This country sucks, and could learn from Norway
Most of you probably don’t know this, but the Netherlands is (or used to be) very rich in natural gas. Most of it lies under the province of Groningen, the north-eastern part of the country, and coincidentally this is where I live.
Especially after the oil crisis of the 70’ ies natural gas has been a huge source of income. In fact, during price peaks it almost made up 10% of government income. Instead of putting the money to good use, like eliminating the sovereign debt, infrastructure or a long-term fund like Norway these revenues have generally not been earmarked in any way. About 15% was spent on infrastructural projects; the rest on general government spending like social security, bond interests and law enforcement. Nice stuff, but the long term benefit has been negligible. I’ve read somewhere that our poor example was actually one of the reasons why Norway chose to stash their oil revenues in the matress for later generations.
For a while there was an earmarked fund for the gas revenues, originally intended for infrastructure. But the stated purpose of the fund was later expanded to include “advancing the knowledge-economy” – i.e. a meaningless, vacuous term that can be used to justify almost any expenditure. The fund has since then been abolished and the revenues simply enter the general treasury again.
Other than the dumb way in which the money is spent, there’s also the issue about where it is spent. Over the decades the bulk of the money was spent in the urbanized western regions. These are obviously the most populous, but even accounting for that the amount is disproportionate. The three northern provinces make up about 10% of the national population, but only about 1% of the gas revenues end up being spent here.
Despite these gas deposits, the north is pretty much the most impoverished part of the Netherlands. Some politicians have criticized the EU financial aid packages to countries like Greece because there’s not enough kinship between different countries for such solidarity, like there is between different regions in the same country. They usually name the province as Groningen as an example, being the beneficiary of wealth transfers from the richer, urbanized west. I think this is funny.
As it turns out, large scale exploitation of gas fields can cause earthquakes. They’ve been happening sporadically for several decades but are becoming a regular occurrence nowadays. Granted, these earthquakes are pretty light (heaviest so far was 3,6 on the Richter scale) but houses and other buildings here haven’t been constructed with these quakes in mind. Since the gas revenues vastly exceed any economic damage these quakes may cause it’s perfectly rational to keep drilling and simply compensate the owners. But since the gas revenues barely benefit the local population anyway, most wonder why they should put up with it at all.
On the bright side: I don’t own a house, I’m free to move elsewhere and I intend to do just that at some point in the future. Living here sucks, anyway.
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Originally Posted by Strike For The South
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