Mona Neubaur, the two Greens who are responsible for the departments of economy and climate protection in the traffic light government in Berlin and the North Rhine-Westphalian state government.

But gratitude is not a political category, even within its own ranks.

There are many in the Greens, above all the Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer, who prefer to stick to old enemy images and denounce the agreement as a devilish pact.

Your party not only fell for false figures from the "notoriously implausible" opencast mine operator RWE, but also supports the "underground narrative" that the climate movement in Lützerath is endangering social peace, claims Neubauer.

Burning barricades and violent activists throwing stones at police officers show that the story isn't all that wrong.

That's a hideous foretaste of what to fear midweek.

A large contingent of the police will have to secure the clearance work against chaos.

The warlike choice of words by Neubauer heats up the mood.

She is now calling for Lützerath to be "defended with all one's might".

With that, she almost sounds like the spokeswoman for “Ende Gelände” or other left-wing extremist-influenced groups that have long dreamed of instrumentalising the climate movement for their ultimate goal of destroying the (capitalist) “system”.

A dangerous melange has emerged.

Boundaries are blurring, standards and perception are slipping.

The myth of Lützerath

Neubauer and her fellow campaigners live in the certainty that Lützerath will decide whether Germany breaks the Paris climate agreement.

This is nonsense.

Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is a global project.

What the target means for the Rhenish mining area cannot be precisely calculated.

As much as the myth of Lützerath has taken on a life of its own in the climate movement, the small town is not suitable as a symbol of the great struggle.

All the more reason to think about the German energy policy, which has been characterized by many contradictions and Pyrrhic victories for decades, in the case of Lützerath.

Ironically, the greatest triumph of the environmental movement is the focus: the nuclear phase-out.

If citizens' initiatives, associations and Greens had not been so eerily successful in getting ever larger parts of society enthusiastic about phasing out climate-friendly nuclear power, then the overdue phase-out of coal could have been pushed ahead years ago - even Lützerath would not have to be dredged up now.

While other countries rely on nuclear power as a bridging technology, Germany remains dependent on coal as a climate killer for the time being.

And gas, which has become very expensive since the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

Yesterday's mistakes

Even if large parts of the climate movement do not want to admit it: Under the given conditions, such fossil stepping stones have meanwhile become indispensable in order to secure Germany as a business and innovation location in the long term and thus to be able to achieve the ambitious goal at all - the conversion of energy supply and industry a functioning CO2-neutral market system.

Like the anti-nuclear movement, the climate movement prefers to stir up fears.

Far too little public awareness of what is actually important: there is still a lack of indispensable components such as power grids and storage capacities geared towards renewable energies.

The Rheinisches Revier could be part of the solution.

The residual holes that remain there from the opencast mines are suitable for gigantic storage power plants, in which large amounts of green electricity can be “temporarily stored” for the whole of Germany.

This is not fantasy.

Fraunhofer scientists successfully tested the concept with a small concrete hemisphere a few years ago in Lake Constance.

In the fight against climate change, it is important to finally leave the skepticism about technology behind, to think in big, even bold categories - as was the case in Germany in the 19th century.

This time in the service of decarbonization.