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Life After Oil

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Scandinavia Leads the Way

Sweden has some of the highest liquor taxes in the world, which have spawned copious smuggling, mainly from Denmark. Until recently, contraband seized at Malmo, near Copenhagen, by Tullverket (Swedish Customs) was poured down the drain. Now, however, in today’s very green Sweden, a million bottles a year of illicit liquor is trucked to a new high-tech plant in Linköping (about 130 miles south of Stockholm) that manufactures biogas fuel for automobiles, as well as fertilizer. The plant also accepts human and packing-plant waste — part of Sweden’s drive to become the world’s first oil-free society by the year 2050. Out of this noxious mix, all of which used to be regarded as garbage, comes bio-fuel to power buses, taxis, garbage trucks, private cars, as well as a “biogas train” that runs between Linköping and Västervik on the southeast coast.

Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have proved to be endlessly creative at finding ways to replace oil usage with what used to be waste. People in these countries are making resources of whatever they have in abundance: Iceland, geo-thermal resources; Sweden, wood; Denmark, wind — often using simple, practical, and elegant applications available now, at modest cost. Iceland plans by 2050 to power all of its passenger cars and boats with hydrogen made from electricity drawn from local, renewable resources.

Denmark has become a world leader in improving wind-turbine technology to the point where it generates electricity that is competitive in cost with oil, coal, and nuclear power, meanwhile building infrastructure that provides several thousand jobs and most families a share in the national wind-energy grid.

In Iceland, 85 percent of the country’s 290,000 people use geothermal energy to heat their homes. Iceland’s government, working with Shell and Daimler-Chrysler, in 2003 began to convert Reykjavik’s city buses from internal combustion to fuel-cell engines, using hydroelectricity to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen. The next stage is to convert the country’s automobiles, then its fishing fleet. These conversions are part of a systemic plan to divorce Iceland’s economy from fossil fuels.

By 2003, 18 percent of Denmark’s electricity was being derived from wind; Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein was using wind for 28 percent of its electricity (Brown, 2003, 201). In Amsterdam, up to 40 percent of travel in the city was via bicycle. At many traffic lights, bikes go first. Spain is testing a new solar technology called “Concentrating Solar Power” that uses mirrors to focus sunlight with a much greater efficiency than photovoltaic cells. This technology is being tested in Seville, and may open the way for large-scale solar power plants.

The Swedish oil end-game is a full-court press, involving, among other things, homegrown bio-fuels, solar, wind, wave, heat pumps, research into new sources and technological improvements sponsored by the government, teleconferencing, work at home (via Internet), public transport, hybrid vehicles, bio-diesel cars.

It’s Al Gore’s kind of place. In Stockholm to promote his film “An Inconvenient Truth” during late 2006, Gore hailed Sweden’s efforts to reduce its use of oil to zero. I think it’s a remarkable achievement,” Gore said. The Swedish government funded a program to distribute “An Inconvenient Truth” to all Swedish secondary schools.

Sweden and the rest of the European Union are working to decouple transportation from gasoline consumption. Automobile engines larger than two liters are severely taxed in the E.U., a measure that would be political suicide in the United States. Stockholm will introduce a fleet of Swedish-made electric hybrid buses in its public transport system on a trial basis in 2008. These buses, which use both a combustion engine and electric motors for propulsion, are an interim step to the development of entirely “clean” vehicles. The vehicles’ diesel engines use ethanol.

Sweden’s government includes a Ministry of Sustainable Development (Brazil and Quebec have similar bodies), which includes a Commission on Oil Independence, with members from government, academia, industry (including Sweden’s automakers), labor and the public. The commission’s task, in its own words, “is to propose different measures to prepare Swedish society for such a development, by know-how, technology and economic means. The sooner this process can get under way the better.”

Ulf Perbo, who heads BIL Sweden, the national association for the automobile industry, said that even automakers there want to end oil dependency. “Many people have asked [why BIL] is not against the Oil Commission, but it is not in our interest to be dependent on oil, with regard to the production and sales of cars. Oil is not what interests us; cars are. And oil is going to be a limitation [to the production and sales of cars] in the future.”

The Swedish government buys environmentally friendly cars, and some cities offer their drivers free parking. Swedish paper and pulp industries use bark that used to be wasted to produce energy for their manufacturing processes, as sawmills incinerate wood chips and sawdust to generate power.

Sweden’s nine million people have long had one of the world’s most impressive records on environmental protection. Sweden by 2006 had reduced oil use in home heating by 70 percent in 20 years. Oil consumption has remained unchanged in industry since 1994, despite a 70 percent increase in production. In 2006, according to the government, Sweden’s energy use was roughly 35 percent dependent on oil products.

The proportion of oil-heated homes in Sweden was down to 8 percent by 2006, as many neighborhoods use hot water from central plants that burn bio-fuels, often woodbased pellets. In December 2005, all Swedish gas stations were required by an act of Parliament to offer at least one alternative fuel.

Since the beginning of 2006, householders have been paid to replace oil-burning boilers with environmentally friendly heating systems. Such financial incentives already were available to libraries, aquatic facilities and hospitals that wanted to switch to more efficient renewable energy.

Sweden has experienced some political bumps in the road on this issue, however. The oil independence panel has its critics. For example: in a country that produces more private cars per capita than any other, the proceedings of the body have completely omitted the word “bicycle.”

While many economists have promoted carbon taxes to reduce emissions, Sweden’s Carbon Tax, enacted in 1991, is one of the first examples of the idea’s use on a national scale. Finland, Norway and Holland also have such taxes. In most cases, the new energy taxes have replaced part of the income-tax burden.

One controversial measure, “congestion charging” — tolls to drive a car in downtown Stockholm — was approved by just 52 percent of voters in a general election referendum September 17, 2006. Stockholm initiated a test program charging drivers electronic tolls to enter the downtown district on normal business days. Tolls range from $1.28 to $2.56 to pass in and out of the district, depending on the time of day and its relation to rush hour. The total tolls per day can go as high as $7.50.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).