Climate change is going to hurt the poorer countries the most.
The fact that the Netherlands was a former colonial power doesn't give them any "colony juice" that they can squeeze onto the ground and dams rise up like apple trees. They still have to design and build the thing given their smarts and labor, and Indonesia has to design the thing given their smarts and labor. The only difference is in the pool of available talent and the organizational abilities of the government to marshall that talent. Given Indonesia's much larger population and greater abundance of natural resources, it's a joke to suggest that it has no resources to build a dam whereas a tiny nation with fewer resources is able to do it. Indonesia's problem is that they are more corrupt and disorganized, and can't marshall their resources effectively.
Otherwise just Rand-ian codswallop.
1) that relative advantage doesn't correspond to an absolute advantage that can be compared across nations. A nation with ten times the market cap of another nation doesn't have 10 times the real resources. It may just have a more developed stock market, or a more financialized economy, or a lower discount rate, or more optimism for future earnings.
2) Neither does market cap mean anything for the nation as a whole. If I have 10 times the wealth of you, I can buy 10 times as many real resources as you can, but together we can still buy only all the real resources available -- when market cap goes up, that doesn't mean more labor is available to purchase, or the nation has more skills or more equipment. It could just mean that there is more optimism about future profits, or a lower discount rate. Market cap doesn't measure the real resources of a nation anyway -- it's a measure of the discounted flow of earnings, but not of the gross value add of the economy. For example, if labor costs go up, profits fall and market cap shrinks. But the real resources do not change -- the labor supply does not shrink. Just the relative price of labor and capital changes. These relative prices can fix the market cap at any point between zero and infinity (exclusive). All by tweaking the risk free borrowing rate, risk premium, and relative prices of labor and capital. You get zero information about the total size of real resources by looking at market cap, all the information is about relative prices for a given set of real resources. The same is true for the total amount of paper claims in an economy -- they give no information on the size of real resources available. They are dominated by relative prices. The proof of this is exactly the fact that the Dutch had such huge market cap when their real resources were so small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
And that enabled big projects like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeslantkering
You can draw your own conclusions about what the Dutch think of people who don't believe in global warming, then lie about the Netherlands, then call reports with video evidence of their lies fake news, then deny they used the term fake news less than 60 seconds later. It's not consensus decision making if you can't even agree with your own words.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/us-ambassador-...
Historical background
Somewhat ironically, there is no consensus about the exact historical background of the polder model. In general there are three views on this subject.
One explanation points to the rebuilding of the Netherlands after World War II. Corporatism was an important feature of Christian Democratic, and particularly Catholic, political thought. During the postwar period, the Catholic, Protestant, Christian, social-democratic, and liberal parties decided to work together to reconstruct the Netherlands, as did unions and employers' organizations. Important institutions of the polder model, like the SER, were founded in this period. No single political party has ever had anything approaching an overall majority in parliament, so coalition government is inevitable. This makes parties extremely cautious, since today's enemy may be tomorrow's ally, all the more so in present times when the "death of ideology" has made it possible for almost all the parties to work together.
Another explanation points to the dependency of the Netherlands on the international economy. The Dutch cannot afford protectionism against the unpredictable tides of the international economy, because the Netherlands is not an autarkic economy. Therefore, to cushion against the international economy, they set up a tri-partite council which oversaw an extensive welfare state.
A third explanation refers to a unique aspect of the Netherlands, that it consists in large part of polders, land reclaimed from the sea, which requires constant pumping and maintenance of the dykes. So ever since the Middle Ages, when the process of land reclamation began, different societies living in the same polder have been forced to cooperate because without unanimous agreement on shared responsibility for maintenance of the dykes and pumping stations, the polders would have flooded and everyone would have suffered. Crucially, even when different cities in the same polder were at war, they still had to cooperate in this respect. This is thought to have taught the Dutch to set aside differences for a greater purpose.
Is being poor really more desirable for anything? Perhaps instead of worrying about global warming, we should solve poverty, then they won't be affected so badly.
Also, the problem here mostly seems to be not money, but government. As the article states “Nobody here believes in the greater good […] There is no trust”. Short-term, how much more expensive would it be to get clean water from the rivers flowing into Jakarta, instead of from those illegal wells?
Less cheap to transport (e.g. bricks) or less durable (e.g. fruit) goods move less easily, and labor moves least easily.
Consequently, it is way cheaper in poorer countries to have personnel, to pay people for repairing stuff, etc.
(I think I misread your comment and others might too, so I'm leaving this here)
But if your point is that Indonesia is not to be overlooked, then that is quite true.
>"Sadly Indonesia doesn't have the near limitless resources of its old colonial owner that keeps Amsterdam/Holland from sinking"
When in fact fact it does have the resources to build a Delta Works-like system similar to the Netherlands.
California is a much more arid region with dry/wet years. Jakarta is tropical, gets roughly 3x the rainfall as San Francisco and has much more consistent/predictable weather, though with climate change, the storms they're seeing are becoming more intense. I'm not sure you can compare the two because California is legitimately a situation of using more water each year than we get in rainfall. In Jakarta, is likely funneling rainfall into the ocean and then draining the aquifers. And while both situations are cases of taking out more water than is being put in, the root causes are very different.