oh, larissa

A charming image to accompany this article in the NYT where, in light of COP15, the Op-Ed editors asked writers from four different continents to give their own report on the climate changes they’ve experienced close to home.

Hanne-Vibeke Holst: Denmark in the Wind

“You’re the ones who will have to live with the effects of climate change,” we caution our youngest as he consumes yet another burger. As a 12-year-old, he has yet to comprehend that at some point he may have to choose between beef and rain forests, plane journeys or glaciers, rationing or perishing. He has no idea that insurance premiums are already rising fast (too fast!), due to the kind of climate-induced flooding that has been filling many a Danish basement. On the other hand, he knows Denmark will have vineyards, and by then he’ll be able to swim with dolphins! Pretty cool, yeah?

I haven’t the heart to mention the plagues of malaria mosquitoes, the risks of contracting West Nile virus and cholera. Neither have I troubled him with forecasts of the cod disappearing from Danish waters, or with the gloomy prospects for growing Christmas trees here. I did, though, (mis)appropriate the climate angle in the course of a discussion about pets. “A medium-sized dog pollutes as much as a 4.6-liter Toyota Land Cruiser clocking more than 6,000 miles a year!” I tell him, reading out of the newspaper. “Yeah, sure,” he says, and rolls his eyes. As if.

…In Denmark, there are more than 100 wind turbine cooperatives, and special exchanges where you can buy shares in them. Our Christmas will be a peaceful one: we’ll talk about the wind and the weather, but in the nice way, so we’ll forget that this year once again Christmas wasn’t white. The snow is going, too.

Whenever Norway’s extensive social welfare system and high standard of living is discussed, conservatives like to say that they can only afford it because they are sitting on so much oil.

If that’s the case, then why does Sweden have a nearly identical system and standard of living, without much oil at all?

(click to enlarge; via axinomancy)

Europe’s democracy deficit from The Economist

“Britain and the Netherlands kicked off the four-day process of electing members for the European Parliament on Thursday June 4th. It is one of the biggest democratic exercises in the world, with over 375m voters in 27 countries. But some voters lack enthusiasm. As the European Union has expanded, turnout has dwindled: from 62% at the first election in 1979 to 45% in 2004. Some blame a general decline in democratic engagement but, aside from countries with compulsory voting such as Belgium, the difference in turnout for national and European parliaments is substantial. And worryingly for Europhiles, turnout is worst in many of the newest members of the club, in eastern Europe.”

Going Dutch - How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State

“I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?

A short stroll from my apartment suggests the outlines of an answer. In about six minutes you reach the Dam, the wide plaza that is the Times Square of Amsterdam… The Dam is therefore a reminder not only of the country’s past but also of its ceaseless battle with water. And that battle turns out to be the key to understanding the Netherlands’ blend of free market and social welfare. The Low Countries never developed a fully feudal system of aristocratic landowners and serfs. Rather, sailors, merchants and farmers bought shares in trading ships and in cooperatives to protect the land from the sea, a development that led to the creation of one of the world’s first stock markets and helped fuel the Dutch golden age. Today the country remains among the most free-market-oriented in Europe.

At the same time, water also played a part in the development of the welfare system. To get an authoritative primer on the Dutch social-welfare state, I sat down with Geert Mak, perhaps the country’s pre-eminent author, to whose books the Dutch themselves turn to understand their history. The Dutch call their collectivist mentality and way of politics-by-consensus the “polder model,” after the areas of low land systematically reclaimed from the sea. “People think of the polder model as a romantic idea” and assume its origins are more myth than fact, Mak told me. “But if you look at records of the Middle Ages, you see it was a real thing. Everyone had to deal with water. With a polder, the big problem is pumping the water. But in most cases your land lies in the middle of the country, so where are you going to pump it? To someone else’s land. And then they have to do the same thing, and their neighbor does, too. So what you see in the records are these extraordinarily complicated deals. All of this had to be done together.”

…The nation today embodies a centuries-old inclination toward collectivism, which one writer characterized as “the democracy of dry feet.””

(Russell Shorto for the NYT Magazine, 20090429)

1petitpois:

50% of Denmark’s electricity is created using a decentralised system, and 40% of the Netherlands’. In Finland, 98% of Helsinki is heated by community heat networks. (source)

March 24, 2009, 12:57am

Governments across Europe tremble as effects of global recession prompt angry people to take to the streets | The Guardian

A snapshot of Jan. 30 in Athens, Riga, Paris, Budapest, Kiev and Reykjavik.