Now that a large section of the cabinet, led by Prime Minister Schoof, is finally working to make progress in the protracted nitrogen dossier, it might be a good suggestion that it also purchases a smart AI tool for the Council of State - so that they can use it there to map out the expected consequences of their choices more quickly and better.
Furthermore, a strict separation of powers remains essential.
And perhaps the last tip is not to use the Chinese DeepSeek to use, because besides the fact that all the data is in Beijing, there is a big chance that the rest of the world will also quickly be informed of everything that is happening. An American software company found itself in the central database of DeepSeek this week without much effort and reported that, if it was that easy, they might not have been the first.
Expanding farce
That aside, the farce surrounding the Council of State ruling of mid-December last year increasingly larger. Even a considerable number of livestock farmers who saw themselves designated as peak polluters and accepted the 'wildly attractive' offer of former minister Van der Wal now appear to be in trouble. The problem is that they too have lost their permits and will not receive another one for the time being for new activities to be started.
The harsh reality in livestock farming is that anyone who has a permit should really cherish it and think ten times before wanting something else.
It is also difficult to imagine that Van der Wal (or rather: her civil servants) came up with it that way. The Council of State thwarts the buy-out scheme, the minister cannot continue with the plans that have been initiated, livestock farmers withdraw from a trajectory that has already been initiated.
Peak polluter bottlenecks
Let's hope that farmers who fall between the cracks can still keep their old permit. If not, then in addition to the categories of PAS reporters and interim workers, we will soon also have the peak polluter bottlenecks, plus a government that is increasingly powerless to then do the only decent thing: compensate them. There are less developed countries where they do it better.
Ursula Trumpian
Cutting the Gordian knot of bureaucracy and legalism seems like a Trumpian solution, but European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is also increasingly keen to get rid of unnecessary rules that only clog up society in practice. She initially wants to get rid of the burdensome reporting obligation on sustainability and the like that companies are groaning under, and possibly also of overly detailed climate and environmental regulations. She is not (yet) reaching any targets, but she realises that the policy has gone too far (although she was still in charge of that in her previous term).
Gelderland zoning
Movements in mainstream politics will not directly help agriculture, but small adjustments can also provide a great deal of relief.
A number of provinces have taken that lesson to heart. They no longer want to wait for Minister Femke Wiersma to make decisions – which she can, but does not. For example, a motion was adopted in Gelderland this week to quickly legalize PAS reporters at more than 500 meters from sensitive nature areas. To achieve this, the province wants to choose a new legal approach and, among other things, start working with zoning. Other provinces have also taken steps to start working with this.
Empirical evidence, but not measured
The Stichting Stikstofclaim (SSC), which has been waiting for months for a request for recognition as an advocate by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, is lobbying in the meantime not only to have a higher arithmetic lower limit for nitrogen adopted. It also wants the critical deposition value (KDW) for nature removed from the law and proposes to halve the calculated percentage of dry deposition. There is something to be said for all these steps, because according to some hard data, they actually have enormous built-in uncertainties and built-in assumptions. For example, the dry deposition (of nitrogen) is said to account for approximately two-thirds of the total nitrogen deposition, but this assumption has not yet been verified with measurements anywhere, not even abroad. The KDWs also liberally sprinkle so-called 'empirical evidence', but not with real measurement data.
Last week, Minister Wiersma also put forward the allocation of a kind of emission quota for individual companies as a solution. This sounds sympathetic and sensible, but this option unfortunately suffers from the same problem that the entire nitrogen discussion suffers from: the inability to reliably measure emissions. A lot can be done from behind computers, with models and in (closed) test setups, but in practice it cannot be proven or tested with 'analog' measurements.
System in 'loop'
It is also a reason why all innovations known and recognized so far under the current set of laws and regulations are vulnerable to the courts. The system is in a so-called 'loop'. It works like a dog biting its own tail, and it is up to the government to develop a new approach, with new people, to get out of it.