There was a long line on the West Kruiskade. There, a free energy box was handed out with draft strips, radiator foil, LED lamps and a water-saving shower head. It’s kind of a duct tape type climate solution and as a duct tape fan I don’t mean that negatively. Sealing cracks and holes in old houses can save an impressive amount of gas. A little foil against the poorly insulated outer wall behind the radiator saves 20 percent.
The very simple measures dangled somewhere at the bottom of the priority lists of many households, but are now rising just as fast as the price of gas. From the Aerdenhout gas leak to the smallest social rental homes, everyone is suddenly in a hurry to make them more sustainable and insulate.
It is a bright spot, in these dark times now half of Europe is spontaneously on fire and we are almost hitting 40 degrees again. After ten years of attempts to make it more sustainable (with confetti energy festivals, benevolence and a lot of insulation subsidies) things are now going badly. The market is doing its relentless work. It makes mincemeat of companies that only used cosmetic green and calculates every fossil combustion into the end products. There is no escaping it.
In this way, there is very cautious hope that the two recent sledgehammer blows – the pandemic and the war – will help us to become more sustainable and to curb that third crisis – climate. First, Covid chained humanity, including all its vehicles. During the lockdowns, nature flourished and surprisingly we saw that in addition to all the Covid sick, the general health of people also benefited from this. Gynecologists suddenly saw fewer preterm births, cardiologists saw fewer heart attacks and aortic aneurysms, and pediatricians saw fewer asthma attacks. The cause is still unclear, but a little less particulate matter could well be a large part of the explanation.
In addition, the pandemic meant the definitive integration of Zoom and working from home. The traffic jams disappeared like snow in the sun. Flying for business has recently rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, but it could just be catching up. Anyone who wants to see each other again in person at catch-up conferences and catch-up annual fairs. And that catch-up could also apply to tourism. Etihad Airways CEO labeled the current holiday wave as „revenge tourism”. Will everyone really get on the plane for every change? And is that still the case after the recent experiences at Schiphol and other European airports?
Then the war. Initially, it seemed that this could only be disastrous for all climate efforts. The number one of the most polluting human activities is coal and lignite power plants, and it is precisely these that have been re-ignited. Drilling new oil wells is suddenly more interesting financially now that prices are so high. Thus, the Russian invasion marked a step back in time in more ways than one.
But investments in those coal-fired power stations are not forthcoming. It seems like a short-term solution while Europe is closing all the cracks at breakneck speed, reaping all the low-hanging fruit and trying to find new energy security as quickly as possible. If Russia has managed to do anything, it is now clear once and for all what an unreliable energy supplier it is and how much of a rush we are in to speed up the fossil fuel detox process.
I see bright spots. Meat substitutes are now cheaper than meat. Electric driving is three to four times cheaper than driving on petrol. Germany sets aside political taboos by the maximum speed on the Autobahn to reconsider and the kernausstieg to postpone again. In the Netherlands we are building a hydrogen factory, in Finland there is a first sand battery that heats houses with stored solar and wind energy. Developments in nuclear fusion have again accelerated.
That makes a war. It accelerates developments. Even with almost 40 degrees, I still rely on the human ability to work ourselves out of trouble again and again.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist. Maxim February is absent this week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of July 23, 2022