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Sweden To Be Oil-Free By 2020
Philoneist.com writes "Treehugger is reporting that the 'Minister for Sustainable Development Mona Sahlin has declared that Sweden is going to become the first country in the world to break the dependence on fossil energy.'" Sweden's hope is to have all of the country's energy supplied by only renewable resources, ridding the country of cars that run on gasoline and oil-heated homes.
It will only be free of oil in 2020. Other renewable energy sources will first be fased out later. Which also makes more sense considering Swedens large dependancy of Nuclear Energy.
(Stupid subject length restriction)
Why are they still building houses with oil heating?
Similarly why build power stations that burn oil or gas?
They seem horribly short sighted developments to me.
Sweden should be applauded for trying to dump fossil fuels, but it will be a lot to ask for in only 14 years. However if it means the development of alternatives (where there's a market there's a will) then by the time the rest of the world starts realising they need to do it as well the technology should be a lot cheaper.
Britain is looking at generating 20% of its power needs from tidal/wave power, however I think the more sensible nuclear power station route will be taken eventually.
Just write: "american" under nationality and "political pressure" under reason for applying.
Welcome to sweden!
Shouldn't this be in 'Politics', not "Hardware'?
So, in 14 years, every car currently on the road in Sweden will be obsolete? Illegal? Will they be making outlaws of classic car collectors? The Swedish automobile industry must be much larger and more advanced than I had ever dreamed, to pull this off. They're going to have to develop affordable new cars with a completely different architecture, since used cars won't be usable. Is the government going to reimburse people whose vehicles are unusable and unsellable? And can every single driver in the country afford a brand new car? A brand new domestically made car, even?
Somehow I don't think they thought this through.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
To quote my grandmother, don't believe everything you read in newspapers. And to that I would like to add: don't believe everything you hear from politicians. Of course, I agree that we can't continue our dependency on oil and it's nice when people have visions. But will it happen by 2020? Sadly, I don't think so. (Bias: I'm a Swede.)
No, they won't make petrol-based cars illegal. They simply move to close all gas stations or convert them to stations that supply other sources of sustainable energy.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Get free of all the other items made using fossil fuels as well. Otherwise what are you really doing? There are many items made with fossil fuels that could be made with alternatives, provided someone would want to pay for it.
This whole idea sounds more like a "feel good" program. All those "tax benefits" to encourage the switch look good but are only to bait the hook but as with any tax used to change behaviour it will not generate the income necessary long term and new sources will be needed. Look at the "congestion tax" - do they expect vehicle use to drop so much as the original reason behind the tax is no longer applicable?
Oh well, best of luck. I think the time table is ludicrous but if they can pull it off then maybe the rest of the world can learn. If not at least one country will be slightly better off.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
These are the same people who are shutting down perfectly good and safe nuclear reactors in favor of importing electric power from dirty Danish and Polish coal plants and (oh the irony) old Soviet graphite reactors in the Baltics. Oh, and did I mention that this has led to the country not having enough power to support peak demand during winter (politicians seem to be unable to grasp the difference between electric power and energy)? The only good thing in the whole mess is that their previous pipe dream goal ("nuclear free Sweden by 2010") has no chance of being met...
They are also the same people who have set the goal of "0 traffic deaths" - and honestly believe that they'll reach it.
There's truly nothing to see here. Move along.
The biggest problem with the democratic system is that after a while the voters start to think that they should be running things.
...and unlike Sweden Iceland has huge resources of geothermal energy. Really, this is just some politicians trying to get attention, there really is no realistic way to meet this goal.
There's a good reason the US doesn't have the mass transporation of European countries.
The United States is bigger than all of them put together.
Mass transportation will never be efficient except in the most densely-populated urban areas, where people live and commute within a small radius of one another. That's just not going to happen in rural communities. Too, public transportation doesn't work in cities that are laid out over a large area, e.g. Los Angeles.
