MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
The World
CANADA
Fire in ship containers
appears to be out
C anadian Coast Guard
officials said Sunday that a fire
that was burning in several
containers aboard a cargo ship
off the coast of British Columbia
appeared to be out.
The Coast Guard said it
received word late Saturday
morning that a fire had broken
out in 10 damaged containers
aboard the MV Zim Kingston,
which is now anchored about
five miles off the provincial
capital of Victoria, and that two
of the burning containers held
hazardous material identified as
potassium amyl xanthate.
“The majority of the fire is
actually out,” J.J. Brickett, federal
incident commander with the
Canadian coast guard, said
during a teleconference Sunday.
“We still see it smoldering.”
The coast guard said the
hazardous material inside the
containers prevented the ship’s
crew from spraying cold water
directly on the fire. An
emergency zone had been
doubled to two nautical miles
around the Zim Kingston.
The Joint Rescue and
Coordination Center in Victoria
said 16 crew members were
safely taken off the ship, while
five others, including the
captain, remained aboard at
their own behest.
The coast guard said that a
hazardous materials crew from
Vancouver was mobilizing and
that the owner of the Zim
Kingston had contracted the
U.S.-based Resolve Marine Group
for salvage operations, including
firefighting and recovery of the
containers.
Danaos Shipping Co., which
manages the container ship, saidin an emailed statement earlier:
“No injuries were reported. The
fire appears to have been
contained.”
— Associated PressUZBEKISTANPresident poised for
landslide election winUzbeks voted Sunday in a
presidential election that the
incumbent is expected to win in
a landslide against weak
competition.
Although President Shavkat
Mirziyoyev has relaxed many of
the policies of his dictatorial
predecessor, he has made little
effort at political reform.
Mirziyoyev, who took office in
2016 on the death of Islam
Karimov, faces four relatively
low-visibility candidates who
didn’t even show up for televised
debates, instead sending proxies.Independent candidates were
not allowed. Despite the absence
of significant competition, voter
turnout was strong.
Under Mirziyoyev, freedom of
speech has expanded compared
with the suppression of the
Karimov era, and some
independent news media and
bloggers have appeared. He also
relaxed the tight controls on
Islam in the predominantly
Muslim country that Karimov
imposed to counter dissident
views.
Mirziyoyev has lifted controls
on hard currency, encouraging
investment from abroad, and he
moved to patch up foreign ties
that had soured under Karimov.
— Associated PressDozens killed as S omalia’s
army, ex-allied group clash: At
least 30 people died, and more
than 100 were injured in
intensified fighting betweenSomalia’s army and former ally
Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama’a (ASWJ)
in the state of Galmudug over the
weekend, residents and hospital
officials said. The clashes run the
risk of distracting both groups
from their campaigns against al-
Shabab insurgents, analysts and
residents said. The ASWJ is a
group of moderate Sufi Muslims
that has played a key role in the
fight against al-Shabab, which is
linked to the terrorist network
al-Qaeda. But tensions between
the ASWJ and the government
have been building for years.6.5-magnitude temblor hits
Taiwan: An earthquake shook
Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and
caused rocks to fall, injuring a
woman and damaging a car. No
deaths were reported. The 6.5-
magnitude quake was centered
near Yilan, a city about 20 miles
southeast of Taipei near the
northeastern coast, according tothe Central Weather Bureau. It
was followed seconds later by a
5.4-magnitude quake. Buildings
in Taipei swayed. The subway
and some other mass transit
services were suspended.Israel set to approve nearly
3,000 West Bank settler homes:
Israel is expected to move
forward with thousands of new
homes for Jewish settlers in the
West Bank this week, a
settlement watchdog group said.
The plan for about 3,000 new
units in the West Bank has
drawn calls for restraint from the
United States, which on Friday
voiced “concern” over the
expected approvals. Hagit Ofran
of the anti-settlement group
Peace Now said a committee is
set to meet Wednesday to
approve 2,800 units deep in the
West Bank, complicating efforts
to create a Palestinian state.
— From news servicesDIGESTBY LOVEDAY MORRISlützerath, germany — The
yawning black-brown scar in the
earth that is Germany’s Garzweil-
er coal mine has already swal-
lowed more than a dozen villages.
Centuries-old churches and
family homes have been razed
and the land they were built on
torn away. Farmland has disap-
peared, graveyards have been
emptied.
