The Volt party wants the cabinet to stop importing extra liquid gas from abroad and make the coal-fired power stations run faster again. Instead, the Netherlands must immediately consume significantly less energy. Even if this is at the expense of industry and horticulturalists.
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,,All taboos must be removed from the table and that includes painful choices”, said party leader Laurens Dassen in a speech during a festival of his party in Delft. According to him, for example, ‘cultivation of cucumbers in winter and flowers that grow in greenhouses while it is freezing outside’ must come to an end. The production of luxury goods must also be ‘scaled down’.
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Now that the Netherlands and other European countries receive little or no natural gas from Russia, the cabinet is looking for other energy sources. This is how the coal-fired power stations are allowed again running at full capacity† This saves the gas we save for the winter, when everyone turns on the heating again.
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Against EU policy
Volt wants the cabinet to invest more quickly in sustainable energy sources and to stop looking for alternatives to Russian gas. Instead, we should immediately consume less energy.
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Remarkable, because the pro-European Volt is thus turning against the policy of the European Union, which has agreed to jointly purchase liquefied gas (LNG). All Member States must also fill their gas stocks as far as possible this summer in order to avert a possible energy shortage in the winter.
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Without the import of LNG or the co-firing of coal, the cabinet would soon have to ration scarce gas. The first to be shut down are factories and horticulturalists that need a lot of gas. Households are spared in these plans.
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methane
Dassen calls the EU policy ‘unwise’ in an explanation. “We can switch off those coal-fired power stations when we no longer need them. But our concern is that those LNG contracts are concluded for the long term. So we’re stuck with that for years to come. While the methane that is released is very harmful to the climate, much more harmful than CO2† I am very concerned about that.”
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The UN climate panel IPCC said this week that it feared that 1.5 degrees of global warming could no longer be prevented. That is precisely why, in Dassen’s opinion, Europe should ‘not switch from fossil to fossil’. “The damage to the environment will only increase.” Dassen does not want to say whether his plan means that large factories in our country must be cut off from gas.
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If the cabinet is now fully committed to saving energy, the gas stocks can be supplemented with gas that is not currently being used, says Dassen. “Then we can’t keep doing everything we’re doing now. Then we have to make difficult choices.”
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