The garden is still almost completely green. It’s November, but it’s seventeen degrees. That clashes with the early darkness and the low, faint sun. At night we are bothered by mosquitoes. I remember a dystopian story by Maarten ‘t Hart from the 1970s that describes exactly this: nature being upset.
So it feels urgent, the climate weeks at the public broadcaster. In the run-up to the climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, which starts on November 6, the NPO channels give space to about fourteen different programs about the climate crisis. That’s a lot to consume in one sitting. Wouldn’t it be better to spread the offer over the year? Constant attention to the only topic that really matters?
With the offer, the broadcaster navigates from cheerful entertainment and optimistic progress reports, to gloomy information and alarming visions. The NOS will come in with hard information on Tuesday The State of the Climate. HUMAN brings the entertainment on Thursday with the climate show The Big Green Idea. You can see from the programming that the broadcaster does not want to scare the viewers away by pointing them too much to the gray reality. So there is a lot of room for supposed solutions.
Climate Monday starts a bit unlucky with The Climate Cart. PowNed leader Rutger Castricum drives famous people around in his electric car, on the way they talk about the climate. The first edition of this second season brings together two kinds of people that I have a hard time watching. Castricum is a cynical bastard with a long history of plague. Addressing black people in the Binnenhof to arrange them as Zwarte Piet – that level. Officially Castricum is now older and wiser, but recently he took down a politician wearing a headscarf.
Take a cold shower with a cup of coffee
Minister Rob Jetten (Climate and Energy) is an imperturbable, smooth politician who talks in pre-made statements. A tidy person for whom there seem to be no problems, only solutions. Terrifying to listen to. On paper, Castricum could lure the minister out of his tent, but that is not happening. Jetten unfolds the government plans, Castricum sneers that it will all be nothing, and then the twelve minutes are already over. We have learned that the minister takes a cold shower with a cup of coffee.
WNL is optimistic right, so presenter Raquel Schilder enters Stand of the Netherlands – Frontrunners visit innovative entrepreneurs. In the first episode, this is a company that extracts gas from waste. the CO2 that is released during that process, they also manage to capture in concrete. This special process solves many problems: waste is reused, fewer earthquakes in Groningen, less dependence on Russian gas. But does it also contribute to reduced emissions? If you burn this green gas, CO . will still be released2 free?
The VPRO goes back to the past to show how we got here. The documentary The Power of Big Oil from the American public broadcaster PBS alternates between admiration – because there is an incredible amount of thorough research in it – and anger. It is about the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the powerful lobby of the American oil industry that for decades torpedoed every attempt at climate policy. She did this, among other things, by financing climate deniers and by putting up a smokescreen of uncertainties. I would like to see such a documentary about the Netherlands.
For panic, BNNVARA has the French apocalyptic series The Collapse (L’effondrement) purchased. In this we see a society derailing rapidly when fuel runs out and supplies fail. It starts with a brief power outage and quickly degenerates into grim anarchy.