Imagine a country that reacts sensibly to the oil situation, the energy
situation - yet Americans pride themselves on a can-do attitude, on
innovation, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Flush With Energy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 9, 2008
The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the
West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons - maybe a
One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner
the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It
was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two
different flushing powers depending on - how do I say this delicately -
what exactly you're flushing. A two-gear toilet! I've never found any of
this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as
Greenland!
A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen,
I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy,
you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every
intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use
two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in
a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the
airport, I'd go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less
pollution and less obesity.
What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining.
No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If
only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil
embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that
crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is
energy independent. (And it didn't happen by Danish politicians making
their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore
drilling.)
What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was
lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes
imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and
building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their
economy - while barely growing their energy consumption - and gave birth to
a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the
world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from
wind. America? About 1 percent.
And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy
taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie
Hedegaard, Denmark's minister of climate and energy: "No." It just forced
them to innovate more - like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their
coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the
way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home
heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)
There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline
because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy
standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually
had "a positive impact on job creation," added Hedegaard. "For example, the
wind industry - it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all
terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark." In the last 10
years, Denmark's exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy
technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in
2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.
"It is one of our fastest-growing export areas," said Hedegaard. It is one
reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said
Hedegaard, "we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it
is zero."
Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock
and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.
"I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people
are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up," Denmark's
prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. "The cure is not to reduce
the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our
addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the
direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on
that will be used to cut taxes on personal income - so we will improve
incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop
renewable energy."
Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy
companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas - Denmark's
and the world's biggest wind turbine company - told me that he simply can't
understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the
production tax credits for wind development in America.
Why should you care?
"We've had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,"
said Engel, "and not one out of the U.S."