We are going to have to get serious about carbon.
.
Canadians don’t really believe that, of course – certainly not our federal and provincial leaders. But one gets the sense that senior decision-makers in The Netherlands do. Not in the next few years, but when it comes to future planning, they believe a conservative course of action would be to anticipate a society-wide switch.
Here’s their Foreign Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans a few months ago (with further excerpts in the above post):
The environmental challenge is arguably the biggest challenge we face. For this, we need a better understanding of the way energy, food, water and the environment are interrelated.
No one can do this on their own. Here, governments, business, international organisations, NGOs, consumer organisations, academia and individual citizens will need to work together if we want to come up with a solution to this most complicated of issues.
Because it means that we’ll have to live differently. Not just produce differently and trade differently; we need to change the way we live….
Imagine a Canadian political leader telling us that.
On the ground, the agencies which run the ports seem to take sustainability seriously, certainly as far as their own operations. (Rotterdam and Vancouver are two of the only ports that produce sustainability reports in accordance with the Global Reporting Intiative.)
And visible on tour are large-scale projects experimenting with CCS – Carbon Capture and Storage – integrated into port lands, notably the Maasvlakte coal-fired power plant, part of the Rotterdam Climate Initiative.
.
.
The idea is to eventually funnel carbon-dioxide into cavities vacated by North Sea oil, and to the greenhouses to the north of the port – so dense on the ground that they create their own microclimate. (Go here to see what these look like closer up – it’s astonishing.)
.
.
But the problem appears to be less the technology than the economy. Timmermans again:
CO2 emissions and the use of natural resources such as water should be incorporated into the price of energy. They are left out of every business model today; they should be part of every business model tomorrow:…
But of course they’re not – at least sufficient enough to make a big difference. Carbon pricing already exists insofar as there is a European carbon exchange. But the price is too low to make it work as an effective incentive to justify the billions needed to pursue large-scale CCS and change behaviour. And the competitive dilemma facing Europe makes escalating the cost of carbon unilaterally untenable.
Nonetheless, technology and logistics have over time had their effects, and that’s what the Dutch are good at: much of their air pollution that used to plague Rotterdam has been cleaned up, though there are still some outstanding sources.
The largest single problem in fact is not as much the sea-based activities of the port but the vehicles which access it. Trucks, it is said, are making strides; organizations like Green Freight Europe are applying logistical lessons to truck fleets that the they’ve learned from leaps made in supply-chain management.
.
Yet oddly, the biggest source of waste through, to and beyond the port is the traffic congestion that clogs up the extensive freeway grid that serves the Randstad – the urban conglomeration of West Holland. Yes, it’s one of the densest urban places on earth, but it seems they’re hardly trying to address the endless lines of stop-and-go traffic that plugged up three lanes of asphalt from Rotterdam to The Hague when we were travelling during rush hour – not to mention all the ring roads that circle every major city.
.
.
I saw not a single HOV lane. Tolls are unknown, even on the latest bridges and tunnels. Road pricing seems verboten. And everywhere they seem to be constructing more lanes and widening roads, likely to be ‘free’ and likely to be full.
The Dutch, so advanced in thinking about and acting on sustainability in in so many ways, seem stuck in the 1950s when it comes to roads and traffic management.
The German Green Party said it twenty five years ago… if we want to be environmentalists, we have to give up cars.
Thought-provoking ;post.
IIRC, NL did try to rollout GPS-based road pricing, but this was stopped due to the current recession.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/netherlands-road-fees-new-pay-as-you-go-tax-for-dutch-drivers-a-661475.html
I always find it odd when society discusses complex things like carbon trading or CCS that are politically acceptable (because a lot of it dies on the table), but we cannot accept simpler measures that impact individuals. (‘axe the (carbon) tax’, road pricing, putting speed limits on the autobahn, etc.)
I take it the greenhouses are growing produce for the local market? Did you get a sense of their relative yield compared with other Dutch agriculture? I can imagine vegetables would grow extremely well in such a CO2-rich environment.
The vegetables are exported to the world. I saw an add for Red and Yellow Peppers here in New Zealand with the caption, Product of the Netherlands
Actually, the Netherlands is the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world. It’s also the sixth biggest exporter in the world for all products and is one of those rare countries which runs a surplus.
The article is misleading. Is it not inevitable that a country which produces much on behalf of other nations will also pollute on behalf of other nations which buy the completed products ? This doesn’t excuse the CO2 output, but it should be put into some context. In a similar vein, much of China’s pollution is on behalf of the west. We buy their products and we’re responsible for the pollution caused by making them.
As for the roads, yes there are traffic jams. But frankly, your view of the country from sitting in traffic jams is a very limited view and you shouldn’t expect to learn much from it. From inside a car you most see other cars. You have to get away from those busy roads and ride a bike to see what is really going on. If you do this then you’ll mostly see bikes (their routes are unravelled from those of cars). If you look up the figures for use of use of non-motorized traffic, the Netherlands is an outlyer amongst wealthy nations due to its high rate of cycling vs. driving. Other nations may have HOV lanes and tolls but they have not helped them to achieve this dramatic shift from car to bike.
North Sea Natural Gas is the obvious answer to the incessant woom woom woom of those wind turbines. I understand they are not the energy panacea they are trumped up to be: hell to live with!
The Brits have a huge natural gas plant on Spurn Head just 400 miles away.
Royal Dutch Shell must the biggest supplier of CO² in the world . . .
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/05/26/to-the-horror-of-global-warming-alarmists-global-cooling-is-here/
. . . no wonder they excel at agriculture. I’m surprised Gord is still pushing the AGW canard: many of us are just to busy to read long articles . . . .