Floris Triest

Here's the mustread if you want to understand this insanity, by investigative journalist Jesse Frederik (in Dutch): decorrespondent.nl/16856/hoe…. Short summary: 1. Drilling for gas caused (by international standards) minor earthquakes. The damage to some houses in the epicentre area was real. And the state and the gas company handled it badly. Corporate lawyers, denial, etc. 2. Things became super political. The need to establish cause was removed. You can now claim mining damage anywhere the ground has ever moved more than 0.55 mm per second. That's a basketball bouncing on a floor. (For most of the province it was a single tremor back in 2012). 3. Then the investigating stopped too. 'Victims' first got €5,000. Then €10,000. Then up to €60,000 of repairs with no investigation into what caused them. 4. Claims exploded. 2024 was the mildest seismic year in two decades, but there were 42,790 damage claims. Over 70% of claims now come from zip codes where the strongest ground motion was about what a truck going over a speed bump produces. 5. Total compensation: €3.9 billion. 56% of all addresses in the 'earthquake zone' have been compensated at least once (including a rich town where the strongest tremor expected was equivalent to a passing train), and where an engineer puts the odds of a quake-caused crack in an undamaged brick wall at 1 in 20,000. The town has collected €65 million, plus another €14.5 million in green-energy subsidies for earthquake 'victims'. 6. Meanwhile the gas company spent €200 MILLION on research - Groningen became the global centre of seismological research (even though people in - for example - Italy would find it funny that we call these tremors 'earthquakes'). The whole provinces was wired with sensors. 7. All the research was ignored though. The political debate was dominated by a form of science denial, but this time mainly coming from the left. One international expert called the parliamentary inquiry's account of the physics 'misinformation on a very serious scale'. 8. The gas field is now being filled with cement. Around 550 billion cubic metres is still down there (roughly 18 years of Dutch consumption), but the Netherlands now imports most of what it burns. Experts asked to keep some wells intact as an emergency reserve. Parliament said no. 9. End result: we spent insane amounts of money, are much more dependent on foreign autocrats for our energy (with higher greenhouse gas emissions), misinformation is everywhere, and citizens in Groningen are still angry.