The Netherlands may be the first country to hit the limits of growth | Hacker News Reader

The Netherlands may be the first country to hit the limits of growth

ft.com

74 pointsmontalbano102 comments

The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more. Regarding the rest, it looks like a fake problem because they still have schemes like the reduced tax for several years to attract foreigners. Can't be both ways, politians can't say there's too many people while keeping the incentives. The practicality of the tax law speaks more than speeches.

As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages". One only has to see that they've paid over $100m in compensation for missed flights to airlines yet at the end of August rolled back an extra €5 / per hour that they added to fight the problem. Result? Everyone quit again. Now they rolled out an extra €2.5/hour per security guard. Only if you are blind you don't see there's more at play here than simple "staff shortages". People haven't died, they just don't want your shitty job when they can do remote customer support for some startup for more money and not deal with rude tourists all day.

> The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more.

This is honestly just dumb. Many of the climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy are really really dumb.

> As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages".

But why? Is it also to reduce emissions? They don't want to actually do something meaningful, so they cause havoc in the Airport to reduce emissions? What is going on?

> climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy

It's not a climate action. It's an environmental action, which there's an overlap with, but which is not the same thing.

What's the difference?

Climate is basically long-term weather. "Nitrogen" doesn't affect the temperature or rain or clouds, so it isn't climate.

FYI when they say nitrogen they don't mean it literally – it's a code-word for nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ammonia (HN3).

Different set of utopian authoritarians forcing people to act against their own interests.

Nuclear energy is actually good for reducing climate change. It’s environmentally undesirable because of the failure mode, the difficulty of cleanup, the fact that the waste is basically forever and we have no real plan for storing or processing it.

At this point, I have to wonder how inherent those problems are to nuclear and more to the specific designs that were built over the years, in part due to various military priorities.

The right time to develop a different nuclear platform was 40 years ago, but the second rightest time is today. Where is the bold, government-level messaging and big research grants saying "here's a completely new architecture, it's simply not capable of the same failure modes as Fukushima or Three Mile Island."

I guess that's why people were boosting Thorium a while back, but I haven't heard much news there. Seemed like microreactors was the latest sexy thing.

It's this. If we got one of the molten salt reactor ideas functional it would be a total game changer for the economics of electrictity and the environment because they are not giant pipe bombs waiting to explode and their safety systems are extremely simple while being difficult to screw up (most spec a fan powered by the reactor blowing on a tube causing a solid plug. Reactor goes into failure mode and fan turns off, plug melts and everything flow into a second chamber designed to absorb all the neutrons and shut the reaction down. You end up with a mildly radioactive slab of rock that you can recycle in another running reactor. Also, since everything is liquid it makes continuous cycling and cleaning reaction products out much easier.

There have been hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars spent on various efforts at breeder reactors over the years.

Most of them catch fire every month or dissolve themselves from the inside after a year. Turns out the idea probably needs materials that don't exist yet (but might soon?).

The Russian BN 800 is the closest if you believe their government, and the chinese LFTR project has some promise.

Even with the basic possibility issues solved there are a bunch of economic, resource and political issues to work through after that.

Two of these are flat wrong. First, the waste isn't basically forever. Part of it can be reprocessed and part of it does indeed decay down to very low or nearly null radioactivity sooner rather than later.

Secondly, (it's such an absurd myth that keeps being repeated), there are plenty of effective, perfectly functional, usable, right-now-being-used plans for storing nuclear waste. It's not even much overall: The total amount so far produced by humanity to-date is just over 400,000 metric tons (this is very little physical volume on any industrial scale of things) and of that only about 4% is highly radioactive. The rest is low-radiation and one third of that total is suitable for reprocessing..

Bottom line, there is NO major problem with storing it if even minimal intelligent effort is applied to the task.

> Bottom line, there is NO major problem with storing it if even minimal intelligent effort is applied to the task.

There's the problem. Even if we only have the 300 year stuff, sooner or later someone is going to put a Jeffrey Immelt in charge of the process and the effort will be neither intelligent sufficient to be called minimal.

> This is honestly just dumb

Yes, but in an indirect way. At some point, nitrogen deposition was identified as harmful to nature, and emissions targets were put in place. Politicians then did everything they could not to be the one having to introduce unpopular legislation, until they couldn't anymore. Now the government has painted themselves in a corner and cannot give permits for building projects anymore without breaking the law.

