(3 minutes read)
- Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate recently visited a vast German open-pit coal mine and condemned the destructions being carried out to ecology and the village and nearby habitats
- This he said, will have wider implications
- The visit of the climate activist assumes importance against the backdrop of the forthcoming U.N. climate talks, which will open in Glasgow, Scotland on Oct. 31
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate recently visited a vast German open-pit coal mine and condemned the destruction being carried out to ecology and the village and nearby habitats. This, he said, will have wider implications. The visit of the climate activist assumes importance against the backdrop of the forthcoming U.N. climate talks, which will open in Glasgow, Scotland in Oct. 31.
The Garzweiler lignite mine in Uganda is operated by the German utility giant RWE. It has become a focus of protests by people who want Germany to stop extracting and burning coal because of the environmental degradation that it causes. Activists are wanting Germany to stop operations of the mine since expanding the mine runs counter to Germany’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to meet the Paris climate goal, which targets capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). Germany vows to end coal mining by 2038, but environmentalists maintain that exit from coal mining should be much earlier.
The activists maintain that coal mining has a direct bearing on climate change and it affects not only the country where it is mined but also the trail of countries, where it is transported to and put to end-use. World-wide the movement towards ending coal mining is gaining currency. Switch over to the alternative sources of energy is a costly one till the time the cost towards generating clean energy is drastically reduced.
