Dutch Public Transit Strike: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Dutch public transit services went on strike today over a disagreement on the retirement age (which is set to rise to 67 years and then to track the life expentancy).

And this is how you find out just how good the Dutch public transit is: when it gets taken away for a day. A million people (out of a population of 17 million) depend on it to get to work or school. It is used by a broad section of Dutch residents (unlike in the United States where, outside a few coastal cities, trains and buses are occupied mostly by the poor and by hapless foreigners).

Photo by Yintan

As one example: Arriving at Schiphol airport generally involves going through immigration, picking up your luggage, and rolling it straight downstairs to the train tracks: the railway station is an integral part of the airport. On weekdays it's serviced by 25 trains per hour.

It's no wonder that the union action struck fear and panic among the operators at Schiphol. If all their passengers arrived or left by car it would be total chaos. They sued for retention of train service. A judge granted the exception, and today air travelers can expect 4 trains every hour at Schiphol.

Fossil Fuel Subsidies Far Higher than Companies' Profit.

This is a bold claim to make, and one that you might expect from radical groups like Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace. But it came from that staid, wholly establishment organisation, the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF estimates that in 2017 global fossil fuel subsidies reached a mind-blowing 5.2 trillion dollars, or 6.5 percent of global GDP, up from $4.7tn in 2015.

These costs include not only direct subsidies but also tax breaks that dinimish national budgets, health care costs from fossil fuel related pollution, the cost of traffic congestion, and so on. It's a pretty thorough assessment of all the indrect costs to society.

Worldwide subsidies for coal is about $2tn, subsidies to oil and gas about $2.5tn.

Now here's the truly gobsmacking thing about all this: