Mainstreaming is not headline news

Right in the mainstream--coping with winter, nationally and locally, Öresund

There's not much about climate change response in Sweden that's exciting and attention-grabbing these days. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, since it seems that the more headlines there are about climate change at the global level, the fewer there are in the Swedish press, about what's happening in this country. Entire weeks can go by with scarcely a mention in any of the half-dozen or so larger newspapers of any Swedish climate change-related activity. To know if there's anything going on, you've got to do a lot of sleuthing. My theory is that this is because responding to climate change is gradually becoming mainstreamed here. I'm not sure yet if this is the best way to go about it, but it does help to explain the lack of media coverage. Climate change is just part of everyday business . . . maybe.

Believe it or not, but one of the coolest places to see innovative thinking about climate change is deep inside the Swedish bureaucracy, in one of the least trendy-seeming places. It's not at the Swedish EPA (Naturvårdsverket), for instance, nor at the Swedish Met Office (SMHI), nor even at the Ministry of Environment, all of which have admirable programs underway, as you would expect. No, this nest of real solid work on societal aspects of climate change is Boverket, The Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning. I'll be describing some of their activities in the coming weeks, but one of their more recent achievements has been the result of a massive exercise in producing a Vision for Sweden 2025, which the Government commissioned from them. The defining objective for the vision is a society guided by sustainable development, and based on the over hundred goals, from national to local level, that have been defined for the country's physical societal planning. The resulting Vision was released, as a "web app," with a surprising lack of media attention and undeserved modesty, on December 12, barely a week ago. The Vision poses four megatrends, of which climate change is one. Since so far the whole thing is only in Swedish, I'll be telling more about it in coming posts. Stay tuned (and Visionary!)

They're saying, "Canada is a brake shoe"

                                                                        Figure by Nimal Kumar

Whatever your view of the fact that Canada, in the company of Russia and Japan, has continued to stay out of the Kyoto Protocol and its renewal at the recently concluded Doha climate talks, Swedish opinion is surprised. Much of the reporting about the conclusion of the talks has pointedly mentioned Canada's earlier withdrawal from the Protocol. For example, one of Sweden's most prominent climate change publicists, Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, was quoted, in the Sunday edition* of the largest Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, as saying that not only was Canada a "brake shoe" (Sw. "bromskloss") in reaching more sweeping agreements, but it was a "camouflaged brake shoe." This is real insider talk. Actually, it seems that it is Russia that is the real master at such camouflage, which means that it is pretending to be a constructive player at the same time as it moves to protect its oil and gas industries and refuses to sign. It's been difficult to see the accuracy of extending the metaphor to Canada, though, since it isn't even pretending. Shall we say that it is a "plain-as-day brake shoe"? What's out there for everybody to see in plain daylight are the tar sands of northern Alberta, and now that market prices are high enough to sustain their extraction, they're too true to be good. It's a pity that Canada, which once had a global reputation as an environmental champion, has gone the way of the camouflaged, and is now considered, in the climate change world, as one of the bad guys. Deservedly.

*Kihlström, Saffan & Clas Svahn. "Nytt avtal får skarp kritik." Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sunday, 9 December 2012, 10.

Futuristic Brussels (Is he kidding?)

It was Brussels, last week, and of course it was raining. I walked around a street corner, and met the future. Against a backdrop of shiny greasy wet cobblestones just off Place du Luxembourg, in front of the Parlamentarium, a vision that challenged me to confront my urban prejudices exploded into view. A tough, cool green-and-white wonder on four wheels stood plugged into a post via an orange cable. It was available. It could be rented. It was drier than a bicycle, faster than a bus, and cheaper than owning my own. What a great idea! I was walking to a meeting nearby, so it didn't fit my plan, but I remained impressed. A dozen photos later, and my surprise well-documented, along with a reassurance of being able to check it all out on a website, it seemed possible to move on. Brussels is getting better. You can investigate for yourself on the ZENCAR homepages, with lots of informative links to follow, and share my amazement at how simple they make it all. There, I learned that the car I saw is a Tazzari Zero two-seater buzzmobile. Bring us more, in more cities!