Driving isn't just a part of the American lifestyle, for many people it's part of who they are. We identify ourselves with our cars; rightly or wrongly, they are part of our psychological makeup. Anyone that wants to govern in this country knows that they must provide the citizenry with automobiles and fuel. They just have to. I don't know what's going to happen when the reserves are depleted. I mean, it's entire plausible we'd send our troops to war on account of oil.
Oh, wait.
Most EU countries are already doing this. Thats why diesel fuel used for heating homes is colored, its not taxed the same way as diesel for automobiles is.
This wouldn't work with a significant tax in the US. Too many Americans respect the law like Germans when someone is watching but make Italians' respect for the law appear German when no one is watching.
What would work is a $10 per gallon phasing up to $40 per gallon tax on both, with a per-person refundable credit on income taxes. A credit would be no different than a deduction for me; but for someone making only $30,000 a year, who might otherwise pay no taxes due to her low income, a credit means she gets a refund which she can use to pay her heating costs. The per-person credit should be pretty high for the adults in the household and pretty low for the children, say $5000 per-adult and $500 per-child, since the adults would of course be the ones responsible for the most trips. But there should be some child credit since they do motivate some trips, like when you drop them off at their friends house, go to the doctor, etc.
Unfortunately this is not going to happen in the USA. We have something like $50,000,000,000,000 coming due soon, which means we have to raise an additional $25,000 per income tax payer per year for 20 years. This means we need lower spending and to raise taxes a great deal and any fuel tax could not be presented as revenue neutral because we can't afford that; the only thing that will get passed is a flat percentage for all income tax payers, this appears 'fair' to the innumerate. Maybe in 50 years, if we make it past the hard times without reverting to a 2nd world country like Argentina has in the last 50 years.
No thanks, I'll just buy an electric car and have it charge off the power grid via hydro/wind/nuclear/geo-thermal/waves, whatever. There's no way in hell you'll get Americans to use mass transportation outside of a handful of major densely populated cities.
It's a myth that "poor people need cars". The rich are not rich because they have a big number written somewhere indicating their wealth. They are rich because they can use that number to make poor people work for them. That being said, if poor people could not work anymore, the rich people would not be rich anymore. So the public transportation would right away become in everyone's interest. The people who are against public transportation are the car manufacturers and their cronies. The public transportation system in the US was systematically destroyed by car manufacturers. As one business historian put it to me... first they buy the tire manufacturers. This gives them the ability to squeeze the bus companies. Then they took over an reduced to a mininum the bus service and then it was only a matter of time before the light rail service in places like California disappeared. California at some point used to have the best light rail service in the country. Now it is all cars. If cars begain disappearing the public service would naturally and almost magically appear to fulfill the economic need.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Ok Guys. There are elections in Sweden this autumn. The government have no idea how to get rid of oil. NO IDEA. The following three decisions are made:
1. Dont invest in more hydro plants
2. Get rid of nuclear power
3. Dont increase CO2-emissions
On top of this the government now says that Sweden will be independent of oil in 2020. They say so because there are elections this year, and the government is afraid of the communist party and the green party!
It's not going to be as bad as you think. The Free Market is an amazing thing. Gasoline prices are on the rise, and eventually, OilPeek or not, we are going to see $3/gal again. At $3/gal the economics of fuel start to change.
A car that gets 28 mpg on $3/gal gas costs 10.7 cents per mile, or $1286 per year in fuel (assuming 12k miles).
An electric car that gets 6 m/KWh on $0.10/KWh costs 1.7 cents per mile, or $200 per year in fuel costs. The $1086 saved per year would be $3,000-$5,000 over the life of the batteries (currently averaging 3-5 years). Battery pack prices vary (elcheapo's can be built for ~$1000, high end li packs can go for $10,000 but have much longer life spans) So the money saved would go right back into the car.
