The forming parties want to invest tens of billions in a climate fund and further increase the Dutch climate target. VVD, D66, CDA and ChristenUnie have agreed on this in the formation talks, insiders report to NRC.
Because the coalition parties want to make large one-off expenditures for the climate, for example to subsidize companies that go green, a special fund has been devised. Proposals for such a fund have already surfaced in formation documents, but if it is up to the four parties, that is now certain. The money for it would now be borrowed and set aside in a short time by the new cabinet and spent over the next ten years. The amount that the parties have in mind fluctuates, says one involved. Another states that it concerns an amount of up to 50 billion.
Last week, the forming parties in The Hague talked a lot about climate policy. The Climate Act, passed in 2019, states that by 2030 the emission of greenhouse gases must be 49 percent lower than in 1990. The Rutte III cabinet has so far done too little to achieve that target, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) concluded. ) just last month.
According to the PBL, the Netherlands will achieve a reduction of between 19 and 24.5 percent in 2021 and is heading for 38 to 48 percent in 2030. “The goals are getting out of sight,” concluded the Council of State after the publication of the PBL figures.
Benefit from low interest rates
The forming parties not only want to take more measures to achieve that goal, but want to aim even higher. A likely outcome of the negotiations, it sounds, is a reduction of not 49 percent but 55 percent by 2030 compared to 1990.
With the new reduction target, the Netherlands would go further than the target set by the European Union this year. The agreement is that emissions across the EU will also have fallen by 55 percent by 2030, but not every country has to do the same. The Netherlands would probably have to reduce its emissions by ‘only’ 52 percent for that task.
On the one hand, the parties want to achieve the reduction by taxing polluting emissions more heavily. On the other hand, they want to mitigate the costs for citizens and businesses.
That’s where the fund comes in. By borrowing many billions in one term, a new cabinet can take advantage of the current low interest rates. The billions are then deposited in a separate fund. The expenditure from this is one-off, not structural, such as teacher salaries or healthcare costs.
The special consequence of this is that the national debt will increase in one fell swoop by tens of billions, but at the same time the coming cabinet can maintain on Budget Day every year that the budget is sustainable in the long term. As a result, a cabinet does not have to cut billions elsewhere to balance climate expenditure.
A note lying around from VVD and CDA sheds new light on the formation
Train document
The VVD and CDA in particular were expected to be skeptical about major climate plans in advance. Nevertheless, in the ‘train document’ that they had drawn up together in September, leaked last week, the two parties already hinted that they could agree with a tightening of the climate goals. Moreover, the four parties would now also have agreed that nuclear energy, popular with VVD and CDA, will be given a role in reducing emissions.
The climate fund is not the only major fund that the forming parties have in mind. The coalition is also aiming for an investment fund with tens of billions in cash to tackle the nitrogen crisis. With this, for example, farmers who emit a lot of nitrogen in vulnerable nature areas can be bought out or relocated. In the past cabinet term, the National Growth Fund, or ‘Wopke-Wiebes Fund’, after the ministers who came up with it, was already established. That too can spend another twenty billion on innovative projects in the coming years.
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