I think we'll see this more often in the future when the consequences of ambitious targets will need to be reckoned with.

And yet, these "ambitious targets" as you characterize them, are insufficient.

I don't even need to know the target or the efficacy. The static political situation and power structures versus the actuals of three decades of climate science have not significantly changed. The only improvements have been solar/wind/battery changing the efficiency and emissions game, but REDUCTIONS are still effectively nothing.

All "emissions targets" are "compromises" between political ignorance/denialism and reality. Everywhere. Until the rich realize they are directly affected (not their children, the elite care nothing for their children), real policy won't emerge.

I suspect it might also be trying to avoid targeting the base.

If you can fit your compliance push into something that seems minor and distant for most voters, it's probably less politically toxic than going for the direct problem that might be controversial.

"We need to scrap gas guzzlers" is a direct attack on your voters, but "We might not be able to issue construction permits in 2025" is distant and doesn't necessarily affect anyone you know personally.

It probably comes from the same mindset that says "let's pay for a lot of (programme) with a high surtax on hotel rooms because that pretty much only impacts external tourists who aren't going to vote us out over it."

I suspect nitrogen remediation with carbon capture using fast-growing plants like bamboo might be part of the solution.

One thing eludes me, though: the Netherlands' highly productive agricultural exports are mostly due to growing vegetables like tomatoes in greenhouses, where th effluent can be controlled. Nitrogen pollution is typically more the result of large-scale livestock or pig farming. The sector actually impacted by the restrictions might not be the most productive one.

> escape goat

FYI, it's "scapegoat".

Though 'escape goat' is a marvellous find; words I may steal.

Dave Gorman did a segment about these kinds of things once in his show. I’ve linked to “escape goat.” His analysis of the one just after it, “bowl in a China shop,” is even more entertaining.

https://youtu.be/5ExXOIvY9V0?t=472

What is the top speed of a escape goat?

Escape goat is fine for all in tents and porpoises

What's that you say - goat on the menu? Bone apple tea!

Nice. Get two birds stoned at once.

I like the other way ;-)

That's just one part of the issue.

Much bigger part is that the government didn't buy out farmer's land when land price was still relatively cheap in order to build houses there (like Belgium did)

What also doesn't help, is that the majority of the voters for the biggest ruling party own homes and have an active interest in seeing their prices surge.

Seems very questionable to me to call out Netherlands as having reached some hard limit that a country like Singapore has blown right by. Singapore has a 40% greater GDP per capita, 16 times (!) the population density, and would starve in a matter of weeks without food imports, or grind to a halt almost overnight, without energy imports. 3/4 of its GDP is services based. All of which is to say, a small nation with the right niche economic model can blow by the supposed limits Netherlands is encountering, albeit at the cost of any semblance of having a balanced or remotely self-sufficient economy.

> 16 times (!) the population density

This might come as a surprise to you, but that's the nightmare Europeans don't want. Europeans don't want to live as cramped as people in the big Asian metro areas do, and neither do the people living there which is why they emigrate if they can.

So yeah, while it's technically possible to keep increasing population density several times over, most Europeans don't want that, as it means a decline in living standards and quality of life.

We might as well just live in pods in giant towers like the humans farmed for energy in The Matrix, if that's the end game of human living density, but nobody wants to live like that.

I don't know about you, but I live on the 3rd floor in a NL city where building limit height is 70 meters. I have 12 hours of sun on my balcony and it's honestly great, but if I could move into a 200 meter high mega tower and have a balcony, maybe an inner yard as well, and a cool roof terrace with glass around it, I would in a heartbeat.

Problem is, your downstairs neighbours all the way to the bottom have progressively worse quality of life - especially those on who your tower is casting its shadow.

This also requires a completely different, much more authoritarian mindset. Even living in high rises already significantly limits your freedom because you have twice as much neighbors.

I don’t think OP was talking about “want”, just refuting that Netherlands has hit the limits of growth.

It's not that I don't understand that (I live, by choice, where the population density is 1/40th that of Netherlands). And, if Netherlands wants to choose not to grow, that's great. That's not encountering some inherent limit to growth, though, as the article implies - it's choosing not to grow.

