Scandinavia!

Wherefore art thou, UV? 😊

Oops. I lost the last version of this which didn’t publish properly. Fingers crossed this time

This one’s for you, Lars Olof.😊 It’s just a quick off-topic rant. To add a modicum of relevance, I should mention that we’ll soon be releasing an update to our GlobalUV app. Today it tells me that the peak UVI in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen will be around 4 tomorrow, about twice as high as here in southern New Zealand as we head into winter.

Why is it that all the good policies in the world seem to come from Scandinavia? It starts with a much flatter wage structure and higher taxes which get progressively higher for higher income workers. That narrows the obscene gap between rich and poor. It helps that Norway has plenty of oil, but all the Scandinavian counties also seem to keep their assets, unlike us in New Zealand. We always sell our family jewels so others can take the profits. It’s no coincidence that Scandinavians have the highest happiness index in the world, with Finland leading the pack.

It’s a while since I’ve been to that part of the world, but from this vantage point here and now it seems a bit like New Zealand used to be in the good old days before the mantras of rogernomics and the half-baked ‘user pays’ that kicked off in the 1980s. One consequence is the exorbitant price I now pay for my electricity. Even though I live only 10 km from one of New Zealand’s largest hydroelectric power stations, hardly anybody in the country pays more for their power than me. The reasons are the same as in my last rants on the topic 6 years ago, or 6 years before that. The only thing that’s changed is the price. My peak rates are now over $0.61 per unit.

The citizens of Norway must be laughing into their lattes as the price of oil rises. With their much-better-insulated homes and wages 50 to 70 percent higher than ours, the unit price of their electricity is about half that.

As the plot below shows they’ve also made some great decisions about their transport fleet, even though they’re awash with oil. look at that impressive uptake of electric cars over the last two decades!

As recently as 2010, all their new cars were entirely powered by fossil fuels, with about 35 percent from diesel and the remaining 65 percent from petrol. The contribution from all other sources was less than 1 percent. Then, things began to change. A couple of years later, battery electric cars had just started to get a measurable share of the market. Just a decade later their share was about 30 percent, and by the end of last year about 98 percent of new purchases were electrics, with the share of diesel and petrol being less than 2 percent.

That’s what good policy drives. Good on you Norway. Denmark isn’t far behind with 82 percent of new cars now being battery electric vehicles. Finland and Sweden aren’t bad either, with about 47 and 41 percent respectively, just ahead of China.

Contrast that with the sad situation here in New Zealand. After a promising start by the previous government, all their good work was undone by spiteful moves by the incoming coalition in October 2023. The threat of climate change wasn’t enough for the morons to help with the transition. Like many of their environmental decisions, they’ve moved in the opposite direction. Currently, only 2 percent of our fleet is electric. With tRump’s crisis in Iran, we’re now paying the price at the pump for that negligence. The public have started to vote. Since this last oil shock, more than10 percent of new purchases are electric.

Even that energy crisis hasn’t persuaded our government to get their heads out of their sand buckets. There’s now an obvious need to get away from fossil fuels for security reasons, but the decision makers can’t shake the lead out of their gumboots. Last week they loudly proclaimed that 13 percent of the fleet will be electric by 2035, rising to 46 percent by 2045. That’s pathetic.

I suspect the problem children are minor coalition parties led by David Seymour and Winston Peters. They’re also hell-bent on using more imported fossil fuels instead of our abundantly cheaper and more secure renewables to prop up our energy grid. A grid that will need to supply much more soon to keep the proposed new data centres running.

The stampede to mine gold is a case in point for the crazy times we live in here. It seems that everybody wants to dig it up and put it in a vault somewhere else. The only reason for doing that is for a small number of people to make a lot of money. My guess is that the (mostly overseas) profiteers already have plenty.

We’re not as bad as tRump’s America but are heading down the wrong path with a lack of principled leadership. Hopefully we’ll get a new government soon so we can reclaim our place in the world as champions for the environment.

In the meantime, bring on those Scandinavian policies - including their tax regimes!

Aaah. that feels much better … If you got this far, well done and thank you. Feel free to add a ‘like’.