(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
This has been the week in which the Minister of Petroleum and Energy Åslaug Haga (sp) has been put under control. It started with VG, Norway's largest newspaper, on Tuesday announcing that the minister and her husband, Foreign Minister Bård Hopland, had set up a small jetty at the Nordfjord country estate. That was the same day they received 7500 NOK in fine for the building council in Stryn. But they did get to mark the approved application to build a new and larger pier, with exemption from the beach zone regulations.
But an accident rarely comes alone. Neither do the bad news, they have it in the mood. Or it may well be that acquaintances, enemies, and media people are bleeding, so that one is reported to be one after another. The dynamic is such that it becomes a "take Haga week".
On Wednesday, we could thus be informed on the front pages that Haga has been "REVEALED AGAIN". She built a storage cage without a permit in 1996, and then rented it out without formal approval – something her previous tenant would most kindly tell Dagbladet. On the same day, there was also a media case that the minister and the Center Party leader should have had a quarterly bill of 1900 kroner, from the ministry, covered for having broadband at the cabin. Progress Party leader Siv Jensen, from the populist party with the worst morale, "doubts" whether it is necessary for an oil minister to be available with broadband.
And so we have it going. If the Haga case follows the natural dynamics, more grums will be spat out. Not necessarily because it is so much more grim with her than with other ministers, but because it is in the nature of the matter, so to speak. Everything can and will be used against her after she showed the first signs of weakness in the meeting with the public's critical gaze this spring: Like when she was revealed in April as involved in hiring party colleague Marit Arnstad's twin sister Eli Arnstad, resigned Enova director , as a consultant for the ministry, in violation of the law on public procurement – something she had first denied in a little trustworthy way. And then when it emerged in May that she gave various explanations for her Tromsø Olympic lobbyism to the rest of the government.
In sum, this gives far more serious overtramp than the trifles that caused Manuela Ramin-Osmundsen to be removed as Minister of State this winter. The difference is that Haga is not going to get fired.
But it is not these, so far unimportant, details of Haga's household economy that are what she really should be held accountable for. The big scandal lies in the case that, despite a strikingly environmentally friendly start to the job this fall, she has not yet managed to pinpoint the path to a less oil-dependent Norway. So far, Haga has proved more like an oil minister than an energy minister, despite the promised commitment to wind turbines. Rather, she distributes oil licenses and opens oil exploration in Lofoten. This is the real scandal in Norway today, especially considering everything we now know about the climate threat from Nobel laureates and the UN Climate Panel. The link between environmental theory and oil production is no longer in the grip.
While even the oil spokesmen in the Arab Emirates are using the oil money to build zero-discharge cities and universities, oil-Norway continues as before, obviously until cramp takes us. We have not only become oil dependent, with half of exports dedicated to oil and gas. For Norway, the oil has become a drug. The challenge is to make us intoxicated.
It is therefore commendable that forces in the Government Party SV try to stagger the oil mania that both the Labor Party and the Center Party stand for. Thus, today's red-green government is still far preferable to the alternative, which with today's polls will involve the country's largest party, the gasoline populists in Fr.p.
The real big taboo topic in Norway today, while earning our sakes at record high oil prices that are then ingrained in national and state pension funds, is how long we can feed on a resource utilization that not only creates increased poverty in oil-poor countries. Our manic oil pumping, and lack of investment in alternative forms of energy, also makes other countries submerged.
This is the backdrop for the week's main event in Ny Tid. And for this week's essay by Cyril Obi, program coordinator at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. "As a leading oil producer, Norway has a special responsibility to counteract global warming, which particularly affects the world's poorest," he writes. And: "Norway both benefits from, and strengthens, the dependence on climate-damaging energy". Well worth noting.
The oil revenues give Norway a unique economic opportunity to invest in the development of cleaner energy such as wind power. But as Ny Tid's review this week shows, Norway's wind power investment is miserable, on the European floor and worse than Moldova's – despite the fact that the coast makes Norway the continent's most windswept country.
An important reason for this "system problem" – and this is where the criticism of Haga and her political colleagues should be directed – is probably the close interweaving between the oil industry and the oil politicians, who have close contact and eventually develop a common mindset.
"Oil companies' revenues give them significant influence over the authorities," Obi explains. The oil lobbyists help to dig a grave we should not be familiar with.
It's time for weaning from the oil as a drug.