[booli]

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?

[Loic]

Take 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]

They 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.

[hannob]

This is largely untrue or inaccurate. There has been a small uptick in lignite use for a couple of years, but it's been going down again. But that was not overall coal use, hard coal was in steady decline. The last new coal plant constructions were started in 2009. This was an unfortunate and wrong decision, but it's been a while ago. Most of the investors of these plants regret that decision, because they aren't needed a whole lot. That villages had to be removed due to coal mining is not something that's happening "these days", it's been happening for decades. However none of that has been decided lately. Goes all back to decisions made in the 90s. It doesn't make it better, but your comment makes it sound that this is a recent development. It's not. Recently some existing plans for lignite open casts were reduced and some villages will be saved.

Demand is not growing overall, it's been in decline for a couple of years (with occasional upticks, but that's to be expected).

Germany is the largest total CO2 source in the EU, but it's also the largest country. Per capita emissions are still relatively high though.

It's not all green in Germany, a lot could be better. I'm in full agreement that the huge lignite mines and plants are a terrible thing, but one should still stick to facts. But despite all bads a lot is going in the right direction.

[RGamma]

One 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-m...

[sliverstorm]

For me, it was the ultimate example of environmentalists shooting themselves in the foot. Always opposed to nuclear (scary!), wind (birds!), natural gas (fracking! CO2!), and as a result we keep burning coal, the worst of them all.

[tobias3]

One 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.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, they're exporting their pollution to China and some of the other European countries, by switching to PVs and buying coal-produced electricity, respectively.

[saalaa]

They 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]

Not 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

[DominikR]

There 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]

People 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]

Human 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.)

[vanderZwan]

Yeah that just screams "externalities" to me, and if that's true it undermines the whole dataset.

[Loic]

It is a genuine question, not a rhetorical question putting into question the data, Netherlands has currently a deficit of 4.1 GHA.

[vanderZwan]

Oh I misunderstood GP then without double-checking the website. My apologies.

[pmontra]

They 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.

[gpdaccess]

Deliberately 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]

Might be from the UE green/carbon certificates but don't quote me on that.

[ajmurmann]

Or worth city states like Singapore and Luxembourg

[Shivetya]

well 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]

More 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.