Climate Policy Must Stop

Climate policy must stop

Speech by Lidewij de Vos in the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament.

12 March 2025

Chairman,

Thank you, Chairman. Climate change is of all times. 150,000 years ago, we were in the middle of an ice age. So were we 20,000 years ago. The Netherlands was under an ice cap, which brought boulders from which people built dolmens. Between these two ice ages, we had a warm period, an interglacial.

This variation in the climate can be explained using Milankovitch's theory. The Earth's orbit around the sun and the position of the Earth's axis follow cycles of tens of thousands of years, which determine the alternation between ice ages and interglacials.

And even on a smaller scale, the climate is not unchanging. A millennium ago, the Vikings moved to Greenland during the Warm Medieval Period. 500 years later, people skated during the long winters of the Little Ice Age.

Since 1850, things have been getting a little warmer again. At the same time, our society has industrialised on a large scale, resulting in CO2 emissions, and people have started measuring and thus observing a rise in temperature.

But is this change unique? And is the cause higher levels of CO2 in the air? It is these two assumptions that form the foundation of the zero CO2 policy we are discussing today. And it is therefore crucial to assess them.

In 1999, the IPCC published the hockey stick graph (1). I have it here with me. The graph shows the course of temperature since the year 1000, and shows an almost constant temperature with a drastic rise in the last century (the black line). Hence the name hockey stick.

1. Hockey stick Graph

A remarkable scale, if we keep in mind the time scale of ice ages. But more importantly, the underlying data of this graph is wrong. Data series have been broken up or padded with data from other years for reasons that are unclear. And with cleaned-up data, you get a graph of fluctuations that match our historical lore (the green line).

So an unprecedented temperature rise is, at the very least, unproven, and in the extreme, not an issue. How does minister Hermans view this?

Regarding CO2, it is true that higher CO2 levels in the past hundreds of thousands of years have coincided with higher temperatures, and vice versa. But it seems that temperature increases always precede CO2 increases, and not vice versa. After an ice age, the oceans warm up and hold less CO2, which raises atmospheric levels. Please comment on this as well.

President. Time scales of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years have uncertainties. Perhaps, therefore, the only pure conclusion is that we do not, or not yet, properly understand climate.

With that, the firmness of climate fanatics is in any case misplaced. The hockey stick graph is wrong. The decisive influence of CO2 on the current temperature rise is unproven. There is no reason to think that climate cycles of tens of thousands of years are confused by human activity over the past 150 years. Anyone who does think so is overestimating the impact of us humans on the earth.

But that is exactly what almost all parties in this Chamber do. Billions go to offshore wind turbines and billions to solar panels and wind turbines on roofs and pastures. Our stable and affordable energy supply is being dismantled by turning off the Groningen gas tap, while meanwhile our electricity grid is clogging up. Based on a misguided idea about climate change, this Chamber has passed the Climate Act, which forces us to take extremely expensive and pointless measures.

Chairman, I cannot but conclude that this climate policy must stop. Forum for Democracy wants to protect our economy, preserve the purchasing power of Dutch people and therefore put an end to this irresponsible waste of money.

Thank you.