Keeping to a fresh agenda

If you're interested in climate change, you need to be flexible in how you perceive the world around you. It's obvious that there are different realities out there, depending on whom you speak or listen to. So far, almost all the predictions of trends have ended up being too conservative. If anything, the real mistake has been in being too careful about how steep those curves are. While most of the scientific community is now seriously considering a world where the average global temperature will increase by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, many journalists and prominent politicians are still arguing about whether or not we are adjusting to a 2-degree-model. Tonight, on Swedish state television's public affairs program, Agenda, the program's host, Camilla Kvartoft, tried to be impressively aggressive in her interview of the Swedish Minister of Environment, Lena Ek. Kvartoft wasted our time by keeping to her notes that pushed for a discussion based on the 2-degree-mode, whereas Ek seemed interested in talking about concrete climate change response measures. That is, she kept trying to do so, but the show's host kept pushing her into a meaningless 2-degree box. After all, we're heading for 4 degrees, at least, and concrete measures are what we need. In setting our Agenda, Kvartoft is one media star who should get a new scriptwriter. Although she probably meant well, it's too bad she came across as outdated, which weakens her credibility. I'll get my agenda somewhere else, thanks.

It's getting hot in there. The real agenda's in the bag.

Mind the steps

On the charging station for electric cars, at the local Coop Forum food store, here in Lund, Sweden, the instructions for using it are helpfully printed on the cover, in the local language:

1. Unlock
2. Plug in the plug
3. Close cover
Charging starts

Green light = circuit-breaker functioning
Blinking green light = charging underway
Red light = circuit-breaker must be reset
Follow instructions inside the box

The cover of the charging station has a logo that says GAPO. I'm checking that one out. My theory is that this is the name of a Norwegian industrial door manufacturer that has diversified. I'm on the trail. The suspense must increase!

Waiting for Go, though

(Apologies to Samuel Beckett). We keep checking the parking lot at the local Coop food store to see if any electric cars show up. I'm going to go in and do a mini-interview of the manager one of these days, to see if anyone has ever used the charging stations. They have locks on them, so I guess if anyone wanted to use them, they'd have to go in and ask for the key. That's one theory.

The atmosphere was electric

I thought about buying an electric car, and had seen that the local Citroen dealer had an attractive little model on sale in its showroom. It's been there for about a year-and-a-half now. The salesman, who seemed reasonably interested in selling the car, pointed out that the (Swedish) price had been reduced by a quarter, from about 60,000 USD, equivalent, to about 45,000, including the Swedish government's special subsidy for environmentally-friendly car purchases (about 6000 USD). Still, in the time it had been in the showroom, there had been only one serious prospective buyer, who in the end just couldn't make the equation of low range (optimally, about 150 km) between charges, expense and lack of charging stations make sense. A number of people, like me, had shown some interest, but little more. I thanked him for his time and went home "to think about it." I also wrote a letter (now about three weeks ago), to the owner of my apartment building, when I realized that even if I bought an electric car, it would be impossible to charge it at home. My letter was simply to ask for information about their plans for electric car hookups. I still haven't received an answer.

Two electric car charging posts await their occasional users.

Eons ago, the world's biggest wind turbine

It's now more than twenty-five years since the biggest wind turbine in the world, at that time, was spinning in . . . can you guess where? Denmark? The USA? China? Spain? Germany?

Nope. Sweden. Outside the tiny hamlet of Maglarp, on the southern tip of this Nordic country, the WTS 3, was built by Wind Turbine Systems, which was part of the Swedish state-owned Swedyard Group of Ship Yards. It was one of a half-dozen or so research prototypes built mainly in the 1980s. It was designed to generate 3 MW of electricity, but often produced more. I remember visiting it, where it stood all by itself in the middle of a grain field, just a few kilometres from the seashore, and it was huge. I was flabbergasted that the equivalent of a Boeing 747's wingspan was sitting up there on its tower, spinning it's two enormous blades in the wind. Yes, it had only two blades, and it had a lot of problems; its designers learned a lot, but went on to other things. Along with most of the rest of its tiny family of wind turbines, it was dismantled in the mid-1990s, and wind power faded mostly away from Sweden for most of the next ten years. That was an institutionalized, state-run failure, with little support from the high-tech nuclear power industry that was flourishing in Sweden.

Anyone travelling on the other side of the strait in nearby Denmark during those years had a hard time missing the hundreds of wind power generators that were sprouting up everywhere. Most of them seemed to have the name Vestas on the sides of their nacelles. That was a grassroots private start-up, the result of dozens of small-scale ventures.