“All destroyed for coal,” said
Eckhardt Heukamp, surveying
the vast pit that drops away from
the edge of his fields, 20 miles
west of Cologne.
But there’s still more under his
feet to be mined: Six more villages
are threatened.
A 56-year-old farmer, Heu-
kamp is the last holdout in Lüt-
zerath, the next hamlet slated to
be wiped away to allow more
digging for coal to power German
homes. He is fighting the forced
expropriation of the 18th-century
farmhouse his family has lived in
for generations, which lies just a
few hundred yards from the
mine’s edge.
As world leaders prepare to
come together in Glasgow, Scot-
land, next month for the U.N.
Climate Change Conference, the
tiny community is on the front
line in a battle to bring Germany
in accord with its climate com-
mitments — one of many such
communities around the world,
as countries struggle to keep up
with ambitious pledges to slash
emissions.
The encroaching pit is a re-
minder of the contradictions of
Germany’s environmental rec-
ord: Outgoing Chancellor Angela
Merkel has been at the forefront
of international diplomacy on cli-
mate, but Europe’s largest econo-
my has struggled to kick its addic-
tion to coal.
Germany has pledged to stop
burning coal by 2038, at least
eight years behind 16 other Euro-
pean countries that have commit-
ted to ending coal use by the end
of this decade or earlier. There is
some hope that may change as the
three parties that made gains in
September’s elections — includ-
ing Germany’s Greens — hold
talks to form a new government.
So far they have said they would
“ideally” like to see a 2030 coal
exit.
“We want to be a front-runner
on climate. We sell ourselves as
this,” said Pao-Yu Oei, a professor
in the economics of sustainable
energy transition at the Europe
University of Flensburg. “But for
some very easy, simple things, we
are not willing to take the sacri-
fice and basically take on our own
lobby groups.”
While it burns a fraction of the
coal of China or the United States,
in the European Union, Germany
is the second-largest consumer of
hard coal, and the biggest con-
sumer of the less-energy-efficient
lignite, or brown coal, which lies
under Lützerath.
Graves exhumed
In western North-Rhine West-
phalia, where Heukamp’s village
of Lützerath lies, coal is ever-
present.
Heaps adorn roundabouts, in a
monument to the fuel. RWE, the
multinational power company
that owns the pit, has set up
viewing and information points
around the mine’s edge.
With its last black coal mines
closed, Germany is the biggest
producer of brown coal in the
world.
Generally closer to the surface
than black coal, lignite is often
mined in huge open-cast surface
mines rather than underground.
After the coal is gone, the soil is
backfilled and replanted, but the
landscape is irrevocably altered.
In all, the area RWE has the
right to mine around Lützerath
stretches twice the size of Man-
hattan.
Villages in the area have been
pulled down for mining for dec-
ades. Some 35,000 people have
been forced to give up their
homes since the end of World War
II.
Garzweiler I, on the other side
of a six-lane highway, brought an
end to more than half a dozen
villages, including Garzweiler, af-
ter which the mine is named.
After coal there was exhausted,
digging began on the other side of
the autobahn at Garzweiler II in
2006, with plans to displace a
dozen more communities and
thousands of residents. They have
disappeared, one by one.
RWE says that i t is fully com-
pliant with Germany’s current
coal exit plan and that all three of
its lignite mines will be closed
earlier than planned. In return
for doing so, RWE received a
2.6 billion euro payout from the
government.
Relocations are avoided where
possible, said spokesman Guido
Steffen, adding that nearby Inden
mine can’t be expanded instead
as there is no rail link to the
company’s more modern power
plants.
The coal of Lützerath is needed
in the near future, he said, and the
coal under the neighboring five
villages in the next “few years” to
supply RWE’s power plants.Activists move in
Lützerath was once a close-
knit community of about 90 peo-
ple, Heukamp said. But his neigh-
bors have slowly sold and left. In
the courtyard of his farm, near his
tractors and combine harvester,
lies a pile of gravestones.Family graves had to be ex-
humed and relocated in the last
village to be flattened for the
mine. There is no longer any sign
of the church that was pulled
down despite its being a protect-
ed building.
As villagers have slowly moved
out, dozens of activists have
moved in. “Defend Lützerath, De-
fend 1.5°C,” reads a sign that
Heukamp held up alongside
Swedish climate activist Greta
Thunberg during a recent visit.
