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German police have long collaborated with energy giant RWE to enforce ecological catastrophe
Clashes at a huge coal mine were the latest episode in a long struggle.
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In early 2023, the German village of Lützerath was the site of violent clashes between thousands of protesters and police who wanted to clear the village so it could be swallowed up by Garzweiler II, a huge opencast coal mine. In small groups, police forces charged into groups of protesters, beating people, kicking and pushing them to the ground. Police dogs attacked protesters, just metres away from the steep edge of the Garweiler II opencast coal mine. Dozens of people were injured.
The protests made world headlines when Greta Thunberg joined in and was detained by police.
The police would eventually drive the protesters out of the village, using batons, pepper spray and dogs (the local police point out these were “legally permitted means of physical violence” and “were only used to avert dangers to public safety and order”). The bulldozers then moved in. Today, as one activist put it, “the place where Lützerath used to be looks just like the rest of the post-mining wasteland around it”.
Lützerath was particularly high-profile, but other villages in the region have suffered the same fate. In my academic research I have tracked how the regional police have long collaborated with energy firm RWE to ensure the expansion of coal mines isn’t held up by local objections.
Protests in Lützerath began after almost all of its residents were forced to sell and leave a few years ago. Expropriation of land for mining is a touchpoint in Germany as the modern Federal Mining Act that enables it came out of old Nazi legislation which allowed the eviction of communities for coal excavation in Germany’s quest to strengthen its wartime capabilities.
In close allyship with surrounding communities and the last remaining farmer, Eckardt Heukamp, activists built barricades, tree houses, tunnels, and tripods, and moved into empty homes to stop the destruction of the village and prepare for a final confrontation with police and the mine’s operator, energy giant RWE. (In a statement provided to The Conversation, the local police said it is obliged to prosecute “anyone who stays [in the mining area] against the will of the owner”).
Heukamp lost his court case against RWE in 2022 and had to leave and see his family farm destroyed. This is the second time he was dispossessed for coal.
The demonstrations in early 2023 were protesting the eviction of those activists to allow RWE to extract and burn a thick layer of lignite coal underneath the village. Sometimes known as brown coal, lignite is the dirtiest form of coal, and a further 280 million tonnes of it will be extracted from Garzweiler mine alone.
Studies show that this coal is not necessary for Germany’s energy supply. But it is part of a controversial deal between RWE and the Green-Conservative coalition government which brings forward the end date of lignite coal mining in Germany from 2038 to 2030, “saving” five similar villages, but sacrificing Lützerath. But by reconnecting two generating units and increasing annual extraction, the amount of total coal burnt is hardly reduced at all.
A history of resistance
The fight to protect Lützerath was part of a decades-long history of direct actions and combative resistance in the Rhineland. For instance the nearby Hambacher Forest occupation, set up in 2012, protected ancient woodland from the expansion of another RWE coal mine. The occupation became a symbol for resistance – “love, live, resist” – inspiring people across Germany and beyond.
For ten years, evictions were followed by reoccupations, as people risked their lives to stop ecological destruction. The last eviction, in 2018, took over four weeks until stopped by the courts, and was later declared illegal. A young film maker, Steffen Meyn, died when he fell around 20 meters from a tree bridge during the eviction.
While the eviction and destruction of the forest were eventually stopped, only a small percentage of the original woodland remains. Heat from the nearby mine means the forest is reported to be slowly drying out.
RWE has often been able to count on the support of police and politicians to combat resistance. In 2015, it emerged that the then-district administrator responsible for policing anti-coal protest was himself a member of RWE Power’s supervisory board, while Greenpeace research found that at least 17 politicians from all political parties – from mayors to parliamentarians – have had side jobs at the company. (In response, the local police said they are “committed to political neutrality [and] are not guided by private or economic interests. We act exclusively on a legal basis.”)
