Northern Lights? Nordic lessons for the just transition

For many, Scandinavia is synonymous with social democracy, high union density, public ownership, and progressive governments inclined to climate action and sustainable policies. A recent study tour to Norway and Denmark, hosted by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New York and Brussels offices, found that both countries still struggle with entrenched interests – local and international – holding back a genuine “just transition”.

The five-day study tour in October brought ten experts – legislators, researchers, and activists – from North America and Europe to Norway and Denmark. It was the aim of the tour to explore the renewable energy landscape in Scandinavia, and to exchange experiences from both sides of the Atlantic around building a “just transition”: a greening of the economy in a fair and inclusive manner that creates decent work opportunities and leaves no one behind.

Taking as its starting point the role and strategies of left parties, trade unions and climate justice groups in the Nordic region, the visit also looked at the larger challenges, including the regional and global dynamics surrounding a green transition. The results were challenging, and sometimes inspiring, but contradictory.

Leading on renewables?

Denmark and Norway are rightly seen as world leaders on renewable energy, but this status is riddled with incongruities. While Norway’s hydro sector supplies over 99 percent of the country’s electricity needs and is more than 90 percent state-owned, wind power faces significant public opposition. Unlike hydro, onshore wind generation in Norway is 75 percent privately owned, largely exported for profit, and pays lower taxes than other energy sectors. Offshore wind production – which faces less criticism – mostly serves to electrify Norwegian oil and gas platforms.

Opposition to onshore wind has even emerged within Norway’s environmental movement and indigenous Sámi population, most notably around the Fosen wind farm in central Norway. In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled the wind farm had been built in clear violation of the Sámi people’s human rights, but the government has failed to take any action. Both environmental groups and the Sámi people continue to protest against the wind farm, and the case has only helped deepen public opposition to wind energy in the country.

Read the full report at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Brussels Office or Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - New York Office. 

Climate Neutrality and Democratic Ownership after COVID

On 21 October, the Copenhagen-based Democracy in Europe Organisation (DEO), along with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Brussels Office, hosted a forum on the challenges of a socially just transition to clean energy, with former Copenhagen City councillor Ulrik Kohl. Kohl, a researcher on community energy in the Nordic countries and Southeast Europe with Malmö University and Roskilde University, spoke about the role of the left and communities in organising grassroots, working class alternatives to the capitalist Green Deal.

The idea of a ‘Green Deal’, or ‘Green New Deal’, has increasingly been seen as a panacea for the unfolding climate crisis. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19, it has also been presented as a solution to the global health and economic crises unfolding in the wake of the pandemic. In Europe, the call for an ‘EU Green Deal’ emerged in 2019, centring around a target of European Union carbon neutrality by 2050. This year EU leaders made this a binding target, setting a further preliminary greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of at least 55% by 2030 (compared to 1990 levels).

Such a rapid transition to green energy and climate neutrality is an urgent necessity, but while welcome, the promised reductions have also been criticised as inadequate. Worse yet, they are unlikely to be met. The reliance on market mechanisms and emissions trading has proved worse than useless, cuts foreshadowed in 2015’s Paris Agreement have simply not eventuated, and without a major change in approach, the latest pledges by world governments at the COP26 summit in Glasgow are likely to go the same way.

Read the full article at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Brussels Office.