Scandinavia Gets Serious on Global Warming
Johansen, Bruce E.
Scandinavia Gets Serious on Global Warming By Bruce E. Johansen Illustration by Sel?uk Demirel Sweden and Norway have some of the highest liquor taxes in the world, provoking large-scale...
...Don't stereotype Sweden as a green-power heaven, Bolund says...
...The congestion charge reduced auto traffic 20 to 25 percent, while use of trains, buses, and Stockholm's extensive subway system increased...
...The Social Democrats stole it from us," Bolund says...
...Oil is not what interests us...
...More and more streets across the city are gradually being placed off-limits to motor traffic...
...Every busted booze smuggler has been drafted into Sweden's war against oil dependence and greenhouse gases...
...Many renovated Stockholm hotel rooms and apartments have a door slot for key cards that must be activated to turn on the lights...
...Power plants have been radically reduced in size and built closer to people's homes and offices to reduce power loss during transmission...
...Sweden's Commission on Oil Independence, a government panel, also was a longtime Green Party initiative that is now embraced across the Swedish political spectrum...
...People ride bikes while drinking coffee or smoking...
...During January, a very stormy month, Denmark harvested 36 percent of its electricity from wind, almost double the usual...
...Per Bolund, one of nineteen Green Party members in Sweden's 349-member Riksdag, says there may be less here than meets the eye...
...It is not in our interest to be dependent on oil, with regard to the production and sales of cars," he says...
...The entire Danish Crown plant has been redesigned with an eye to saving energy, part of a thirty-year Danish effort to eliminate waste, conserve energy, and reduce consumption of fossil fuels, as The Wall Street Journal reports...
...Sweden is not alone...
...Until recently, gold-and-blue-capped Swedish Customs officers poured the contraband booze down the drain...
...The color of consensus in Sweden today is green...
...The country was the first in the world to adopt a carbon tax, in 1991...
...The Green Party favored a Stockholm congestion charge for decades, as conservatives blocked it...
...Denmark's taxation system has become an environmental exclamation point...
...We are falling way behind Sweden and Denmark and many other European countries in taking serious steps to combat global warming...
...To sample bicycle gridlock, come to Copenhagen, which has deployed 2,000 bikes around the city for free use...
...it now has several hundred small ones...
...Surplus heat from Danish power plants is delivered to nearby homes, via insulated pipes...
...We have a long way to go...
...When you leave your room, the lights automatically turn off...
...Employees ride company-owned bikes to off-site meetings...
...But the Swedes are moving in the right direction, however...
...Such financial incentives already were available to libraries, pools, and hospitals that wanted to switch to more efficient renewable energy...
...These buses will use ethanol-powered internal-combustion engines and electric motors, an interim step toward development of entirely "clean" vehicles...
...In the mid-1980s, Denmark had fifteen large power plants...
...cars are...
...Between 1975 and 2001, Denmark's national heating bill fell 20 percent, even as the amount of heated space increased by 30 percent...
...A growing web of pedestrian malls allows tens of thousands of people to traverse downtown Stockholm on foot every day-down a gentle hill, northwest to southeast, along Drottninggatan, past the Riksdag (Parliament) and the King's Palace, merging with Vasterlanggatan, into the Old Town-for more than two miles...
...Teleconferencing is in...
...The project also increased the use of environmentally friendly cars, which are exempt from congestion taxes...
...Senate cafeteria carries a sign urging colleagues to recycle scraps for biogas...
...Large parts of Denmark have undergone a nearly total makeover of basic energy infrastructure...
...Any time you see the government claiming that oil use for heating has been minimized to nearly zero you have to say-yes, but...
...The Link?ping plant also accepts packing-plant waste...
...Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is the author of "Global Warming in the 21st Century...
...The proportion of oil-heated homes in Sweden has fallen to 8 percent, as many neighborhoods use hot water from central plants that burn biofuels, often wood-based pellets...
...Imagine, for example, paying more than $80,000 in taxes (as well as $6 a gallon for gasoline) to buy and drive a Hummer H2-that, and pesky bicyclists may ridicule your elegantly pimped ride as an environmental atrocity...
...And oil is going to be a limitation in the future...
...The new system now heats almost two-thirds of Danish homes...
...Ironically, the congestion charge will be imposed under the country's present conservative-oriented coalition government...
...The average Dane now uses 6,600 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, less than half of the U.S...
