What do you think this is?
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“What do you think is this?” ← You slipped. That’s a major non-native speaker flag.
The picture looks like some sort of destroyed building, with soldiers or police looking on. It also looks almost like it’s animated.
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At first I thought it looked like medieval knights in an opera setting.
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Huge mining machine
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That’s right, but why do you think the police are protecting the giant machine?
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Because of disagreeing with environmental degradation, maybe.
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You changed the original picture. This one is easier to identify.
I’m going to guess the police are there because environmentalists are trying to stop the machine.
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Yes, it’s all about a place called “Lützerath”:
Open pit mines are pretty disgusting. They are mining lignite which isn’t even good coal. I suspect most of the anthracite got mined long ago, so now they are mining the crappy stuff.
I have not heard of villages being abandoned in the US for mining purposes - not in modern times anyway. But it might still happen when building dams and reservoirs. Hydro electricity is clean, but it usually means flooding vast amounts of land. I remember writing a paper in school about the Glen Canyon dam and reservoir. It was extremely controversial because it flooded some of the most beautiful parts of the country.
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Yes, the German fossil fuel company RWE wants to burn more coal to make a profit, leaving behind pits like this one.
However, some of our people don’t want to put up with that:
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The irony of the second picture with the wind turbines in the background.
I don’t understand what they are doing though. I see what looks like some coal veins in the background, but nothing at all where they are digging. It sure doesn’t look like an area rich in coal. They must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel mining lignite, and not even much of that.
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It’s a symbolic act by RWE to show how powerful they are. Here is a quote from BUND that explains the situation:
Lützerath and its unruly residents are blocking the way for RWE’s excavators to expand the Garzweiler open pit mine to the west. If RWE and the state government have their way, 280 million tons of lignite will be extracted there by 2030, much more than the climate can bear.
BUND sees the real reason for the eviction in the desire of the coal company RWE to remove a symbolic focal point of the climate movement. This is how RWE itself had formulated it. In a document for the NRW Ministry of Economics, RWE argues against the preservation of Lützerath. Quote: “No pacification: It would create motivation for further blockades. Thus additional uncertainties in the further opencast mining.”
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