The Danish climate minister closing down the nation’s oil and gas industry
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Anyone who thinks we can simply stop using oil is simply ignorant.
That is not to say that we shouldn't use renewable energy for fuel but the narrative of we should stop everything 100% is highly irritating.
Happy to hear is anyone has different opinions :)
But this article is not about that - this is about one country deciding to get out of oil production. I guess they have discussed this at lenght and decided that, all factors considered, it makes more sense for them to stop oil production, decarbonize their economy as far as possible, and import the oil that they will still need.
When people say "stop using oil", it really means stop using it for fuel because that is the vast majority of usage, and if we eliminate that then what's left is not a significant problem. The worldwide demand could probably be satisfied by a handful of drilling rigs instead of the thousands we have now.
"Modern medicine relies on petroleum, particularly to transport patients, staff, and supplies"
That part is largely 'solved' problem and the rollout of those solutions over the next 30 years will probably be significant. As far as plastics and pharmaceuticals are concerned the paper puts it at "an estimated 0.2% of petroleum used in the United States was for medical plastics"
As for plastics in general the current number seems to be in the 6-10% range globally depending on who you ask. With a combination of reducing, recycling and misc. technology improvements I'm sure we can get that down further in the next 20-30 years. And much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.
So on the whole I think winding down the petroleum industry as we know it today over the next 30 years to a fraction of what it is today (no one is seriously suggesting 100% shutdown) is absolutely doable, from a technology point of view. The reasons why it won't happen are political.
More importantly, it will hopefully come from onshore wells which are easier to access and manage than the crazy underwater shenanigans necessary of deep offshore extraction.
People often forget that the problem isn't producing CO2, the problem is producing too much CO2. If we have sequestration techniques (natural or man made) you can produce as much CO2 as you want as long as you have sustainable levels (which currently we need negative net production).
Chances are wherever you are most of of what you have in your direct sightline contains petroleum in a way or another. Try living without products containing petroleum and you're basically back in 1800s.
Once we run out of it we're truly fucked because we have yet to find viable alternative for most of its use cases.
I consume maybe somewhere on the order of 2kg per week (100kg/yr) in the form of plastic packaging, toothpaste, rubber, asphalt, etc. And most of this consumption results in solid waste or other inert storage, as opposed to the generation of CO2.
Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses will not mean "you're basically back in 1800s" - those sorts of uses are not as relevant to climate change. You'll still be able to buy tires and toothpaste (though the economics of something like asphalt, which is almost a waste product unless you're doing cracking, might result in alternative materials trials for road surfacing treatments, particularly in urban areas. Interlock pavers are particularly suitable for low-strength situations where asphalt is currently used due to artificially low prices)
I never talked about energy and heating, quite the contrary. All I'm saying is that almost everything we use or consume are petroleum derived, that petroleum is not an infinite resource and that for most of these things we don't have anything viable to replace them with yet.
The economics of synthetics are cost prohibitive for use in transportation and road construction. But luckily, electric vehicles will continue to reduce the need for petroleum for transportation purposes and asphalt is the most recyclable petroleum product out there. You can literally recycle it on-site.
You can synthesize hydrogen from water. You can synthesize methane, methanol or ammonia with hydrogen and CO2 and go on from there to build everything that is built from oil today.
This isn't exactly efficient, and doing this at scale is a huge challenge. But in the end we'll have to find alternatives for all oil products, because making them from oil will inevitably lead to carbon emissions (both in the refinery and at the end of life of products when they decompose in a landfill or get burned).
This drives me crazy. While closing down the oil industry should be a goal, all solutions that the public would accept (and aren't worse than climate change itself) will be technical solutions, not sacrifice. The lockdown gave us a good glimpse at how effective sacrifice it. It's not enough.
Your point about sacrifice probably stands
My issue with sacrifices is that they often punish the wrong people. For example, let's say there is a carbon tax on flights (very likely to happen soonish). People who travel for work and for other necessities should not incur the same penalty as tourists who travel purely for pleasure.
All these fake greenies flying to India to find themselves are still going to burn in hell though.
You probably mean frequent national flights for small Europeans countries? People are just flying less internationally because of COVID, not because of Friday for Futures thinking that's not cool.
Or to put in another way, is a new SUV worse than an Opel Corsa 1999 regarding CO2 emission?
Applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it.
then look down on other people who don't
That's in your mind, not mine.
Technology is more likely to solve the problem than reducing emissions by a certain percentage, which is guaranteed to be insufficient. Transatlantic flights are certainly a hard problem, but why should it be impossible? Either using hydrogen, synthetic fuels and/or by offsetting emissions with carbon capturing.
Which leaves us in the situation that if you get on a plane to cross the Atlantic today you will add another ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Carrying on as we are right now is like spending next years pay rise before you have got the promotion, it will bankrupt us.
Back when every river in Europe was full of human shit, the air was full of smog and pretty much the entire continent was devoid of timber people were saying the exact same sort of "technology will never solve this, we need to make sacrifices" crap.
