Do you really think environmentalists are the driving force behind this?

Environmentalists are not the driving force to mine this coal, but many campaign heavily against nuclear, and the effect of decommissioning nuclear in Germany has been increased coal activity.

I'm not placing the blame at the feet of environmentalists, so much as ruing unintended consequences.

Well yes, but environmentalists usually also call for large reductions in energy consumption as they know renewables can’t provide a like-for-like replacement. Are the consumers of electricity not also to a degree complicit by creating the demand in the first place? I think it helps to look past the proximate cause.

Presumably the same environmentalists are also backing the exit from coal. Using nuclear instead would have just displaced this mining activity (for the uranium) to somewhere else in the world.

But yeah, Merkel’s nuclear shift did seem pretty rash.

It's funny how people associate that nuclear shift with Merkel, given how it mostly was Merkel flip-flopping away from her prior policy of overriding the existing agreements about phasing out nuclear once it started to look bad...

Which environmentalist groups are anti-nuclear? I've never heard that position from groups in the US.

Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND, "association for the protection of environment and nature, Germany"), Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, to name just a few.

Yes. Environmentalists are complicit.

There are people who term themselves 'Eco-modernists' who are almost always pro-nuclear power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecomodernism

There is also 'environmentalists for nuclear' that includes Patrick Moore, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace and James Lovelock:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear

James Hansen, possibly the original driving force behind modern greenhouse gas concerns is also pro-nuclear.

It is definitely not fair to say “treehuggers, every single one of them. There are a lot of environmentalists who are absolutely pro-nuclear. Just like any mass of people, blanket generalizations are almost always just wrong.

We can do better than that here.

Oops, that sentence was ambiguous. I meant every single one of the talking points. Treehuggers is absolutely the right term in the context of this article, though.