The Dutch have this climate change thing figured out

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From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on the economy, but an opportunity. While the Trump administration withdraws from the Paris accord, the Dutch are pioneering a singular way forward.

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The Dutch are 100% right that climate change is an opportunity and the Dutch are right to embrace it. However, the NYT is completely wrong to compare the Dutch's Delta Works Project and other flood protection measures with Trump pulling out of the PCA. The Netherlands' attitude was developed almost a century before the PCA and 50 years before climate change was a thing. Maybe if the NYT pulled its head out of its own arse it could see the flaw in their "science denier" logic because even if the PCA was 100% successful the earth is still going to get hotter and the seas will still rise.

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To the Dutch, what’s truly incomprehensible, he added, is New York after Hurricane Sandy, where too little has been done to prepare for the next disaster. People in the Netherlands believe that the places with the most people and the most to lose economically should get the most protection.

The idea that a global economic hub like Lower Manhattan flooded during Hurricane Sandy, costing the public billions of dollars, yet still has so few protections, leaves climate experts here dumbfounded.

Mr. Molenaar, Rotterdam’s climate chief, summed up the Dutch view: “We have been able to put climate change adaptation high on the public agenda without suffering a disaster in many years because we have shown the benefits of improving public space — the added economic value of investing in resilience.

“It’s in our genes,” he said. “Water managers were the first rulers of the land. Designing the city to deal with water was the first task of survival here and it remains our defining job. It’s a process, a movement.

“It is not just a bunch of dikes and dams, but a way of life.”

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The "climate experts" in the Netherlands are dumbfounded because they think that American "climate experts", the democratic party, green activists, etc actually care about addressing the problem. However, that is not the case. The American "climate experts", the democratic party, etc don't care about preventing the next Hurricane Sandy or reducing the impact of the next megadrought in the American west; they care about wealth redistribution, government subsidies, and using climate change as a political tool. Maybe if the dems, greenies, "climate experts", etc stopped trying to shame their political opponents into supporting regulations that won't do anything to help protect us or save the planet, and started focussing on building the projects that the we will need to lessen the effects of climate change (i.e. the Ike Dike in Houston, the NYC flood barrier, desalination plants in Cali, etc) they might actually find support for that.