Storm

2019 – A Bridge to 2020?

It’s 2019 for almost a month now, and it feels odd. Every new year is odd, and everybody knows the feeling of writing down the new year for the first time. A new year filled with hope, expectation and uncertainty. 2018 has been officially closed off, and no memories can be added to it. All the memories you make for the next 344 days will be put under 2019. Even with that information it feels to me like a ‘bridge year’. A year which only purpose is to build up to the next: 2020. 

Climate goals, health care goals, governmental goals, almost all of them should be accomplished in 2020. The sustainable development goals should be accomplished in 2030. For example, we did, or are going to be doing a project on Texel to help create a sustainable Texel by 2020. Doing this project in 2019 feels to me like starting a paper the day before the deadline. In some exceptional cases this produces wonderful papers, as some say ‘diamonds are made under pressure’. But I highly doubt this will be the case for 2019. 

One of the main goals that the European Union set is that 20% of the energy should come from renewable resources. This includes wind and solar energy, but also more controversial ones as bio energy. At the start, the Dutch government was already very sceptical and possibly not very motivated to accomplish this. As a result, they lowered the bar and set it at 14% renewable resources. In 2016, that percentage was a grand total of 5.9%. In 2018 it skyrocketed to 6.6%. At this pace, we will end up with 7.2% in 2020. Not only is this about half of our already lowered goal, 3.8% of it is from biomass. In conclusion: we accomplished almost a fifth of the goal the EU set. 

Yes, goals should be set high. Normally I am a fan of an unreachable goal as they push you to accomplish more than you at the beginning thought you could. This however ended up at the wrong side of it. However, not all hope is lost. Our daily efforts and awareness could help to maybe not reach, but come close to a reasonable outcome. And if it wasn’t for the goals, we would probably still at 0%. If I learnt two things while studying GSS, it is that we should always have hope for a better future, and that something is always better than nothing.