Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Netherlands take the "long view"

Amusing little piece even if it is about life and death.

When we covered the Stern review in depth looking at the economics of climate change things began to get fuzzy the further into the future you took the predictions.

The Netherlands are taking no chances and when 80% of the population live below the current sea level who can blame them. However, a 200 year plan is something else.

From Peak Oil (those well known harbingers of doom).

Netherlands has 200-year global warming plan
Amsterdam - With two-thirds of the Dutch population living below sea level, the country's government sees the risk of rising seas caused by global warming as a matter of life and death. So it's taking a long term view of the problem - a two hundred-year view, to be exact.

The Cabinet announced plans on Friday for a new commission to begin preparing water defences through the year 2200.


"We want to make sure that there's still a Netherlands a century from now," Tineke Huizinga, the country's top water official, told state broadcaster NOS.

"We don't want to just let the water flow and all have to move to Germany."

The Union of Dutch Municipal Governments welcomed the news on Saturday, even though the plans will likely lead to new taxes, calling it a "necessity for the Netherlands to prepare for the consequences of possible climate change and to approach it, in the case of water, primarily from a safety standpoint."


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