Mining trade union head: Resistance to open pit mining resembles "a civil war”

The head of Germany’s largest mining trade union IG BCE, Michael Vassiliadis, has said resistance to open pit mining in the country resembles “a civil war,” Rudolf Barnholt writes in Rheinische Post. At an event in the run-up to state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Vassiliadis said Germany’s Energiewende was “an absurd endeavour” which would “find no country that is dim-witted enough to imitate it,” Barnholt writes. Vassiliadis argued Germany’s energy transition was too inefficient and anti-coal activists were wrongfully styled as conservationist heroes who made the idea of ecological modernisation “a religion,” according to the article. 

Read the article in German here.

For more information, see the CLEW factsheet When will Germany finally ditch coal?