I think the really interesting, and hard, question - which to be fair, the article does hint at - is whether a country can opt for such limits, and still maintain a world-leading standard of living. I've never seen an economics model that convincingly has a path for no-growth. Clearly, we all need one.

> I think the really interesting, and hard, question - which to be fair, the article does hint at - is whether a country can opt for such limits, and still maintain a world-leading standard of living.

That’s a trick question.

You have to take into account that the way we mesure economic prosperity nowadays - mainly via GDP - is deeply flawed. Externalities are discounted everywhere.

The way we chose to measure and control the economy really serves to enforce a power structure which is becoming more precarious by the day. If you look at the facts, the insane productivity gain of the twentieth century should have allowed every human on this planet to live a fairly good life. Materially speaking we could be living in a world free of hunger and extreme poverty and it’s something we can sustain in an ecologically friendly way. Yet inequality is rising nearly everywhere.

What we are witnessing currently is a complete failure of leadership. We have built a complex system which is greatly advantageous to a few and their greed makes them prefer the destruction of everything to risking a chance of a change happening.

It always strikes me as so weird when someone deems it appropriate to speak for a whole group of people, especially a group as diverse as Europeans. Just say you don't want to live like that and then lobby government to put in place regulations that will allow you to live the way you want while allowing others to choose to live the way they want, even if that means in a 500 square foot highrise apartment in a densely packed area.

It always strikes me weird when someone judges me without knowing me.

And I'm not speaking for a group of people, but the real estate market in Europe speaks for itself and what the people are voting for, including with their wallets, and what the regulations allow for. It's what I noticed since I moved here. I'm not making this up, it's what the market looks like. Don't hate the messenger.

If you pitch China style neighborhoods of concrete jungles full of high-rise buildings in Europe, for the sake of growth, nobody will want that. We already have some such buildings/neighborhoods and are usually low income migrant areas where nobody wants to live. And post-communist Eastern Europe has such areas of commie-blocks but that's a different story.

The most desirable housing here where I live (Austria) is low-height (2-4 stories) low density neighborhoods with green gardens in walkable areas close to the old town where all the amenities are, or single family homes with large green areas in the country side. Those are also the most expensive forms of housing (d'uh!). I've notices this market preference applies to other EU countries that I lived in as well.

Tall, high-rise concrete buildings here are few and are usually built as low-cost housing for low-income people and are usually located further from the old-town where building regulations allow for extra height and where land is cheaper because it's also in less desirable areas with more trafic noise, more pollution, less green spaces and worse schools/amenities/infrastructure. Nobody, except the people who can't afford better, wish to live in those high-rise dense buildings/neighborhoods as it's pretty depressing, and some of those neighborhoods are already showing signs of ghettoization including higher crime rates and low school performance, which doesn't help sell the idea of high dense living as being desirable to anyone.

Maybe there are exceptions in the diverse EU, with cities that have made dense, tall, multistory concrete jungles a desirable living proposition even for the well off to have families in, but I haven't seen that yet.

I'm sure tall and dense building could be made desirable here for many Europeans but it requires a complete shift in mentality, and a well though out urban planning that focuses on quality of life and livability for all social classes to live under the same roof, instead of building them as cheap housing for migrants in the middle of nowhere to turn into future ghettos.

Some of these high-rise commie-blocks in Poland are actually pretty desirable. The difference is that they weren't built to warehouse poor people in some undesirable area next to a freeway and a landfill. They're often close to city center and have plenty of green space between buildings, including lots of beatiful trees. The communists had real city planning (it was easy for them, as they owned everything in the country :), so there's often a nice park next to the blocks that serves its residents, schools, stores and public health care are all within walkable distance etc.

Singapore is a very desirable place. Clean, safe, some good provisions for public housing. I can think of a dozen places I’d leave to move to Singapore.

> Europeans don't want to live as cramped as people in the big Asian metro areas do

London and Paris are more dense than Singapore and by far the best places to live in Europe. Please stop projecting what you want on the rest of us.

> London and Paris are more dense than Singapore and by far the best places to live in Europe.

Did you by chance mean "most expensive"?

In any case I've been to London and Zurich and in my personal view the latter is in a wholly different league than the former in terms of general niceness.