I could go on but "making sacrifices" does not work at scale because when you apply that one approach to more than one problem you wind up sacrificing so many things that the standard of living is driven back by hundreds of years.
Technology created this problem, applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it. All this wishful thinking crap won't get us anywhere.
You don't need to drive your standard of living back hundreds of years although if we don't get a handle on climate change that will happen.
It quickly & significantly narrows the solution space. No amount of carpooling or bicycling will ever be enough by themselves to get us to carbon zero. (Speaking as an avid cyclist)
Yes, I know that they can't just shut down the oil industry overnight - but governmenst need to set incentives more aggressively to move away from oil and coal energy, non-electric transportation and using animals in food production. At the same time, they need to stop subsidizing these (the EU is spending a quarter of their budget for direct livestock farm subsidies).
Such a course might seem expensive and disruptive, but the alternative (business-as-usual) will be significantly more expensive and disruptive.
We were the first country to legalize porn, and homosexual civil unions, and although we're not the biggest country, I think it made an impact.
Maybe the actual savings in terms of CO2 isn't the largest, and maybe the closing could've been more aggressive - but I still think it sends an important message to other countries who are larger producers of oil.
If Denmark manages to thrive after banning fossil fuels, then that will be the time to be impressed.
let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive.
much more impressive than banning slavery.
Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. This wasn't because people suddenly realised the slaves weren't having fun, or suddenly after millennia of religion someone decided to take the 'be nice to people' dogma seriously. Neither of those things take centuries to figure out.
The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. Slavery is a great example of liberating people to do things being much more impressive than bans. Banning slavery was a big step that sped the whole process up by a few decades, but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create.
> let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive.
Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.
No, the modern day slave trade is flourishing. Sex trafficking all over the world is one example. There are open slave markets in Libya now just as there were for centuries or longer.
I'll cheerfully point out I don't think that Libya is economically competitive, and the slave trade is a big symptom of that.
Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away.
Them banning slavery will impress me less than a policy of general liberalisation to get some economic success happening. Economies don't grow big by banning stuff; banning stuff happens after the economy is strong enough to handle the damage bans do.
That argument requires substantiation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arguably some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, yet slavery (or slave-like working conditions) are prevalent throughout society.
An economy with slaves does not, fundamentally, make sense. It isn't going to be the least bit competitive with a modern capitalist economy with wages without wealth literally bubbling up from the ground in the form of oil. Everyone in such an economy will be less wealthy than their peers in a free market.
1) The capitalist formula for this is basically: Can i extract more value from this individual through "free" productivity minus wages, or from "slave" productivity minus enforcement cost.
Your arguments don't convincingly prove the former.
2) Even if I were to accept your reasoning (which to be very clear I don't), I still don't understand what argument you're making.
Because it naturally leads to:
a) Capitalism solved slavery by it being unprofitable, so the regulation/ban was unnecessary.
which leads to:
b) If it was profitable, the ban would hamper economic growth.
I'm much more interested in the second part. What would your stance be if we assume it would be profitable?
Capitalism doesn't concern itself with morality, but humans do. Should we do nothing about it because all political intervention is bad?
Just to make sure, I assume this is your opinion of agreement with me? Which I appreciate, even if you weren't GP. It's just that the phrasing makes it sound like a disagreement in reasoning, which if that is the case I would like you to expand on.
But as to your second point, labor hasn't (yet) disappeared due to industrial revolutions, only shifted. What has changed is simply the scale one unit of labor could perform. Slaves would very much still be valuable in the 1800s. If nothing else proven by the fact that still to this day farming jobs are very often imported low-income jobs. I can't reconcile that fact with your reasoning.
The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me.
To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here?
Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.
Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.
So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.
A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically no slaves left because nobody would want one. Cost money to maintain with very little payoff versus alternatives.
Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
[citation needed]
> Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
I'm having trouble taking this comparison seriously. There has always been employees aside of slavery, usually at different positions.
Look at Apple's production history in China, or Amazon warehouse workers or Google/Amazon turk work. If there was no regulation, and with unscrupulous C-levels, those positions would probably be slaves, from a "capitalist perspective".
So now someone has a factory. They could, in theory, buy slaves and try to get them to work in the factory. But you would run away or, if you stayed, have no desire to work hard because you're not getting paid.
Or, the factory could "buy" slaves and offer them a buy-out mechanism. The factory pays $500, but after you make 1000 widgets, you get your freedom. The factory earns $800 from 1000 widgets, so that's a profitable deal for them. The former slave gets out of slavery as soon as they make 1000 widgets, so they have the incentive to make widgets. Try to get someone to make widgets as a slave without any reward and they only make 500 widgets, and then the factory would have to pay $500 to get $400. So the factory that ultimately frees the slaves out-competes the one that doesn't, and the slaves get freed.
True, 250+ years after slavery was abolished in the U.S., slaves are no longer an effective (or legal) asset.
