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Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print?
by booli 10y ago
Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print?
A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?
- vanderZwan 10y agoYeah that just screams "externalities" to me, and if that's true it undermines the whole dataset.
- Loic 10y agoIt is a genuine question, not a rhetorical question putting into question the data, Netherlands has currently a deficit of 4.1 GHA.
- vanderZwan 10y agoOh I misunderstood GP then without double-checking the website. My apologies.
- gpdaccess 10y agoDeliberately managing the rate of growth of its population would reduce its global footprint, but we're unable to sustainably meet 0 deficit anywhere unless you commit mass genocide.
- johnchristopher 10y agoMight be from the UE green/carbon certificates but don't quote me on that.
- pmontra 10y agoThey started with a surplus as everybody else and they run into a defict, like most of the rest of the world, including many large countries. Unsustainable growth except something like a technological miracle or a plague happen? Probably.
- Loic 10y agoTake a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can achieve it.
- saalaa 10y agoThey have not reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing down and demand is only growing. They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure). They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig it out. I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2 reduction goals of 2020 and 2030. At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.
- tobias3 10y agoOne also sees the little 1990 peak. That's when inefficient east-block power plants started to be turned off and be replaced by more efficient versions. Other countries did not have such an easy way to increase overall power plant efficiency.
- RGamma 10y agoOne of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of renewables (which might have no local greenhouse gas emissions, but are still dirty to produce/consume rare earths). Oh, and there are lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of euros ([1] says there are estimated damages in double-digit billions of euros overall) in denied profits going on. I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our earthly power consumption problems once and for all... [1] http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-mit-top-anwaelten-gegen-merkels-atomkurs-a-769213.html http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-m...
- Shivetya 10y agowell their means to score countries is contrived enough to be "we knew the results before we knew the facts". As in any strong economy is bad
- __jal 10y agoMore like a strong economy == lots of energy use, and lots of energy use == lots of pollution, because the world uses lots of dirty energy. The fact that one can guess some results ahead of time doesn't cast doubt on the results, any more than, after coughing blood and 40 years of smoking, a positive cancer diagnosis is suspect. I rate this rhetorical tactic a 3: poor composition, not enough work either developing the implication of skullduggery or making it more subtle, missed opportunities for additional attacks on reporters' credibility.
- saalaa 10y agoThey have quite a vast network of turbines. During some of the most windy days of the year, they produce more electricity than they consume. I'd say they also tend to do much less shipping by truck than many other countries.
- tinbad 10y agoNot sure where you got that from but 'sustainable energy' production (includes more than just wind, but safe to say that in our country is mostly wind) was only 3.9% in 2009. The government set a goal of 20% by 2020. So no, we are still mostly reliant on other forms of electricity. https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie
- ajmurmann 10y agoOr worth city states like Singapore and Luxembourg
- DominikR 10y agoThere is no technology available today that would allow an industrialised country like the Netherlands to get to a zero carbon dioxide footprint. It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)
- CalRobert 10y agoPeople had moved on from mud huts by the 1600's, and yet had a pretty small (though non-zero) carbon footprint. I do agree that population, especially the population of people living a carbon-intense lifestyle, is a serious concern. Many people point a finger at poor nations with high population growth rates while failing to acknowledge that people in those countries tend to emit very little.
- dredmorbius 10y agoHuman civilisation had burned through (or been climate-changed out of) several ecosystems by 1600. Europe was reaching the point of overexploiting its fuelwood resources. India and China were peaking as civilisations, reaching levels they'd not return to until the late 19th or 20th centuries in absolute level, and reaching relative standings among other nations and civilisations not since exceeded. I'm currently reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and the two volumes of Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history. They're impressive and sobering. While there are a range of estimates, there are a substantial group of population theorists, largely grounded in ecology, who see the population levels of 1650, roughly 500 million worldwide, as a likely long-term maximum. (The broader range runs from as few as 50 million, which still exceeds virtually all large land mammals, to several trillion. I find the lower bound potentially plausible, though pessimistic, the higher range delusional.)