Searching for options: Norway’s efforts to develop inexperienced industries are hampered by environmental points and the necessity for heavy subsidies, Fosen peninsula, 13 October 2020
Heiko Junge · NTB · AFP · Getty
In 1969, after years of looking, the American oil firm Phillips Petroleum struck oil off the southwestern coast of Norway. The invention of the large Ekofisk oilfield sparked what’s since been termed the ‘oil journey’, a fairy story deeply embedded in Norwegian society, not solely due to the wealth generated however as a cornerstone of Norwegian id: a small kingdom that managed to put the riches from beneath the seabed in public arms and use them to construct a beneficiant welfare state.
However in latest many years this hopeful story has soured, with rising acknowledgement that pumping oil and gasoline from beneath the ocean is incompatible with a habitable future local weather. As environmentalists and local weather scientists have mentioned, and the Worldwide Power Company and UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres have repeated, hydrocarbons should be left within the floor.
The ‘oil journey’ is a fairy story deeply embedded in society, each due to the wealth generated and as a cornerstone of Norwegian id
Whereas Norway’s environmental motion and elements of the left have demanded a phase-out of the present business with a cease to exploration licenses, a lot of Norwegian society is in denial: based on a ballot carried out by King’s School London in 2022, Norwegians usually tend to refute that local weather change is especially attributable to human actions (24%) than different Western Europeans (18% of Germans, 10% of Italians).
One of many new proponents of this delicate denialism is the Business and Enterprise Celebration (Industri- og Næringspartiet, INP) based in 2020, which managed to get representatives in 115 of Norway’s 356 municipalities within the September 2023 native elections and now has extra members than the Greens (MdG). In its manifesto the INP claims that it isn’t a local weather change denier, however denounces ‘events, organisations and those who seemingly attempt to achieve energy by selling concern of local weather change’; it affirms that ‘the local weather on Earth has (…)
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(1) Oliver Ashford, Jonathan Baines, Melissa Barbanell and Ke Wang, ‘What we learn about deep-sea mining – and what we don’t’, 19 July 2023, www.wri.org; Louisa Casson et al, ‘Deep hassle: The murky world of deep sea mining business’, www.greenpeace.org, 9 December 2020.
(5) Letter to the US Senate Committee on Power and Pure Assets, 31 March 2022.
