Norway votes and everyone is talking about oil. There are still a lot of people like Trond Modal from the oil company Okea, who just announced in the midst of the global climate debate that he believed in “another 50 years of oil and gas” in Norway because: “The world needs oil and gas.” The amazing thing is that such voices in Norway now sound more and more like they have fallen out of time. The land moves. And it looks like next Monday’s parliamentary elections will bear witness to this change.
Norway is expecting the most exciting elections in a long time. The polls predict a change of government. The likely loser is likely to be the conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Norway’s head of government for eight years. And the likely winner is their challenger, 61-year-old Social Democrat and former Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
If Støre wins, Norway would complete the quartet after Sweden, Finland and Denmark: the entire north would be governed by social democrats again, for the first time in 20 years. Not that the Norwegians care. During the election campaign you debated free dental treatment, education, the privatization of the health system and higher taxes for the rich, as the wealth gap is growing rapidly in Norway, which was once so egalitarian. But above all – and nobody had foreseen it – the Norwegians argued over oil, and they did so with great passion.
The Norwegians put down what many observers missed given the size of the challenge in Germany: the country is fighting a “climate election campaign,” the newspaper wrote Class camps. “Norway needs a new oil policy,” captioned Aftenposten, the most influential newspaper in the country, an editorial for election a few days ago.
Norway has the highest density of e-cars in Europe
This is remarkable: oil and gas made Norway rich. And for years they have stood for a contradiction in the politics of the country, which is outwardly pursuing an ambitious green course, with the highest density of electric cars in Europe and ambitious climate targets. Norway covers its own energy needs almost entirely from the production of sustainable energies such as water and wind – and it is also the largest oil producer in Western Europe. The oil and gas produced are exported and the profits flow into the state oil fund, which is now worth more than $ 1.2 trillion than ever.
The Norwegian government likes to refer to state-of-the-art extraction technology that produces little CO₂; in 2020 it was around 13.3 million tons of the greenhouse gas. At the same time, the government mostly ignores the fact that most of the climate damage only occurs when Norwegian oil is burned in other countries in its carbon footprints – the Oslo think tank Cicero estimates the amount last year at around 400 million tonnes of CO₂, or 30 times as much of domestic emissions. This is one of the reasons why the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has already called Norwegian politicians “climate hypocrites”.
So far, the country’s two major parties have shared the oil-friendly policy. Jonas Gahr Støre’s Workers’ Party recently supported the White Paper on Energy, which the conservative government presented in June: Although there is a lot of talk in it about promoting sustainable energies, at the same time corporations should be allowed to produce oil and gas until 2050 and beyond.
In recent years, in Norway, too, the unease about the designation of ever new oil and gas fields, some of them in previously untouched Arctic regions. Young and urban voters in particular are increasingly critical of oil; Last month, for the first time in a survey, the majority of the people of Oslo supported the stop of all new oil projects.
The climate debate during the election campaign was sparked off at the beginning of August with the presentation of the gloomy new climate report by the IPCC, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. UN Secretary General António Guterres spoke of a “red alert” for humanity and said the report must be the “death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet”. Quite a few Norwegians felt addressed. “The election campaign was turned on its head by the fight for oil,” writes the newspaper Dagsavisenwho no longer want to accept the old argument of the oil defenders, according to which little Norway could not save the earth anyway, since the Arab countries produced much more oil and China emitted much more CO₂: “The world now needs role models. If we don’t go ahead, who then? “
Oil and gas represent 160,000 jobs
The first astonishing result of the IPCC report was that the small green party, which called for a quick subsidy freeze, had thousands of new members within a few days, and its membership swelled by a quarter. Prominent economists and writers urged their country to end its oil addiction. In the first televised debate by the party leaders, the future of oil suddenly became the number one topic.
And the so far oil-drunk conservative government surprised the country and all political rivals with a planned tax reform just under two weeks before the election, which in the future should burden the oil industry with much more of the financial risks associated with exploring new oil drilling projects – risks that the state has previously assumed. For many environmentalists, it’s a cosmetic reform. Quite a few oil fans, however, for example from the right-wing populist Progressive Party, were shocked, and the state broadcaster NRK even saw the “beginning of the end” of the old certainties looming.
The likely election winner, the AP Workers’ Party, has ruled out radical steps so far and wants to formulate future policy in talks with the oil industry. Oil and gas still account for 42 percent of Norwegian exports and 160,000 jobs. But at least five smaller, heavily oil-critical parties will probably make it into parliament. And in most polls, the Social Democrats are currently at just 24 percent. Jonas Gahr Støre’s preferred partners for a coalition are the red-green Socialist Left and the rural-green Center Party, both of which are calling for a much more climate-oriented policy than the AP. And Støre could possibly also be dependent on the support of the Red Party and the Greens, who are making the most radical demands: the immediate stop of all searches for new fields and the end of all oil production by 2035 at the latest.
The pressure on the big parties is growing, and within the Labor Party, too, the youth of the party have long been calling for a faster move away from oil. In the meantime, the industry itself is pretending that everything will stay the same. According to the Ministry of Oil and Energy, half of all oil and gas reserves in Norway are still underground, undeveloped. 50 new projects are planned for 2021 and 2022 alone.