For decades, RWE has fostered its image as a “responsible neighbour”, thanks to the firm’s PR and corporate social responsibility (CSR) work and the support of regional media and government. Police have long collaborated, retweeting RWE press messages, using its vehicles to transport protesters, and effectively outsourcing the most difficult (tunnel) eviction work to RWE’s own private fire brigade by declaring it a “rescue”. (The police say this did happen but deny it was an example of collaboration. “Rather”, a spokesperson told The Conversation, “it is a matter of clear, legally-assigned responsibilities”).
Revolving door relationships lubricate the political manoeuvring to defend coal at all costs. In late 2022, for instance, a close aide of Germany’s minister for foreign affairs and former leader of the Green Party left to become RWE’s chief lobbyist. (The Conversation contacted RWE for comment on whether this was an example of a “revolving door” situation but received no response).
For decades, RWE has paid communities in shares, not cash, which means that many become financially dependent on the company. Nearly a quarter of RWE’s shares are owned by communities, cities and towns. Local authorities are thus shareholders, licensers, clients, constituencies, employees and tax collectors at the same time.
Blurry boundaries between corporation and state
The boundaries between RWE and the federal state of North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) are so blurry the state is sometimes termed “NRWE”. When I studied RWE’s counterinsurgency strategies in the region I found the firm’s interests were represented everywhere, from church choirs and town councils, to school boards and universities.
RWE has financed police barbecues and fire trucks, I was told, sponsored football clubs and festivals, concerts and exhibitions, viewing platforms and historic castles, regularly organises lectures and restoration conferences. It puts up baking carts and public bookshelves, pays for school buildings, organises volunteering activities and tours through the mine. Employees go into schools and hand out lunch boxes to first graders. They create teaching materials, role-playing games, and girls’ days in their training centres, offer school trips into power stations, zoo schools, and environmental education initiatives. (RWE did not respond to a question on whether it has bought support among local communities).
Back in the 1980s, a scientific report highlighted the ecological destruction caused by mining in the region – but publication was blocked by the state government. More recently, RWE has been able to influence legislation – Der Spiegel reported in 2022 that parts of Germany’s coal phase-out laws, which ensured the Garzweiler mine would stay open, were based on studies paid for by the company. RWE has previously confirmed it funded the studies but said everyone had “free access to the documents”.
RWE has also paid for research on how to understand resistance to its own actions. All of these are classic counterinsurgency strategies to repress, pacify and co-opt dissent, smoothed over by a well-oiled propaganda machine.
The eviction of Lützerath is over. But criminalisation and policing continue in the coal mining Rhineland. As police continue to protect fossil capital, enforcing ecological destruction, and being perceived to serve not just RWE but the many individuals and institutions that benefit financially from coal mine expansion, the fight goes on.
The Conversation approached RWE for comment but did not receive a response.
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Andrea Brock has in the past received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Deutsche Studienstiftung.
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International
Fuel poverty in England is probably 2.5 times higher than government statistics show
The top 40% most energy efficient homes aren’t counted as being in fuel poverty, no matter what their bills or income are.
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The cap set on how much UK energy suppliers can charge for domestic gas and electricity is set to fall by 15% from April 1 2024. Despite this, prices remain shockingly high. The average household energy bill in 2023 was £2,592 a year, dwarfing the pre-pandemic average of £1,308 in 2019.
The term “fuel poverty” refers to a household’s ability to afford the energy required to maintain adequate warmth and the use of other essential appliances. Quite how it is measured varies from country to country. In England, the government uses what is known as the low income low energy efficiency (Lilee) indicator.
Since energy costs started rising sharply in 2021, UK households’ spending powers have plummeted. It would be reasonable to assume that these increasingly hostile economic conditions have caused fuel poverty rates to rise.
However, according to the Lilee fuel poverty metric, in England there have only been modest changes in fuel poverty incidence year on year. In fact, government statistics show a slight decrease in the nationwide rate, from 13.2% in 2020 to 13.0% in 2023.
