It hasn’t been like this for very long, but outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) seems to have started talking about the climate differently, more alarmingly. The VVD leader, who always says that green policy must be ‘feasible and affordable’, spoke in the House of Representatives after the summer about the ‘catastrophic consequences for our world’ if the earth warms by three degrees. And about risks that cannot be foreseen if the Netherlands does nothing. He saw, he said during the General Political Reflections following Budget Day, “an unbelievably great necessity” to intervene.
He used imagery which the VVD seems to think is good for the supporters. According to him, the Netherlands could also be “number 1 at the Olympic Games for the climate”. Rutte now believes that tens of billions of euros should be invested in what he calls one of the major post-war renovations in the Netherlands.
His party colleague Ed Nijpels, leader of the 2019 climate agreement, noticed. “At the General Considerations, Rutte really took flight forward.” Nijpels had heard him tell “tear-jerking” stories about the climate, but so far only outside the Netherlands.
Now Rutte says: ‘we cannot afford to postpone this further’
In the campaign before the elections, the VVD sounded very different. The party did not let the election program calculate on green effects. In March, one day before the elections, Rutte said on a talk show On 1 that no additional measures were required. Because then you were “overgaping”. According to him, you only had to think about it in October, if it would at least be officially clear that the cabinet would not achieve its target for 2030.
Within the VVD, especially young people find the climate increasingly important, the party knows. The VVD also knows that two of the three parties with which it is negotiating a new cabinet, D66 and ChristenUnie, want ambitious climate policy. Which may also have played a role: the floods this summer and the alarming report of the UN climate panel IPCC. And so the Netherlands heard Rutte say in September: “We cannot afford to postpone or delay this further.”
From teasing spirit to inspiration
There was something else: just before the summer, Marjan Minnesma, director of environmental organization Urgenda, visited him twice. It wants to bring large parts of heavy industry to virtually zero emissions in ten years, partly through subsidies. “By analogy with Kennedy who said: I want to be on the moon in ten years.” According to her, the plan suits an entrepreneurial party. She is surprised that the VVD did not come up with it themselves. “I think it is also psychologically necessary for the industry to take a big step. Citizens think: why us, why not those big emitters?”
She noticed on her first visit to Rutte that her idea of green industrial policy grabbed him. “He thought that was super interesting.” And so she was allowed to come back two weeks later to get her woman on the moonplan further.
Minnesma is known in The Hague as a scourge of the cabinet since the judge in the Urgenda case in 2015 ruled that the government would reduce CO emissions by 2020.2 had to decrease significantly. Her first visit to Rutte was a lecture, she says, with a PowerPoint presentation. „I wanted him the basics of climate science. You often hear him shout: take it easy, we still have thirty years. That’s the wrong language. That way you radiate: everything will be fine – and that is absolutely not true. If you keep emitting until 2050, you will go well over 2 degrees.”
Rutte has since mentioned her plan in parliamentary debates. From teasing spirit to inspiration – Minnesma thinks it’s fine. “We conducted that lawsuit out of love. We don’t argue, we propose solutions.”
And the story is not completely strange for Rutte either. As early as 2008, as VVD leader, he wrote a pamphlet that his own party did not like, but which he is now talking about again: Pamphlet from an optimist. He argued for a green-right view of energy. Especially to make money with it. “Then we have gold in our hands.”
Green policy must be ‘feasible and affordable’
Prime Minister Mark Rutte
Goat wool socks
Rutte always liked to oppose GroenLinks. “They want us all to wear goat wool socks, turn down the stove and live in a black and white photo,” he told the newspaper in 2019. AD. Now Rutte talks more positively about GroenLinks. That party would also not want “personal life to change dramatically”, Rutte said during the reflections. But, he admitted, “without any repercussions in people’s private lives,” it won’t work.
One of Rutte’s favorite sayings disappeared silently over the years. He first said that windmills run on subsidies and not on wind, after the Rutte II cabinet of the VVD and PvdA you didn’t hear about that anymore. Thanks to the PvdA, a subsidy scheme for wind farms was set up that proved successful: less and less subsidy was needed.
However, Rutte continues to repeat that climate policy must be ‘feasible and affordable’. Terrible, thinks Nijpels. “He suggests that we only do it if it’s affordable. But we committed ourselves to it in the Paris Agreement and the Climate Law. Moreover, it has been calculated for a long time that we as a country can afford it just fine.”
It suits the prime minister who moves in the middle, doesn’t lead the way and wants to reassure people that he doesn’t do crazy things. “Rutte is a master at drawing conclusions that everyone likes,” says Gertjan Lankhorst of VEMW, representing the interests of companies that use a lot of energy. “Climate is a polarized theme. You are not ambitious enough for some and too radical for others.”
And now Rutte says he wants to become Olympic climate champion. Minnesma and Lankhorst react the same: first see, then believe. Because then there is a huge amount of catching up to do. And cabinets are better at planning than executing them, both say. Pious intentions are not enough, says Nijpels. Minnesma: “I want to be his Olympic coach.”
Also read this interview from 2019 with a linguist: ‘Language of politicians in The Hague almost identical to that of salesmen’
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of October 27, 2021
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