BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - The co-faction leader of the Green Party in the Bundestag, Katharina Dröge, has defended the agreement on lignite mining in the west and thus also on the clearance of Lützerath as necessary. 2023 is "a year that does not begin easily for us Greens," Dröge said on the sidelines of a closed-door meeting of the parliamentary group's executive committee in Berlin on Thursday. Federal Economics and Climate Protection Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) also reiterated the decision as a "good decision for climate protection" that would save CO2 emissions.

"On the one hand, we as the Green parliamentary group in the Bundestag - and I am convinced of this as a Green party - are absolutely united on the issue that it was right and necessary to bring forward the coal phase-out by eight years," Dröge said. Without the agreement, the Lützerath area would still have been dredged, "then the five villages would not have been saved, and we would not have achieved anything for the climate," the group chairwoman said. "And that is the common thing that we Greens also put forward." In doing so, she was responding to a question about the rift that runs through the party on the issue of Lützerath.

On the other hand, the Greens are "also absolutely united" in their support for more climate protection, Dröge said. "And it's a bit of our fate that we stand here and say: if they had listened to us five or ten years ago, we would be in a different place today. That has always been the fate of the Greens on climate change issues. But we now bear responsibility. And what we can do is save CO2 now."

The decision to phase out coal in western Germany in 2030 was something the Greens "pushed through alone in this federal government," he said. No coalition partner had campaigned for it in the Bundestag election campaign, he said. "Neither the SPD nor the FDP nor the CDU said in the Bundestag election campaign here: hook on, let's do it. But on the contrary, we pushed this through."

The economics ministries led by the Greens in the federal government and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia had agreed with the energy company RWE to bring forward the phase-out of coal in the west from 2038 to 2030. In return, two lignite-fired power plant units that were supposed to be shut down by the end of 2022 are to remain in operation until the end of March 2024 - with the option of an additional year. The settlement of Lützerath is to be demolished in order to extract coal there. Five already largely empty villages at the Garzweiler open pit mine in the neighborhood of Lützerath, on the other hand, are to be preserved./hrz/DP/ngu