Treehouses dot a copse of trees
between Heukamp’s farmhouse
and the mine’s edge. A gully holds
dozens of tents.
A woman who goes by thename Salome Dorfer, 25, lives in a
treehouse about 26 feet up a
towering oak. She’s been here for
the past year. Dorfer is the name
she uses for her activism, as she
said she fears that using her real
name could hurt her employment
prospects.
Lützerath’s new residents say
they won’t leave without a fight to
save the village.
“We are preparing tactics to
basically block the roads when
they come with their working
equipment,” she said, touring the
site barefoot on a recent rainy day
in October. “We’ll make it as big
as possible to show the world that
we need to change this, that wecan’t just act as usual in the midst
of a climate crisis.”Germany’s goals
The German government had
not expected to meet its 2020
emissions reduction target, but
limped over the line thanks to the
pandemic. But it is expected to
slip back below its target this year
as the country returns to business
as usual.
Still, it has set ambitious new
goals: a 65 percent cut in emis-
sions from preindustrial levels by
2030, and reaching 88 percent a
decade later. The government
was forced to scramble to update
its climate law this year after thecountry’s highest court ruled that
it fell so short it essentially en-
dangered the fundamental rights
and freedoms of the country’s
youth.
Experts say it needs to update
its coal phaseout plans to reach
those targets. The percentage of
electricity Germany makes from
coal has dropped significantly in
recent years, but it still accounts
for more than a quarter of the
country’s power supply.
Germany’s 2038 goal appears
increasingly out of step with Eu-
rope’s larger economies. Britain
says it is phasing out coal by 2024,
France by 2022 and Italy by 2025.
Making it more difficult for
Germany is its decision to phase
out nuclear by 2022 in the wake of
Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster,
plus its large manufacturing in-
dustry. Experts say Germany
needs to rapidly ramp up renew-
ables to fill the gap, but soaring
gas prices could complicate ef-
forts for that transition, with
fears it could increase electricity
bills even further.‘The nothing reaches you’
Down the road in the village of
Kuckum, the Dresen family think
they might be able to stay in the
home where their family has lived
for generations. With their village
earmarked for demolition since
1995, the looming threat of dis-
placement has been ever-present
in 21-year-old Tina Dresen’s life.
“As a kid you were always
thinking, to the left, there’s this
hole,” she said. “And there is only
sadness. It’s like you’ve been liv-
ing next to nothing, and the noth-
ing reaches you.”
The family had initially
thought selling was inevitable,
but then the remaining corner of
Hambach Forest — the previous
symbolic center of environmen-
talists’ fight against Germany’s
coal policy — was saved when the
government brought forward its
coal exit date.
“Then we thought it’s possible
to win this fight,” said Tina’s
brother David Dresen, 30, an ac-
tivist with Alle Dörfer Bleiben, or
All Villages Stay, a local group
fighting to save the villages.
The majority of their neighbors
have already gone. “Empty, emp-
ty, empty,” he said, pointing to the
redbrick houses that line the
road.
Two-thirds have already sold,
according to RWE le tters posted
to residents earlier this year, urg-
ing them to resettle, a process
that has been ongoing for the past
five years. The company says it
aims to move the village residents
together, in a process of “joint
resettlement” that has “stood the
test for decades now in preserv-
ing a village community.”
Families are offered a plot in a
new village that they can buy and
build on from the money offered
to them for their property by
RWE. Most reach an amicable
settlement, it says. Those that
don’t can be forcibly evicted
based on a German law that
allows expropriations for the
“greater good.”
Clumped together with a group
of other “new” villages, between a
highway and a railway line, the
new development bears little re-
semblance to the old communi-
ties. Unfinished streets are lined
with boxy new homes in what
feels like a nondescript suburb.
“It has the same street names,
that’s it,” said David Dresen.
[email protected]Katharina Köll contributed to this
report.Germany continues to raze villages for brown coal
The country is on the front lines of the global disconnect in the climate fight, with pledges to cut carbon, but continued investments in fossil fuels
PHOTOS BY FABIAN RITTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: A c oal excavator works next to the village of Lützerath. ABOVE: A horse belonging to the Dresen
family grazes on their property in Kuckum, a v illage that has been earmarked for demolition since- Family members hope t hat a change in German politics will allow them t o stay in their home.