“Probably the greatest malfunction in the red-green coalition”

North Rhine-Westphalia’s (NRW) Green environment minister Johannes Remmel has angered the party's SPD coalition partners, as well as the CDU, with a call to close 10 local coal-fired power plants, Guido M. Hartmann writes on Welt Online. Just days before parliamentary elections in Germany’s most populous federal state on 14 May, Remmel’s plea has caused “a collective outcry” in NRW, whose heavy industry relies on the region’s vast lignite reserves for cheap power, Hartmann says. The SPD, the “red” force in the "red-green" coalition, confirmed the state’s plan to continue coal mining and coal-fired power production until the middle of the century, he writes.

Read the article in German here.

See the CLEW factsheet When will Germany finally ditch coal? for more information.