This is a curious story (being told on Friday in Europe), and you will sit and ponder upon the consequences likely to occur.
Years ago (almost 30 years), the Netherlands sent some folks to the EU, and the participants (not just them but all of the nations involved) sat down and drew up a priority list of problems and came to greenhouse gases. They decided that by 2020....you had to cut 25 percent of your emissions. Thirty years was enough, in the minds of those folks meeting, and most of them....have retired from public life or passed on....so you can't really blame or fire them.
In this period (roughly 28 years)....at the conclusion of 2018....they'd actually only cut things by 15-percent (to what the numbers were in 1990).
Is the 15-percent cut number authentic or scientifically derived? Well....you can suggest that it might not be but no one is really disputing the 15-percent number. It's just sitting there and the basis of a serious argument.
Last week (Friday morning) a court stood up and said....you signed papers to promise you'd do 'X', and you have to deliver a 25-percent cut....by the 31st of December of 2020.
Some folks (mostly just environmentalists) claim that you could trigger a number of things to occur in 2020, and put harsh reality on the landscape there (maybe by taxation or by fines....nothing is clear about the intent of these people), and deliver the 25-percent number. Folks (even the court) would be happy about that. Regular Dutch people? Well, you can't be that sure about their happiness.
The reality is that you could do a couple of marginal things, and pump the anticipated number to around 17 to 18 percent of a 1990 cut agreed upon. The court accepting that? No.
So, here's the thing, which you have sit back and sip a serious amount of beer or wine upon.....some political folks are under a judicial watch, and they need to meet X-number. On the other side.....regular consumers, farmers, business people.....all have to be on the negative side of the stick.
Who invented the 25-percent number in 1990? No one talks about that much. You would think that this group of people would be brought out and stand in some public square to explain where they got this magic number.
So here's the thing, on 21 March 2021.....there's another Dutch election. If serious economic damage is done, or farmers go ballistic, or various groups of Dutch people think they've been screwed, then this election goes into a 'dark' direction, and anti-environmentalists will be selected, and a whole new set of consequences falls into play.
It'd be nice to bring the forty-odd main players of 1990 out and have them explain their reasoning, and maybe admit they screwed up. But that's not likely to happen.
2 comments:
Surely the reasoning should be present within the policy documents?
When the crowd in 1990 signed off on the documents, no one really asked questions or wrote in waivers (something you'd strongly consider in this day of age). So this challenge to enforce the document has been sitting there and the judge just went to the next step....enforcing it. What the government could do (with bold leadership), just say we won't take your 'advice', and we will honor the general public instead. What exactly the court can do at that point?
Maybe at the end of this mess....the judge wants them to take the logical step...vote on junking the document/agreement from 1990. The Greens would go ballistic, but the parties that run the country can only survive if they don't trash the country. This is the consequence of modern-day society...you can only move things at x-amount of speed. Anyone thinking otherwise, doesn't understand the complex nature that mass transit, infrastructure, construction projects....all fit into the big picture.
One of the great wonders is that if you go and look at your 1990 electrical bill and wattage used, comparing it to today, you are probably using 50-percent of the wattage of 1990. Getting those newer refrigerator units, going to LED lights, etc....all combined, have lessen wattage. Course, the cost factor radically went up, and I'm still paying more than what I did in 1990.
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