...average, according to The Wall Street Journal...
...And signs in the Riksdag cafeteria advertise that food scraps can have a useful second life as biogas...
...The Danish Crown slaughterhouse uses the fat of 50,000 pigs a week to generate biogas...
...Drivers are free to buy an SUV, but the bill includes a registration tax up to 180 percent of the purchase price...
...Rain or shine, they use a wide array of baskets to carry groceries and briefcases...
...This swill produces biofuel for buses, taxis, garbage trucks, and private cars, as well as a methane-propelled "biogas train...
...Bolund pointed out that some cars (such as hybrids) are heavy, but relatively low in fossil-fuel emissions...
...Members of parliament ride to work, as do CEOs of some major companies...
...Since the beginning of 2006, householders have been paid to replace oil-burning furnaces with environmentally friendly heating systems...
...The vehicles' diesel engines will use ethanol...
...Ulf Perbo, who heads BIL Sweden, the national association for the automobile industry, says even automakers there want to end oil dependency...
...The Swedish government recently adopted another Green Party idea: a vehicle tax based on carbon dioxide emissions rather than weight...
...Al Swedish gas stations are required by an act of parliament to offer at least one alternative fuel...
...Helmets are not required, despite the occasional bout of two-wheeled road rage as bicyclists clip each other on crowded streets...
...When Swedish officials brag that they have reduced the use of oil in home heating to almost zero, he says, they are ignoring the fact that half that total is from nuclear plants, and most of the other half from often-inefficient hydropower...
...In the United States, the comparable figure is one-quarter of 1 percent...
...Today, nearly half of the Swedish income tax burden has been phased out and replaced by levies based in some manner on fossil-fuel consumption...
...Some wind turbines now have blades almost 300 feet wide-the length of a football field...
...He then grins, saying that the Greens must be prepared to be mimicked across the political mainstream to succeed...
...Many Danish companies offer indoor bike parking, as well as locker rooms...
...People tote children on extra bike seats...
...When they do commute, more Swedes now use public transport, hybrid vehicles, and biodiesel cars, as well as bicycles...
...Imagine a CEO in the United States doing that, or a Senator...
...Denmark's gross domestic product has doubled on stable energy usage during the last thirty years...
...Emissions of carbon dioxide declined 10 to 14 percent in the inner city and 2 to 3 percent in Stockholm County...
...Danish building codes enacted in 1979 (and tightened several times since) also require thick home insulation and tightly sealed windows...
...The escalators and moving sidewalks in the Riksdag stop when no one uses them...
...Scandinavia Gets Serious on Global Warming By Bruce E. Johansen Illustration by Sel?uk Demirel Sweden and Norway have some of the highest liquor taxes in the world, provoking large-scale smuggling from Denmark...
...The congestion charge of up to $7 a day narrowly passed in a referendum on September 17, 2006...
...Lars Rebien Sorensen, head of the pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk, even conducts media interviews from his bike saddle...
...It may be a while before the U.S...
...To reduce oil consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, Swedes are being encouraged to avoid commuting altogether...
...Denmark has become a world leader in wind-turbine technology...
...Every fifth car in Stockholm now drives at least partially on alternative fuels, mostly ethanol...
...Another conservation measure, "congestion charging," which levies a toll on cars entering downtown Stockholm, became a controversial issue in the Swedish general election during the late summer of 2006...
...These days, however, a million illicit bottles a year are trucked to a sparkling new high-tech plant about eighty miles from Stockholm that manufactures biogas fuel...
...The train's boosters (not squeamish vegetarians, from the sound of it) have figured that the entrails from one dead cow buy 2.5 miles on the train...
...The city's environmental chief, Klaus Bondam, commutes by bicycle...
...Urban life in Denmark is being recast with the automobile as antithesis...
...Turbines generate electricity that competes in price with oil, coal, and nuclear power, and they provide several thousand jobs...
...The Stockholm congestion tax will become permanent this summer...
...Bicycles have become privileged personal urban transport...
...This is the latest wrinkle in a sixteen-year-old Swedish movement toward carbon-based taxation...
...Everywhere in Stockholm you see little energy-saving tricks...
...Stockholm will introduce a fleet of Swedish-made electric hybrid buses in its public transport system on a trial basis in 2008...
...But we don't have a while to wait...
Vol. 71 • July 2007 • No. 7
