Police on Tuesday began breaking down barricades and forcibly removing climate activists staging a sit-in protest against the expansion of a coal mine, highlighting tensions over Germany's environmental policy amid an energy crisis.

Several hundred climate activists tried to prevent heavy machinery from reaching the abandoned village of Lützerath in North Rhine-Westphalia by constructing barricades and digging trenches to halt police in their tracks.

Activists have occupied the remaining buildings in the village to the west of Cologne and near the Dutch border on the face of the opencast lignite mine — long scheduled for demolition and cleared of residents — for almost two years.

Police on Tuesday appealed to activists on site to leave voluntarily and said their full clearance operation would likely begin on Wednesday. Officially, as of Tuesday, protests on the site are no longer permitted. A last-ditch effort by activists to secure a longer license to remain with a court injunction failed on Monday. 

Violent altercations between protesters and police and scenes of verbal abuse have become more commonplace in recent days as the clearance deadline loomed. Police and protesters have traded allegations of disproportionate behavior and use of force.

Tensions over Berlin's climate policy

Environmental groups have been critical of Germany's new government since Olaf Scholz (SPD) became chancellor in December 2021, when the Green Party also became a prominent partner in the coalition that helped the former finance minister form a government.

The government has so far made only small changes to longstanding energy policies, for instance voicing a desire to bring the existing German deadline to stop using coal forward from 2038 but retaining that date as the latest possible exit.

Meanwhile, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent impact on Russian gas and oil deliveries and prices forced the German government to enact contingency plans to secure energy supply, even including a brief extension to the running times of the country's few remaining nuclear power plants, whose final switch-off had been scheduled for the end of 2022.

The Greens picked up almost all the ministry positions directly related to these issues in coalition negotiations, such as energy, the economy, and the environment. Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck is the most senior politician responsible for — and the man who therefore is frequently charged with defending — policies that for decades would have been anathema to his party and its base.

Environmentalists argue the party sacrificed its principles when joining the government, as does the opposition Left party.

The head of the Left, Janine Wissler, has decried the plans to mine out the village as "madness" and a "frontal attack on climate protection." Wissler, who visited the site on Tuesday, called out Habeck for his role in the dispute and accused the Green Party of betraying its climate agenda over RWE's interests.

A Green Party Bundestag member, Kathrin Henneberger, has also been on-site in Lützerath as a parliamentary observer and posting regular updates on the police operation and the mine. She said she had seen arrests early on Tuesday, including one "without a good reason from my perspective." 

"Here we see how protesters and police are facing off against each other," Henneberger said in a video she posted online. "Today will be a very uncomfortable day."

Lützerath was a tiny village, once home to around 100 people. 

jsi/msh (dpa, Reuters, AFP, epd, KNA, AP)