International Herald Tribune

Thursday, March 20, 2008

A carbon-neutral Norway by 2030:

Fine print in the plan

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

OSLO: Last year, as United Nations scientists were warning of the perils of man-made climate change, this small country of fjords and factories reacted with an extraordinary pledge: By 2050 Norway would be "carbon neutral" - generating no net greenhouse gasses into the air.

Norway's bold promise raised the bar for other nations, who were mostly still struggling to figure out how to reduce emissions, even fractionally. Then, in January, the Norwegian government upped the ante again: Norway would be carbon neutral by 2030, it said.

But as the details of the plan have emerged, environmental groups and politicians - who applaud Norway's impulse - say the feat is being achieved largely by sleight-of-hand accounting and huge donations to environmental projects abroad, rather than meaningful emissions reductions that might be replicated elsewhere.

If anything, they say, Norway's early experience shows that cutting carbon dioxide emissions - the essential thing scientists agree is needed to stem the momentum of global warming - will require real sacrifice closer to home, like driving less, flying less and putting restrictions on business.

That realization has set off intense soul-searching in Norway, where further emissions reductions are likely to be painful. Like all the environmentally conscious Scandinavian countries, Norway made the easy changes decades ago.

It may also come as a rude awakening to the many countries, companies, cities and universities that have lined up behind Norway in recent months in pursuit of the goal of becoming carbon neutral - essentially an environmental balance sheet showing they absorb as much carbon dioxide as they emit.

Many have signed on not only to set an example but also for favorable public relations or to pre-empt government regulations they believe may be inevitable. In the last year, the Vatican has announced it was carbon neutral and companies like Wal-Mart say that is their goal.

But their claims, like Norway's, require asterisks. As the Norwegian plan shows, achieving a carbon neutral state, for now, often depends as much on how you make the calculation and how much money you spend as it does on sacrifice or innovation.

"We're a nice little selfish country of petroholics and that has made us lazy," said Frederic Hauge, head of Bellona, Norway's largest environmental NGO. "The move from 2050 to 2030 is a sign of good intentions, but unless I see action, I've heard it all before."

Norway does not look like a poster child for environmental friendliness when seen from the perspective of its smoke-spewing rigs producing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil a year. It is the third largest oil exporter in the world.

In the short term, the country is poised to become carbon neutral by financing environmental projects abroad, as allowed under the United Nations environmental accounting policy. That means that emissions at home can be "canceled out" by things like planting trees or cleaning up a polluting factory in a faraway place.

Norway's actual plan for reducing its own emissions is less clear, relying in large part on developing unproved technology.

The Norwegian model, critics say, may not be a path to the future of carbon neutrality and may not be sustainable, since it requires significant investment and there are not enough environmental projects in poor countries to cancel out all the emissions of the developed world.

"They're willing to spend a lot of money on a climate policy that's based abroad, but so far they haven't been quite so willing to make politically difficult choices at home that people will feel," said Steffen Kallbekken, a senior analyst at Cicero, the Institute for International Climate and Environmental Research, a nongovernmental group here. "So it's not so much of a model as it could be."

The same goes for the Vatican, which "offsets" its emissions by planting forests in Hungary, but did not include the polluting travel of its priests and officials or the emissions caused at properties outside of Vatican City.

Wal-Mart, an acknowledged leader on the environmental front, is encouraging suppliers to emit less carbon, but does not take into account the emissions caused by the millions of people who drive to its stores.

Those kinds of accounting gaps and trade-offs are widespread and mask the true challenges ahead, even for well-intended countries like Norway, say scientists and environmental groups.

Norway's program, widely praised at least for its vision, was born out of its sense of global responsibility or perhaps just plain guilt. Behind its green pledge lay an uncomfortable truth: Norway's vast wealth comes from its status as the third leading exporter of oil in the world at 2.6 million barrels a day. It is also in the top 10 exporters of natural gas and a major refiner of aluminum.

Although this country of five million people is fairly ecofriendly - with, for example, high automobile and fuel taxes - it exports emissions all over the world while maintaining a broad industrial base of its own.

In its recently released Climate Change Performance Index 2008, the NGO Germanwatch ranked Norway 16th out of 56 countries, tied with Indonesia and well behind Sweden, Britain and Germany.

Heidi Sorensen, secretary of state at the Norwegian Environment Ministry, acknowledged the contradiction.

"We are living in a constant dilemma in Norway because we have grown rich on the petroleum sector, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. So there's a lot of discussion about what responsibility we have. If we're going to tell countries like China and India to lower emissions, we have to do something too."

That something has been to finance projects globally. At the climate conference in Bali last December, Norway announced that it would spend 3 billion Norwegian kroner, or $ 570 million, to prevent deforestation, with a special focus on projects that would also promote the alleviation of poverty in Africa. "We hoped this would serve as a model for other countries," Sorensen said.

Such projects fall outside of international carbon accounting plans. If those projects were taken into account, "we could be carbon neutral now," she said.

Frederic Hauge, director of Bellonam, and others say that inevitably means Norwegians will have to do more at home.

Norway has also been investing in emerging technologies, particularly carbon capture and storage, in which emissions produced by factories are stored underground. Perfecting the technique would be "Norway's moon landing," the government announced, a piece of inspirational science to benefit the world.

Almost everyone in Norway applauds those moves, but that is where the cheering ends. The government has not been specific about its plans to reduce emissions at home and that is making many people nervous.

"We are very positive about dialogue with the government and very positive about reducing greenhouse gasses, but we want to be very careful that industry doesn't end up a loser," said Finn Bergesen, head of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise. "It's a good thing to set goals but goals have to be realistic." Recently, a Norwegian aluminum producer announced that it would open a new plant in Dubai.

"We have some of the cleanest plants in the world and if they close up here and pop up in China, where they will not be so clean, that's not to anyone's benefit," Bergesen said.

The one large political group, the Progress Party, that opposed the carbon neutral goal has become increasingly vocal.

"They have a goal but they don't have a plan and for me spending money without focus on things that are merely symbolic is a problem," said Siv Jensen, the Progress Party's leader, who is sometimes mentioned as Norway's next prime minister.

She would like more money spent on things like roads, improving Norway's recycling program and exporting knowledge of hydropower.

Any further steps will not be easy. Cars and fuel in Norway are already heavily taxed and gas guzzling cars have long been taxed more than small economical models. An SUV in Norway costs four times what it costs in the United States. "There is road tax, carbon tax, energy tax, and also the highest car taxes in Europe," Sorensen said.

Other countries can close highly polluting coal-fired electricity plants as an easy first step to reducing emissions. But Norway barely uses coal at all. More than 95 percent of the country's electricity is from waterfalls - ecofriendly, renewable hydropower.

The main polluter in Norway is heavy industry: oil, gas and metal refining. They are the industries that have made Norway rich and their revenues ensure high pay and good benefits here while paying for reducing deforestation in Africa.

Environmental advocates say Norway should go the next step, issuing fewer permits for oil exploration, for example, and even raising gas taxes. Instead of exporting energy, Hauge suggests, they should use some of it domestically to create things like low-priced solar panels for use in the developing world.

"We will sacrifice - in our own rich-country way," he said. "We can't go to ski so easily anymore. Maybe you'll have to stop your electric car after 350 kilometers. But will we freeze? No. We'll be able to solve it."

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