- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11459608
The European Commission has confirmed to media outlets that it will maintain its ban on new oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The Commission plans to make its announcement on 20 October when it will present its updated Northern Neighbourhood Strategy.
The EU’s support for the ban, fiercely opposed by some countries and companies, comes after a summer that has shown the dangers of climate breakdown for humankind’s survival and rights.
The decision is the result of an unprecedented civil society mobilisation that saw over 1,600 submissions, including by FIDH, to the EU’s consultation process.
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A moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects and the phaseout of existing ones are essential to the respect of human rights obligations. A moratorium is also a crucial, science-based piece of the puzzle to save the 1.5-degree temperature target, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) said.
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For months, Norway - not an EU member, but a close ally - has been lobbying the bloc to drop its opposition to drilling in the Arctic. The Iran war and the biggest oil and gas supply disruption in history have added to Norway’s arguments that Europe needs reliable supply from places outside of conflict zones.
However, the EU is not willing to change its position on Arctic drilling.
“Moving forward, our approach on the moratorium will remain unchanged: our policies have objectives to address climate change and environmental degradation and support sustainable economic development,” the spokesperson for the Commission told Euronews.
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There’s also resistance in the Norwegian parliament for at least some of the blocks, most notably Lofoten, Vesterålen and Senja (LoVeSe). The way Norwegian politics works, Labour and the Conservatives are fine with making some decisions together, but don’t actually want to form a government together, and depend on smaller, greener parties for that, which have successfully blocked oil exploration in LoVeSe for a long time and intend to continue doing so.
It’s also kinda frustrating to deal with people who believe this decision can have any sort of short-term impact on prices at the pump. If Labour and the Conservatives get their way and there’s extraction of oil in the arctic in the future, actual oil deliveries will only start so far into the future that no matter what happens in Hormuz and russia, it’s the new normal. We’re talking over a decade.
You seem like you know stuff about Norway, so I’m gonna ask you what do you think of the following article, in relation to the posted one?
That is Labour’s position, and if left unchecked, they will form majorities with the Conservatives and the right-wing populists to go through with that.
The article I linked is from today and about the smaller greener parties’ opposition to drilling in LoVeSe and how they plan to use budget negotiations to get the government to commit to no drilling there. Currently only Labour is in government, as they failed to get more parties into government, instead relying on year-to-year budget negotiations with, uh, the Far Left, the Socialists, the Greens and the Agrarians (who are fairly populist and anti-climate-policies, no matter how much climate change wrecks their voters). The budget isn’t just moving NOK around, it also contains a whole lot of verbal agreements about what the government should do.
So while there’s no majority for a general bill banning arctic oil exploration, the other parties can still negotiate for the government to leave it be, at the cost of some other stuff they’d like to get into the budget, as Labour still doesn’t want to have to resort to a line-by-line treatment of the budget in parliament.
In Labour’s case it’s also a case of the main labour union umbrella organisation being very heavily influenced by the unions working in the oil sector. There are some other unions who are opposed to arctic drilling, and who would like to get the transition started before our customers start going away and we’re left with a very heavy case of Dutch disease. They’ve butted heads in the past, but I haven’t noticed any bickering recently, and the main union umbrella org itself just narrowly avoided having an oil guy becoming its leader (because he’d been sleeping with subordinates in the labour unions and Labour, not because of his policies).
Might also add that the way Norwegian oil taxes work, there’s very little taxes on anything oil-related until they start turning a profit, at which point the taxes kick in, feeding the oil fund. So there’s not all that much incentive for the oil sector to avoid possibly unprofitable ventures, as those turn into huge tax writeoffs.
Personally, seeing EV uptake accelerate this year, and the general exponential rollout of renewables, and developments in batteries, I suspect that by the time any arctic oil might find its way to the market, the market is going to be a lot less oil-and-gas-hungry, hopefully even to the point where pumping oil in the arctic isn’t actually a profitable venture.
Oil isn’t used for electricity generation and critical uses are diesel and bunker fuel for traction and chemical industry which are not elastic. The reason pumping will stop is due to extractability limits/depletion. That is getting close for Norway as well. The oil fund won’t help them, since it’s just investments, so paper winnings.
So-called oil fields also extract a lot of gas, and that is used for electricity generation.
Traditionally we call it the oil and gas sector in Norway, but these days it might be more accurate to call it the gas and oil sector.
Yes – but in Norway you get far less gas bycatch than with fracking. Methane is also used for nitrogen fertilizer and chemical industry as well as high temperature industrial processes. These are not competing with renewable electricity either.
Yes, complete decarbonisation of industry is a longer canvas to bleach, but there’s also a significant difference between the market decarbonising completely, and renewables and heat pumps (and induction, I guess) doing enough to drop off demand. Drilling for oil & gas in the sea hasn’t been the cheapest source, and Norwegians will talk about the oil crisis of 2014-2016, where the problem was that it got so cheap that production here was halted.
Drive down demand for fossil fuels, and Norwegian exploitation of the arctic fossil fuels will likely just be priced out.
