Norwegian oil discourse way off course

When attending the intersessional climate negotiations here in Bonn as a Norwegian NGO participant and listening to the often quite constructive remarks given by the Norwegian negotiators, it is strange to think of how this poses a stark contradiction to the political fossil fuel discourse given by the government back home.

Norway, you say? The weird, small and rich country way up North? Isn’t that the country with the Brundtland commision, the country that invented Sustainable Development as a term, and the country that keeps talking about the need for ambitious climate negotiation outcomes?

Well, yes. But sadly, we’re also a country which makes huge amounts of money from the oil industry. That puts us in an awkward position and makes us look more and more as hypocrites on the international climate arena. Within our own national borders however, the politicians have done an impressive job with framing the oil industry in a positive light. Believe it or not, but the government has made many people believe that the fossil fuel extraction is actually good for the climate! The rationality is that the world needs energy anyway, and since the Norwegian oil industry is amongst the “cleanest” in the world, then we’re actually doing people a favor by extracting the oil the world desperately needs, while making money at the same time. How well that works out for us, indeed. Actually, contrary to any rational expectation, Norway keeps on investing increasingly more money in the fossil sector, spending the incredible amount of 172,5 billion Norwegian kroner (29,8 billion USD) just last year in new investments (quite a big amount for such a small country).

Even though the industry might be comparatively clean, Co2 is still being emitted when the oil is getting burned. In that way, Norway is contributing a lot to the global emissions in total. Of course, this doesn’t go into the Norwegian carbon budget, since the carbon is emitted outside national borders, which makes us look cleaner than we really are. Since we mostly use hydro power in our own country, we like to make a show of being a flagship nation on renewable energy. But it’s still quite clear that Norway should take some of the blame for the presence of our own oil on the world market.

It’s quite impressive to see a country’s politicians being able to persuade their people to think they as a nation are saving the world and providing “clean” energy to the needy when in fact they are amongst the biggest emitters in the world. A real achievement indeed. The only question is how long this can keep on. Already Norway has a problem with upholding this good-guy image when continuously facing new research results that underscores the important effect energy use has on climate change. This was lately reaffirmed in the newest IEA World Energy Outlook report published just this week, saying that the global energy sector accounts for two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions. And we already know that most of our known fossil resources have to stay in the ground if we can have any hopes of keeping the temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius. It’s not enough to keep on extracting relatively less dirty oil when what we actually need is to cut the crap all together.

The basic fact is that Norway keeps on investing their money in a backwards industry that we know will not deliver the solution we need. At the same time, they keep stressing the importance of a new international climate agreement being science-based. It is all in all an impossible split that Norway can’t keep up for long. It’s time for the international community to give them the helpful push they need, and make it clear that it’s not tolerable for Norway to scale up their fossil ambitions while millions of people suffer the harsh consequences of climate change. I for one am directly shamed by my own country at how they can pull this off internationally. Norway: get a reality check!

Photo Credit: Leila Mead - ENB Climate, L.C.Nøttaasen, . Shell