I too love nature, but I wouldn’t like to sacrifice the climate for it. Porthos, a large CO2storage project, is now in danger of being stranded by the latest plot twist in the nitrogen tragedy. Many other sustainability projects as well. Windmills, solar parks: you can’t build them without petrol engines.
In fact, the Council of State is now ordering omelets to be made without breaking a single egg. Insufferable. Especially if you Remkes’ Not everything is possible (2019) once more, and a pie chart reads that the entire construction industry only accounts for 0.6 percent of the problem.
Don’t get me wrong. I too love the Lady Justice blindfold – all polluters are equal – but I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice common sense for it. And who is forcing our ministers to walk around with the same blindfold? Some vision is most welcome when designing a country.
In itself, those exemptions for housing and sustainability were therefore not so bad. Prefer starter homes than mega stables. Better clean energy than a chicken shed. That was the underlying political vision.
Only: they were bad checks. The disadvantage of nitrogen space is that you cannot carelessly press it. Politicians did not dare to choose who had to sacrifice space, which eggs had to die for all those ambitious bouncers. But only toddlers can hide by closing their eyes.
The organization of our country has been left for too long to 1) the market and 2) the countless forces that attack us time and again (natural damage, asylum influx, geopolitical stampei, global warming, the arrival of the wolf).
Destiny and market. Above our heads, above our wide rivers, they slowly interact. They wage their struggle in our landscape and the result of those forces is the living environment with which we, residents, have to cope.
Amazing, for a democracy, how little influence we seem to have on this. What do we want? Buying farms for wider highways? How much nature? How many inhabitants? Between the market and fate, citizens and representatives of the people must be able to form a buffer against arbitrariness.
How many meadows? How many mega stables? What prevents us from making a realistic future plan for immigration, before the great climate migrations come over us?
All polluters are equal, but some are slightly more equal than others in my opinion. If you put that 0.6 percent next to the nitrogen giants – agriculture (46 percent) and abroad (32 percent) – it is clear where we have to get the space from. Right. Invade Germany, bomb the Ruhr area flat and redevelop it into a second Veluwe. If that turns out to be an impregnable egg shell, we can at least start with the Gelderland bird flu valley.
Christian Weijts writes a column here every Friday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 4, 2022