I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it’s still not good enough (I would even say the country’s “well above average” condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for “friendly” politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn’t help that most people’s Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they’re faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.
I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it’s still not good enough (I would even say the country’s “well above average” condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for “friendly” politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn’t help that most people’s Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they’re faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.