Today, Sweden's nuclear program faces an uncertain future. But you can see hundreds of wind turbines sprouting up across the countryside here, too. Most of them seem to have the name Vestas on their nacelles.

The company that built the Maglarp wonder-of-the-world has now been bought by the German company, E.ON. In the last week, E.ON announced that it was moving its northern-European headquarters for land-based wind power, to Malmö, only a short distance from Maglarp. There's a lot to do here.

Foundations for the new offshore wind farm being built by E.ON off Kårehamn, Öland, Sweden (Photo credit here)

"Iceland is not an Arctic coastal state"

"Iceland is not an Arctic coastal state." No, I didn't say that, the Arctic Five did. Who are they? Well, if you haven't happened to have been following the details of climate change diplomacy in the Nordic countries in the last few years, you've missed this mighty fact. The Arctic Five is a group of five states who have decided that their coastlines form the shores of the Arctic Ocean, to the exclusion of Iceland. Have a look at a map of the whole Arctic, a circumpolar map. You can agree that Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States/Alaska all have edges that bound the Arctic Ocean. For some reason, they don't want Iceland to be part of their club. Although the current highest-level body in the far north, the Arctic Council, includes the Arctic Five, as well as Finland, Iceland, Sweden, the Indigenous Peoples and a number of Observers, the five coastal states have made a point of meeting amongst themselves, but excluding Iceland. That Iceland is not an Arctic coastal state isn't just something that bothers me, it also bothers the Icelanders. Can you imagine why? Important declarations on Arctic matters, involving climate change, the limits of the continental shelves, freedom of the seas, and so on, are being made in the name of the Arctic Five, without the involvement of the other Arctic parties.

A recently-published article by Klaus Dodds and Valur Ingimundarson, entitled, "Territorial nationalism and Arctic geopolitics: Iceland as an Arctic coastal state,"* explores Iceland's position on this contentious issue in a fascinating and penetrating way, if you want to read more. Although the article does a great job in explaining Iceland's arguments for being considered an Arctic coastal state, I can't find where it explains why the Five have acted so arbitrarily, except to postulate that they are acting from spontaneous hegemonic urges. Let me know if you know more about this!

*The article can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2154896X.2012.679557

A map from the public domain:



The map is accessed from:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/IBCAO_betamap.jpg
where it can be seen even more clearly.

The future is next week (3)

We don't need to argue about whether the record-breaking changes in the extent of the Arctic ice pack are because of climate change to try to understand what impact these developments will have. Whether we can do anything about the causes behind the changes in the Arctic ice is an important discussion, sure. My own view is based on the science, so for me, climate change is the driver of much of the new stuff that's going on in the north, and what's going on in the north is what's happening right now. This is not some distant idea of future climate change. Today, and every day until sometime in the next week or two, a new record is being set. The future is still just next week.

The Greenland icecap just visible on the horizon, near Sisimiut. (Photo copyright Richard Langlais)

The future is next week (2)

As we know, the Arctic is melting more almost every year, and breaking all the records. It's a pity that debates about whether or not it is because of man-made climate change or not are blocking any broader public discussion of these new conditions. OK, other things are also blocking that discussion -- the financial crisis, the financial crisis and the financial crisis --but these hard times will move on, and meanwhile the effect of changes in the Arctic will continue to ripple through our societies, financial crisis, or not. Changes in the ocean currents that affect our weather, advances in shipping over the top of Siberia, shifts in the ranges of difference species; these are already significant enough. And those are just a few examples. Nobody really knows how it will affect the Gulf Stream. The uncertainty is making me nervous . . .

To see where the future of the Arctic is heading, today, and every day, you can check out:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

No more icecap in this part of Greenland, the coast near Sisimiut (Photo copyright Richard Langlais)

The future is next week (1)

The ice is melting faster and faster. The Arctic Ocean is changing fast. Sometime around the middle of September, there will be less ice "up there" than there's been in about 4,000 years. Let's leave the whole climate change debate out of this, for now. Let's just look at this observable change. If you look at that, you can just say, "The ice covering the Arctic Ocean is changing fast." And then you can try to understand what that means. Today, and every day until sometime in the next week or two, a new record in that melting-back is being set. Climate change seems distant, far away in the future. For the Arctic, the future is next week.

To read about the last time such melting occurred, probably about 4000 years ago, you could read this post:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181811100097X

Near Sisimiut, Greenland (Photo copyright Richard Langlais)