“We thought someone would save us but nobody came” This fall, I spent 6 weeks in the USA, including in South Texas, where natural gas is being fracked and LNG export terminals are exporting the gas to Europe.

Texas and Louisiana are home to the largest “carbon bombs” in the world. If all oil and gasprojects are fully realized there, that alone would bring us to over 2 degrees of warming. But behind the figures lies a depressing reality.

“We thought someone would save us but nobody came” I can’t get this sentence out of my head. And also: “We can’t all leave” as young people in Arlington Texas told us.

Arlington is a suburb of Dallas in Texas. There are 400 active gas wells there. In the middle of residential areas. Behind gardens, next to schools, behind kindergartens, behind the pharmacy. Often inconspicuously hidden behind fences. But not inconspicuous. Because you can smell the pollutants in the air, you can feel them in the back of your throat.

I started getting headache after 10 minutes in. People in Arlington have been living next to fracking for 10 years. One in four children has asthma. The cancer rate is one of the highest in the country and babies are born with damage.

For me, this was unimaginable: that fossil extraction is not something that happens far away in an industrial area, but so immediate. When I remarked on this, I was told that the gas was under the houses. Then I heard another sentence that stuck with me: “Our lives are cheap and they don’t care”.

They don’t care. 2024 will be the hottest year on record. And here in Berlin, the companies drilling for gas in Arlington and elsewhere are currently plotting how to expand their dirty fossil fuel business.

And finally, the fact that fossil fuel companies have no problem attacking villages, making people sick and burning down the planet is nothing new.

And that at a time when the crisis could hardly be clearer, when the rain no longer comes when it used to, in the year in which the severe climate catastrophes surprised even climatescientists, that they then become bolder in their methods, more inventive in their fairy tales, more courageous in spreading disinformation should not surprise anyone either.

Fossil fuel companies have never been and will never be part of the solution. The fossil era is over, we are getting out of coal, which, by the way, was long said to be a supposed bridge technology, and now they are trying to create new dependencies through the back door.

Fracking is not allowed in Germany - for good reason. In Arlington, fracking is being expanded with reference to the energy crisis in Europe, with reference to the new terminalsin Germany.

People in Texas are fighting back, complaining, demonstrating and giving interviews. But as long as the political message from this side of the Atlantic is that we need the gas, they will not win against the fossil fuel companies.

As long as we are building new terminals and new gas-fired power plants in Germany and signing new contracts, we are torpedoing our climate targets, endangering livelihoods and futures and undermining the energy transition.

So let’s not let the companies get away with it. And demand a clear gas phase-out plan in Germany.

I can say in no uncertain terms: we don’t need gas and we don’t want gas. And we are prepared to fight back.