Even if the whole country was turned into one big urban area, 507 people per square km is no where near the population densities of many large cities in the world.

Taiwan has huge swaths of barely populated mountainous regions and yet its average is 673 people per sqkm. To put it another way, it's 1/10th the size of Japan and has about the population of Australia.

The Netherlands has a lot more land suitable for residential housing and a lot less density. If this is hitting "the limit", then they're not doing it right.

> The Netherlands has a lot more land suitable for residential housing and a lot less density. If this is hitting "the limit", then they're not doing it right.

Why do you presume that all land suitable for residential housing should be destroyed by residential housing? There are far more types of uses than that.

There is far more to life than having a place to work and to sleep.

I'm not making those assumptions. You should come to TW and do some bike-riding around the island sometime. It's beautiful.

i'm planning to in a few months! would love any pointers or recommendations :)

Not GP but I highly recommend visiting the east coast of the island. The population density is much lower and it's really beautiful. You have to visit Taroko Gorge, which is a canyon with marble walls. It's amazing!

> I'm not making those assumptions.

Except you are. Your attempt to refute the fact that the Netherlands has not hit any limit is to make baseless claims that "it has more land suitable for residential housing".

I think a lack of bedrock or soft soil may limit growth.

To supplement, take Hong Kong and Singapore for example, they both has a population density roughly ten times to Netherlands, 30%-ish more expensive in terms of rent. And both have a soaring housing market for the past 20 years. They are at the "limit of growth" for two decades

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Sometimes I wonder if I'm not depressed because of all those economic choices that makes no sense to me. I have known about climate change for 20 years now, since I was a teenager, which is why I never really wanted to have a car or get money.

I guess one person can become depressed because the world doesn't make sense.

> economic choices that makes no sense to me

Economics makes no sense. End of. That's why it's econ-omics and not econ-ology. Don't get disheartened over the idea that there's some super-smart people out there who ought to know what they're doing. There isn't and they don't. Like Art, it's whatever you want it to be.

Of course it makes sense to become depressed. You have been convinced that shrinking into a hole is necessary to save the planet. You’re obsessed with environmental purity and afraid to make a mark on the world. What if the opposite were true?

There is probably a third way.

I have seen way more articles about how millennials,etc should cut back on avocado toast (an euphemism for shrinking into a hole) than I have seen anyone say to reduce consumption for climate change. The ones people are shrinking into a hole for are previous home and landowners.

This article is for you. (Yes its about kids, but it talks about how its not doom and gloom like the media says).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-sh...

Just remove that burden from your neck and enjoy your life as you might like to. Whether you do or don't minimize your carbon footprint will not make an iota of practical difference in how much or how little the world warms up.

One of the biggest PR tricks of modern times has been how the truly huge polluters such as major state resource companies, huge private/corporate resource companies and the lobbyists/media outlets/ politicians who tacitly support them have managed to flip the burden of guilt for climate change onto ordinary people about their personal life choices. This has happened to the ridiculous point that people such as yourself actually feel guilty about basic life choices due to a thing that's hardly their fault in any meaningful or measurable way. What an absurd way to live a life of unhappiness..

This kind of comment pops up every time and to be honest, seems like propaganda.

It completely omits the fact that companies extract fossil fuels, factories run and ships ship to supply consumer demand.

The fast fashion industry is a fairly large emitter, all because people want new outfits every week. Same goes for animal agriculture.

So yeah, it is absolutely personal lifestyle choices driving emissions

It will only limit growth in sectors where productivity is more or less fixed, like cafes and care homes. No problem about sectors where it can actually grow. It's not a "limit of growth". And labor shortage is a natural situation during actual economic growth: if you have too many people and not enough jobs, economy is in crisis. Now we have the opposite.

If you can’t find housing or babysitters for your employees, how are you going to grow? By increasing employee productivity $somehow?

Currently we have a labor, housing and energy shortage. Cost of living is huge (in my humble opinion), and I don’t see this problem being fixed in the next 10 years.

Secret: babysitters in Amsterdam are $12/hour.

Secret: housing is cheaper than most American cities.

Secret: graduating CS engineers make $45k.

Secret: the Dutch urban template is well suited to produce/expand new cities. And 50 years ago they made a massive new province just 15 minutes from Amsterdam by raising the land out of the water. There is plenty of room for growth.

