Norway poster child for carbon-neutral sleight of hand

Norway – followed by Vatican City and many other countries – with an official assist from the United Nations, is practicing environmental double-dealing on the Holy Grail of carbon neutrality. The reality?

Their claims — like Norway’s — all require asterisks, like home-run records buoyed by steroids. And as the Norwegian plan shows, achieving a carbon-neutral state, for now, often depends as much on how you make the calculation and how much money you spend, as it does on hard work, sacrifice or even innovation.

Norway looks like it is going to be carbon-neutral in part because U.N. standards allow it to count things like planting trees in other countries as reducing its own CO2 footprint.

At the same time, Norwegian companies, like American ones, opening industrial plants in countries with lax environmental standards is another way of cheating. A Norwegian company is opening an aluminum smelter in Dubai, for example. And, the U.N. doesn’t require that this pollution outsourcing be counted againstNorway’s CO2 footprint.

As for Norway, here’s the actual lowdown on its greenness:

In its recently released Climate Change Performance Index 2008, the nonprofit group Germanwatch, which is active on environmental issues, ranked Norway 16th out of 56 countries, tied with Indonesia, and well behind Sweden, Britain and Germany.

The problem can’t solved by cutting the use of coal, or getting gas-guzzlers off the road. That’s done and done. The problem is this:

The main polluter in Norway is heavy industry — oil, gas, metal refining. They are, of course, the industries that have made Norway rich. …

“We are very positive about dialogue with the government and very positive about reducing greenhouse gases, but we want to be very careful that industry doesn’t end up a loser,” said Finn Bergesen, director general of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise. “It’s a good thing to set goals, but goals have to be realistic.”

The revenues also pay for anti-deforestation work in Africa that the U.N. allows Norway to count in its greenness quotient.

But, Norwegian environmentalists don’t buy it, calling it greenwash.

“We’re a nice little selfish country of petroholics, and that has made us lazy,” said Frederic Hauge, president of Bellona, Norway’s largest nongovernmental environmental organization.

This is why I don’t get why Bush doesn’t sign on to Kyoto. Hell, we’re continuing to outsource factories to China. All we need to do now is plant some trees somewhere and we’ll be lean, clean and green.

Right.


Environmental advocates say Norway should take the next step, issuing fewer permits for oil exploration, for example, and even raising gas taxes. Instead of exporting energy, Mr. Hauge suggests, Norway should use some of it domestically to create things like low-priced solar panels for use in the developing world.

Meanwhile, it’s not just U.S. creationists that can be religiously-based hypocrites:

The Vatican “offsets” its emissions by planting forests in Hungary, but it did not enter into the calculation the polluting travel of its priests and officials — nor the emissions caused at properties outside Vatican City.

In other words, there’s a LOT of cheating, ethical cheating, even if the letter of U.N. agreements allow it, about what various countries of the world are really doing to stop global warming.