And they break even. At $3/gal (Currently $2.45 here) and $0.10/KWh (Currently 8.5 cents here). The electric system will likely have lower maintainence costs as well, but it's harder to measure that at this point with the limited market segment and history.
Katrina was a good thing in that respect, it created a huge boom in alt energy companies and funding in the US.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
There's a good reason the US doesn't have the mass transporation of European countries.
The United States is bigger than all of them put together.
According to the CIA World Factbook the USA is 9,631,418 sq km. According to Wikipedia Europe is 10,030,000 sq km.
Public transportation works everywhere in civilized world except US. And that's because fuel is too cheap there.
Public transportation works in the U.S. too, just not for people living in areas with low population densities, which is a lot of them. I attended a University in a medium sized town. We used to drive two hours to the nearest taco place. It was four hours of driving to the nearest Indian food place. I've never seen a public transportation system that was cost effective for a small number of people living a long way from the nearest anything. Add to that a harsh climate and spotty phone service and your life, or the life of a family member can depend upon owning a good truck. I'm all for better public transportation and the reorganization of living and working space to allow for it to function. You, however, are just not comprehending the scope of the problem.
So they're going to stop using plastics, and tires? No more asphalt on their roads? What is their entire merchant shipping and fishing fleet going to run on? Will KLM be flying solar powered airliners?
I think it is quite an exxageration to say that they will be free of fossil fuels by 2020. Perhaps by 2120.
TFA only mentions cars and homes, but I don't see hundreds of thousands of homes retrofitted to some other heating system within 14 years.
Proverbs 21:19
Volvo is one of the few companies that manufacture passenger cars that run on diesel. To my knowledge all the others are also N.Euporean. Mr. Diesel, as you may recall, originally fueled his prototypes on peanut oil - Or so I've always been led to believe. Motor fuel is probably the easiest of the energy uses to replace with renewable resources...
You gotta start out by looking at transportation, how much of do we really need? Most of our trips are pretty pointless, flying marketeers out to prospective customers so that they can feel like the vendor values their business. Hauling our overweight asses to the grocery store to get more Snickers bars. Dragging ourselves to the office so that we can punch the clock when all the really good ideas come to us in the shower anyway.
When I was a youngster very few families had two cars, at least not where one or more weren't up on blocks. It was common to see middle aged men in suits on city busses, and those city busses were run at a profit by private entities. Now even teenagers have to have cars to park at the neighborhood school all day (felines). And the local busses are subsidized in an attempt to the keep the riffraff off of the road and so that the domestics can get to work.
Internet technologies will certainly help to reduce our dependance on frivolous travel, or it should anyway - But I suspect that even as we speak some geek is traveling to the regional director's private residence to clear the cookies or update the virus signature file.
Yeah, I think I might like it in Sweden. Do they eat lefsa there or is that just next door?
I was shocked by the number of beggars in the "rischest country in the world", as have been many of my compatriots who have also lived in the US. I found the common attitude that being poor or under-priviledged is your own fault to be extremely disturbing. There seems to be an attitude of "anyone can climb beyond his origins in the USA" which doesnt seem to be based on reality. It certainly seemed that if you were born or lived in the wrong suburb, were of the wrong ethnic background, had poor parents or a similar dis-advantage, then only the exceptional managed to avoid being trapped in poverty for life.
Quality of education in the US is based on the wealth of your suburb. Without the efforts of philanthropists there is simply no way that any but a lucky or extra determined few will gain the education needed to avail themselves of the "opportunities" your society offers.
Quality of health care is another thing I was amazed by. It is a principle of this country, that if the population has good, affordable health services then the loses due to sickness will be minimised, and as a result productivity and standard of living will rise. In the USA, even much of the rather expensive health plans seem to be focused on providing health care only in the most extreme caes of need. And the price of medications is shocking.
Having lived in "pinko socialist" country, and having lived in the "land of the free", I'll choose my higher taxes in order to ensure my children's future, rather tand take a huge bet on a risky gamble like you Americans have to do.