>Secret: housing is cheaper than most American cities.

Whatever my housing costs are, it's irelevant to compare them to US housing costs since I don't make US wages. I make local wages, and compared to those, housing is expensive.

These are not secrets. $12/hr is a lot of money on a monthly basis. It also doesn’t help if there aren’t enough babysitters to fulfill demand.

Housing is cheaper, but so are the salaries. Try figuring out how to pay for housing and a babysitter in Amsterdam on a $45k salary.

Also, most people aren’t CS graduates.

Isn't child care sort of socialised in Dutch? Through a combination of generous parental benefits, child care facilities (day-care/school) etc.,? I lived in Amsterdam for a short period and no one I knew had a regular babysitter. It seemed as if there are regulations around having a child care facility in the vicinity of every X number of houses.

Sort of, but it's also an unforgiving maze of regulations where any misstep is punished with extreme prejudice. A lot of people avoid the subsidy for this reason.

One government fell over this (unfortunately the same government stepped right back in as if nothing had happened) and there was a big inquiry. But trust in the system is still minimal.

Housing costs is something that gets more complicated the closer I look. The mere material shell is literally dirt cheap, and can be made by someone in a jungle who starts by looking for rocks to bash together to make an axe to chop wood to fire clay into bricks and use the ash as mortar: https://youtu.be/eesj3pJF3lA

But the shell isn't the expensive part. Even for much newer and fancier places, like where I live, most of our iconic cityscapes are either over a century old or from the immediate aftermath of WW2, and in either case made with and for a much lower income economy.

What's really expensive is the land, and for that we bid against each other for the right to be close to the interesting things. The interesting things can be specific cultural centres, or good schools, or economic hubs; but it also includes the physical infrastructure, the roads and electricity and sewage systems.

I have already explained labor shortage. And yes, when you have a growing economy you don't get babysitters: you need kindergartens. Anyone can get a babysitter in India. Almost no one can get one in Japan (where there is labor shortage, no immigrants, and no systematically poor underclass). Babysitters are a thing in either very poor or very unequal country, if anything, a middle class person being able to afford a babysitter is a very, very bad sign for a country.

Cost of living means cost of labor (because for anything else productivity is unlimited), expensive place = well-developed, rich place. Energy shortage in a rich country can be solved through renewables and energy efficiency and only country i can think of which is better suited for that than Netherlands, is Denmark (maybe).

Right.

"Labor shortage" is equivalent to "rising wages".

They could always build down, or up, or just reclaim more land from the sea.

I'd be more worried about completely land-locked countries, or ones who (unlike the Netherlands) don't have experience reclaiming land from the sea.

The sea is pretty effectively reclaiming land back from them at this point. It's not a winning battle these days. It's also not so simple to build Manhattan style buildings on a sandpit

There is no logic to your claim at all. It is simply an engineering problem.

The problem is natural disasters and catastrophes can beat human engineering most of the time.

I'm curious which lost land you are referring to.

Building skyscrapers on former swamps is indeed difficult.

Sadly there's a huge resistance from the population and local municipalities to build high-rises. The municipalities usually have some rule that no building can be taller that the the old clock tower that virtually every town and city in the Netherlands have, this limits building height to about 70 meters. Then there's those people who will live in the shadow for 30 minutes and complain that this lowers their house price since they get less sunshine on their balconies or terraces. Then you have a faction that want every new building to look like a traditional building (2-3 stories tall made of bricks). Then there's the fact that towns and cities are very old, so you have these people who want to preserve the look at all cost.

Skyscrapers don't have to be built in the old town. There are huge tulip fields in NL that could be converted to living space, if so desired... to small buildings even, if tall ones were a problem.

I know and this is often the case, but the height limit still applies in the whole county, even 5 miles from the city center.

However at least my local city council has understood that taller buildings is the way to go.

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/kWbfR

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...

The whole idea of limits of growth is just bullshit. It would require a limit not only to population and resources, but also hard limits (that happen to all occur in the 2020s) to innovation, marketing, creative industries, social and demographic change, efficiency increase, changes in management and government action.

The only way to stop economic growth is to stop all change at every level in society, including all individuals' preferences and fashions.

