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?
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.