German village disappears to make way for coal

IMMERATH, GERMANY » The hospital is gone. So are most of the houses, with more being knocked down daily. Not even the bodies remain in the tree-shaded cemetery, where centuries-old bones were recently dug up and moved.

There is far more digging to come, enough to extinguish any trace that Immerath, a once-quaint farming village in the fertile western Germany countryside ever existed. Because beneath the rich soil lies a substance even more valuable: Coal.

The demolition of Immerath — making way for the expansion of mega-mines that will produce billions of tons of carbon emissions in the coming decades and leave a deep gash where villages dating to Roman times once stood — represents the dark underside of Germany’s efforts to address climate change.

The growth of German coal mines at a time when the fuel is being rapidly phased out elsewhere also shows how difficult it can be for countries, even ones that aggressively commit to cleaner technologies, to actually make the switch.

For Germany, the gap between its bright-green rhetoric and coal-smudged reality has never been more vivid.

In the former West German capital of Bonn, the country is hosting a U.N. climate conference this month that is seen as critical to global efforts to fulfill pledges made two years ago in Paris. To slow the climate’s potentially catastrophic warming, experts said the governments represented in Bonn will need to accelerate their embrace of renewable energy.

But just an hour’s drive away is Immerath, which in its dying days has become an emblem of Germany’s struggle to break its heavy addiction to brown coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.

“There’s no bigger impact on the environment than brown coal mining, and we’re the world champion,” said Dirk Jansen, a leader of the local chapter of Friends of the Earth in Germany’s coal heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia. “If we want to stop climate change, we have to start here.”

The ingredients for that start would seem to exist. Germany is led by Angela Merkel, who is known as the “Climate Chancellor” for her global leadership on the issue even as the Trumpled United States has abandoned it. After fall elections, Merkel’s conservatives are now negotiating to govern in a coalition with the Greens party, which has long advocated an end to German coal.

Opinion surveys show wide majorities of the German public favor getting out of the coal business, and the government has already committed to largely decarbonizing the economy by the middle of the century, with renewables filling the void.

But Germany is also on course to badly miss its emission-reduction targets for 2020. Leading politicians, Merkel included, have staunchly resisted taking steps that activists say could help the country get back on track, including quickly shutting down the dirtiest coal-fired plants and setting a firm deadline for phasing out coal altogether.

The reasons are varied, but they all come down to this: Germany’s ambitious vision for “energiewende,” or energy transformation, has proved far more difficult to execute than it was to plan.

“It’s not just a technical shift. It’s a societal shift,” said Rebecca Bertram, an energy expert with the Greens party-aligned Heinrich Böll Foundation. “There are so many vested interests in keeping the old structures, and people will cling to them as long as they can.”