Infinite growth is very easy. Just collapse the economy and rebuild in an endless cycle. You will end up with less total economic activity than if there was no addiction to unnecessary growth but ok, let's fight to our deaths via wars because of it anyway.

> while liveable land is shrinking due to climate change

Why? The article doesn't go into detail about this. Is it because the climate is getting hotter and people are migrating to colder places? Instead of you know using air conditioning.

Then this just feels a country that doesn't want to grow, not that it hit any actual limits. Isn't this also similar to what's happening in Japan?

My guess would be that lots of the country actually lies below the sea level and so some land is lost to the rising sea.

https://www.politico.eu/article/when-will-the-netherlands-di...

Is this a real problem or a fake problem?

Every airport is struggling for the most part because they lost all staff over the past few years and have to hire them all back at once. Besides I was at Schiphol recently and it was fantastic -- no queues. I didn't notice any issue with restaurants in Amsterdam. Housing costs in AMS are also relatively acceptable in my opinion.

Have a few statistics and a lot of anecdata been stretched to their breaking point in this article? Is there even a problem?

> Every airport is struggling for the most part

*In the West.

Come to Dubai, Doha, Riyadh or any of the eastern airports and you won't find any problems. Probably your are going to find even better service.

Dubai isn't a good place to be championing; they rely on slave labor [0] to keep their economy moving, and that has effects all the way up the chain.

[0] https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

If we are going to talk about slaves, Then that also includes America which has slave labor from prisons, where people work an entire month for less than a dollar.

And of course that's without talking about countries America destroyed and stole their Natural resources like Iraq.

I don't typically engage with people who don't address the argument at hand and instead engage in diversionary tactics. What I addressed was your holding up a slave/petro/religious state as an example of anything good (I can't think of any major lessons they can give to anyone on anything to do with civil rights or labor practices).

In this case, I abhor the US stance on prison labor enough that I feel compelled to agree with you. It does not excuse any of the slavery in the Middle East, but the US does have its own issues. As a clarification, the lowest wage I could find was $0.13/hr, so not a month for a dollar, but not functionally different ($1/day or so).

As for the Middle East wars... yeah. Not a fan of those.

Ah yes, airports which operate on the backs of modern day slave labour, I can guess why they don't have a problem.

So, airports are staffed by slaves?

> Dubai

A grand total of 6 lines for all departing flights?

> Fantastically productive Dutch farms have made this tiny country the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter.

In 2021 30% of total agricultural export is re-export. [1]

Also interesting: “Re-exports to the UK down by 35 percent due to Brexit”

[1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-e...

They shouldn't export so much. Doesn't 90% of fresh flowers come from that country?

> Doesn't 90% of fresh flowers come from that country?

47.9% of the global cut flower market in 2019 [0]. They do grow 90% of Europe's orchids [1]

[0] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/netherla...

[1] https://londonflowerschool.com/journal/inside-the-dutch-flow...

The Netherlands has the majority of the worlds exports of fresh flowers. That doesn't include domestically grown and sold flowers.

I recall reading Iceland could roughly sustain 50k people before the industrial era. It took them a long time to sustain the hundreds of thousands that live there today.

"Importing more migrant workers isn’t a popular idea..." well there you have it.

https://archive.ph/kWbfR Paywall free link

Many of the problems seem to be because of the EU - maybe they should fix that instead of stopping growth?

What do you mean by "fixing that". Increasing even more emission limits? We are already going down a serious climate change path, so let's contribute even more on that front?

If that’s what people in the Netherlands want why not?

Fixing it here would mean acknowledging that you cannot run an entire continent of different peoples, languages and cultures (which affect priorities, such as climate be economy) using one central entity.

If more people could live in the cities they would not need cars. Seriously, cars are the biggest problem in the NL. Not emissions from farming or construction.

Emissions from cow farming are a big problem. Even if you don't think it's worse than car pollution (which I'd argue it is, by a long way), the solutions are not mutually exclusive, I think we can agree on that.

As for more people being able to live in cities, those who live outside them do so out of choice. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like the Hague or Amsterdam. They're fine places, just not for everyone. And there's the real issue: The Netherlands is full, not because it's not possible for it to grow further, but because it's not possible without reducing the quality of life.

This idea of growth being beyond reproach is thankfully not present in the Netherlands.

At the limit of growth while still supporting a (large) monarchy. Correlated?

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