CLOGS IN THE WORKS

The transition to a sustainable energy economy and its deliberate and unconscious sabotage

An essay by Jan Paul van Soest, who has been one of our preliminary jury members for the past years.

Jan Paul van Soest, photo by Roy Beusker

The need for far-reaching policies to address climate change and adopt sustainable energy systems is urgent and undeniable. The overwhelming bulk of scientific evidence shows the earth's atmosphere is warming at an unprecedented rate and that human-driven emissions of greenhouse gases are largely to blame. The inescapable conclusion: fossil-based energy systems need to be phased out as quickly as possible and a transition made to renewably-sourced alternatives. Why, then, is it taking so long?

The reason, in a word, is sabotage: a concerted campaign by fossil-fuel corporations, energy-intensive industries and other vested interests to sow confusion about climate science and green technologies and thus undermine political and public support for effective action. The methods employed by these 'merchants of doubt' have been extensively documented, a.o. by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book of the same name. They include the use of fake scientific institutes, public relations outfits dressed up as 'think tanks' and blogs and websites created specifically to spread their noxious rhetoric.   

This climate-denial and anti-transition cocktail was originally mixed in the United States, more than anywhere else, using a recipe concocted by the tobacco lobby, but has now wormed its way into Western Europe, too. And while the Netherlands was once at the forefront of environmental policy-making, it seems that today this country is more vulnerable to these trends than its neighbours. Over the past 10 or 20 years the Netherlands, more so than any other north-west European nation, has turned its back on the 'Rhineland model' to embrace the neoliberal 'Washington consensus' and even the ultra-libertarian, apocalyptic thinking of such figures as Ayn Rand, so widely acclaimed in the US.

This essay, written at the request of the Netherlands Council for Environment and Infrastructure, explores these issues in greater depth and analyses how we can best unmask the sabotage currently being perpetrated by the 'merchants of doubt' and reclaim a rational path forward to a sustainable future.

I sincerely hope it will provoke plenty of debate, not only on climate change and the energy transition, but above all on vested interests and the notion of evidence-based truth. For it is my deepest conviction that if we hold that the issues of the day can be resolved by recourse to mere opinion and positions of power rather than scientific knowledge and evidence and consign the legacy of the Enlightenment to the dustbin of history, then we are headed for a new Dark Age.

Jan Paul van Soest

Jan Paul van Soest is a consultant on sustainability issues with over thirty years' hands-on experience with Dutch and European environmental and climate policy.