Greta Thunberg made international headlines this week when she and other climate activists were briefly detained by police at a protest against the expansion of a coal mine in Germany.
Thunberg was among the thousands of protesters who arrived to denounce the expansion of the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine by German energy company RWE. The extraction of lignite (also known as brown coal, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels) requires digging 200-metre-deep ravines that can swallow entire villages – in this case, the abandoned village of Lützerath.
Last week, swarms of police moved into the village in North Rhine-Westphalia to clear the activists, some of whom have been camped there for two years.