Our recent study suggests that these figures are incorrect. We estimate the rate of fuel poverty in England to be around 2.5 times higher than what the government’s statistics show, because the criteria underpinning the Lilee estimation process leaves out a large number of financially vulnerable households which, in reality, are unable to afford and maintain adequate warmth.
Energy security
In 2022, we undertook an in-depth analysis of Lilee fuel poverty in Greater London. First, we combined fuel poverty, housing and employment data to provide an estimate of vulnerable homes which are omitted from Lilee statistics.
We also surveyed 2,886 residents of Greater London about their experiences of fuel poverty during the winter of 2022. We wanted to gauge energy security, which refers to a type of self-reported fuel poverty. Both parts of the study aimed to demonstrate the potential flaws of the Lilee definition.
Introduced in 2019, the Lilee metric considers a household to be “fuel poor” if it meets two criteria. First, after accounting for energy expenses, its income must fall below the poverty line (which is 60% of median income).
Second, the property must have an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of D–G (the lowest four ratings). The government’s apparent logic for the Lilee metric is to quicken the net-zero transition of the housing sector.
In Sustainable Warmth, the policy paper that defined the Lilee approach, the government says that EPC A–C-rated homes “will not significantly benefit from energy-efficiency measures”. Hence, the focus on fuel poverty in D–G-rated properties.
Generally speaking, EPC A–C-rated homes (those with the highest three ratings) are considered energy efficient, while D–G-rated homes are deemed inefficient. The problem with how Lilee fuel poverty is measured is that the process assumes that EPC A–C-rated homes are too “energy efficient” to be considered fuel poor: the main focus of the fuel poverty assessment is a characteristic of the property, not the occupant’s financial situation.
In other words, by this metric, anyone living in an energy-efficient home cannot be considered to be in fuel poverty, no matter their financial situation. There is an obvious flaw here.
Around 40% of homes in England have an EPC rating of A–C. According to the Lilee definition, none of these homes can or ever will be classed as fuel poor. Even though energy prices are going through the roof, a single-parent household with dependent children whose only income is universal credit (or some other form of benefits) will still not be considered to be living in fuel poverty if their home is rated A-C.
The lack of protection afforded to these households against an extremely volatile energy market is highly concerning.
In our study, we estimate that 4.4% of London’s homes are rated A-C and also financially vulnerable. That is around 171,091 households, which are currently omitted by the Lilee metric but remain highly likely to be unable to afford adequate energy.
In most other European nations, what is known as the 10% indicator is used to gauge fuel poverty. This metric, which was also used in England from the 1990s until the mid 2010s, considers a home to be fuel poor if more than 10% of income is spent on energy. Here, the main focus of the fuel poverty assessment is the occupant’s financial situation, not the property.
Were such alternative fuel poverty metrics to be employed, a significant portion of those 171,091 households in London would almost certainly qualify as fuel poor.
This is confirmed by the findings of our survey. Our data shows that 28.2% of the 2,886 people who responded were “energy insecure”. This includes being unable to afford energy, making involuntary spending trade-offs between food and energy, and falling behind on energy payments.
Worryingly, we found that the rate of energy insecurity in the survey sample is around 2.5 times higher than the official rate of fuel poverty in London (11.5%), as assessed according to the Lilee metric.
It is likely that this figure can be extrapolated for the rest of England. If anything, energy insecurity may be even higher in other regions, given that Londoners tend to have higher-than-average household income.
The UK government is wrongly omitting hundreds of thousands of English households from fuel poverty statistics. Without a more accurate measure, vulnerable households will continue to be overlooked and not get the assistance they desperately need to stay warm.
Torran Semple receives funding from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/S023305/1.
John Harvey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
european uk pandemicInternational
Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes
After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…
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After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.
Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.
These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.
Another excerpt:
That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.
Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.
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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study
Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis…
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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People who recovered from COVID-19 and received a COVID-19 shot were more likely to suffer adverse reactions, researchers in Europe are reporting.
