regard the threat seriously and are taking concrete action both in their
legislative bodies and on the ground. From the Netherlands to Venice,
governments are spending lavishly to defend their countries against
rising seas, while European energy and engineering concerns are lead-
ing the way in providing the world with technologies to deal with both
greenhouse gases and the climate impacts they are believed to trigger.
“Here in Europe there is an absolutely overwhelming consensus
amongst both scientists and businesses that climate change is real and
we need to act upon this,” says Alex Evans of the Institute for Public
Policy Research in London. There are several reasons for this firmer
commitment, according to Hermann Ott of Germany’s Wuppertal
Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. In comparison with
their U.S. counterparts, European corporations have a smaller influ-
ence over the European Union, Ott argues, and even large energy con-
cerns such as Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum formally rec-
ognize the reality of global warming. “Europeans are more likely to
accept that there are limits to growth and the carrying capacity of the
planet,” he says. “We’ve had to come to terms with a lot more compe-
tition with each other, and due to the limited space in Europe, envi-
ronmental protection takes a much higher importance for the general
population.”
Nowhere is that more true than in the Netherlands, where 60 per-
cent of the population lives below sea level, relying on a vast network
of pumping stations to keep their homes from drowning with every
downpour. Many countries have networks of canals and irrigation
ditches to bring water to crop fields. In the Netherlands, the canals
exist to get the water out. Stand beside the canal running past Glas’s
office at Delft Hydraulics and you will notice that the water level in the
canal is one or two stories higher than the ground outside his building.
Down the road, a large pumping station pumps water up to the canal
from a low-lying drainage ditch collecting the runoff from a recent
snowfall. Elsewhere in the country, enormous pumps push the water
in the largest collection canals up to the sea, whose surf crashes 14 feet
above the ground level of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. The Dutch
have a saying that sums up an essential fact of life here: “Pump or
drown.”
Europe 27