Participants in the study were more likely to experience an adverse reaction after vaccination regardless of the type of shot, with one exception, the researchers found.
Across all vaccine brands, people with prior COVID-19 were 2.6 times as likely after dose one to suffer an adverse reaction, according to the new study. Such people are commonly known as having a type of protection known as natural immunity after recovery.
People with previous COVID-19 were also 1.25 times as likely after dose 2 to experience an adverse reaction.
The findings held true across all vaccine types following dose one.
Of the female participants who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for instance, 82 percent who had COVID-19 previously experienced an adverse reaction after their first dose, compared to 59 percent of females who did not have prior COVID-19.
The only exception to the trend was among males who received a second AstraZeneca dose. The percentage of males who suffered an adverse reaction was higher, 33 percent to 24 percent, among those without a COVID-19 history.
“Participants who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed with a positive test) experienced at least one adverse reaction more often after the 1st dose compared to participants who did not have prior COVID-19. This pattern was observed in both men and women and across vaccine brands,” Florence van Hunsel, an epidemiologist with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb, and her co-authors wrote.
There were only slightly higher odds of the naturally immune suffering an adverse reaction following receipt of a Pfizer or Moderna booster, the researchers also found.
The researchers performed what’s known as a cohort event monitoring study, following 29,387 participants as they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The participants live in a European country such as Belgium, France, or Slovakia.
Overall, three-quarters of the participants reported at least one adverse reaction, although some were minor such as injection site pain.
Adverse reactions described as serious were reported by 0.24 percent of people who received a first or second dose and 0.26 percent for people who received a booster. Different examples of serious reactions were not listed in the study.
Participants were only specifically asked to record a range of minor adverse reactions (ADRs). They could provide details of other reactions in free text form.
“The unsolicited events were manually assessed and coded, and the seriousness was classified based on international criteria,” researchers said.
The free text answers were not provided by researchers in the paper.
“The authors note, ‘In this manuscript, the focus was not on serious ADRs and adverse events of special interest.’” Yet, in their highlights section they state, “The percentage of serious ADRs in the study is low for 1st and 2nd vaccination and booster.”
Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of the group React19, which advocates for people who were injured by vaccines, told The Epoch Times: “It is intellectually dishonest to set out to study minor adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination then make conclusions about the frequency of serious adverse events. They also fail to provide the free text data.” He added that the paper showed “yet another study that is in my opinion, deficient by design.”
Ms. Hunsel did not respond to a request for comment.
She and other researchers listed limitations in the paper, including how they did not provide data broken down by country.
The paper was published by the journal Vaccine on March 6.
The study was funded by the European Medicines Agency and the Dutch government.
No authors declared conflicts of interest.
Some previous papers have also found that people with prior COVID-19 infection had more adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including a 2021 paper from French researchers. A U.S. study identified prior COVID-19 as a predictor of the severity of side effects.
Some other studies have determined COVID-19 vaccines confer little or no benefit to people with a history of infection, including those who had received a primary series.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends people who recovered from COVID-19 receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although a number of other health authorities have stopped recommending the shot for people who have prior COVID-19.
Another New Study
In another new paper, South Korean researchers outlined how they found people were more likely to report certain adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination than after receipt of another vaccine.
The reporting of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or pericarditis, a related condition, was nearly 20 times as high among children as the reporting odds following receipt of all other vaccines, the researchers found.
The reporting odds were also much higher for multisystem inflammatory syndrome or Kawasaki disease among adolescent COVID-19 recipients.
Researchers analyzed reports made to VigiBase, which is run by the World Health Organization.
“Based on our results, close monitoring for these rare but serious inflammatory reactions after COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents until definitive causal relationship can be established,” the researchers wrote.
The study was published by the Journal of Korean Medical Science in its March edition.
Limitations include VigiBase receiving reports of problems, with some reports going unconfirmed.
Funding came from the South Korean government. One author reported receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer.
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