Companies like Apple, Google, etc., did not exist in the 1800s. Stock ownership did not become common until the 1900s, even amongst the wealthy, so there was no alternative for this hypothetical slave owner. Moreover, unlike the North, the South did not have easy access to shipping or to the raw materials for heavy industry. (For example: Pittsburgh didn't become the Steel City because it was a nice place to live; it became the center of the U.S. steel industry because of its proximity to the raw materials and the methods of transportation available at the time.)
Obvious to the free market. The slave owners were already heading towards bankruptcy when the Civil war began. Nonenforcement of the escaped slaves act could well be seen as a refusal of other participants in the economy to subsidise slave owners' unprofitable business models.
This is completely wrong. In the 1800 US census, it recorded 893,602 slaves. By the time of the 1860 census (the last before the Civil War), that had risen to 3.9 million slaves (the 1850 census showed 3.2 million, so it was obviously still rising).
And, yes, it halved as a % of the population because the urban population was growing faster than the slave population was growing. That doesn't mean it was shrinking.
Making slavery unprofitable is more impressive than actually banning it. Both are good, but enabling freedom is still a substantially more powerful change than the simply banning of slavery. Much like how banning heroin doesn't actually cause heroin to die out if there is a demand for it; we may yet see heroin legalised in my lifetime much like marijuana. It is entirely possible. Slavery ain't coming back, it benefits pretty much nobody. There isn't a billion dollar industry in slaves waiting to be discovered.
The problem with heroin (not from personal experience) is that you only realize that it was a mistake after you're already addicted, and then it's incredibly hard to stop. But seeing how much damage the "war on drugs" and the cartels producing them are doing, maybe a number of addicts (and deaths) more would be acceptable in the grand scheme of things...
Not in the US...The Industrial Revolution actually made slavery worse. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 dramatically increased the demand for slaves.
The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom.
No, in the U.S. at least the Industrial Revolution meant lower-paying jobs in a factory within less individual opportunity for economic success. The Industrial Revolution killed the demand for skilled artisans and tradesmen. The 1800s were known as the age of the "Robber Barons" for this reason.
Both Canada and Australia have had legal injecting rooms for many, many years.
When was porn illegal in other countries?
Canada has restrictive laws regarding some porn which is legal in other countries, they've arrested people over it.
Proud to be living in such a society here in DK that cares to make education free/affordable, healthcare free, and invests in social good. Yes, it’s not perfect, but has a lot more to be proud of than to complain.
Now, one thing I wonder is why Denmark doesn’t pounce on the opportunity to set an example and build out electric charging infrastructure backed by its grid of renewable energy. That could boost the economy and save the world at the same time.
Unfortunately, like "better safe than sorry", this just isn't true beyond feel-good virtue signalling. When you're dealing with nature and the environment it all comes down to assimilative capacity; under it and we're fine, over and we're screwed. No matter how many Denmarks make dramatic changes it means nothing without movement by the biggest emitters like China and the US.
If everyone only points to each other and a "bigger real problem" you can hand wave everything away.
Meanwhile in the US...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/11/few-countrie...
Oh, only two insignificant countries are meeting their treaty obligations.
Heck, the US might see what it did to Denmark and start its own version to compete and make "green" money. Being dismissive of good faith effort doesn't take us anywhere.
How do you propose magically fixing everything at once without making any steps along the way?
Yes, this is a big deal, but only because of the publicity value of the decision, as the environmental impact will be negligible. But this is the root of the problem: Denmark's energy policy is almost solely about publicity!
Since the end of the 1970s, our neighbours in Sweden have consistently followed an energy policy, that deliver cheap[0] and stable energy from hydro- and nuclear power, while emitting much less CO2 than us. Check at any time of day, and I can assure you that the emmissions from our electricity consumption will be higher than in Sweden[1].
While Denmark has almost phased out coal power, we've replaced it with "biofuel"; imported wood from Brazil, Estonia and the US. This is especially neat, as a technicality in the IPCC emmissions ratings views wood as a sustainable fuel, as the forest can be replanted and the emmissions will be stored in the wood until this is cut down and burned anew.
Our strategy was described as "accounting fraud" by IPCC scientist William Moomaw and "climate fraud" by Daniel Kammen, professor at Berkeley and a former IPCC lead author and Obama advisor. Denmark's seemingly incredible track record has even fooled our population: 78% of Danes believe that our primary source of renewable energy was windpower, when this was actually just 22% of all renewable electricity generation (biomass being 68%), which accounts for 35% of total electricity consumption [2].
This is problematic to say the least: Not only are our energy prices among the highest in the world - how does 40 cents pr. kWh sound? - we aren't making any real difference. The Danish strategy has always been sold as "a job creator" and "an export adventure", but isn't that just the same type of corporate greed, now in sheeps clothing?
Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, was the primary recepient of billions of dollars in state aid, tax excemptions, etc., but every downturn resulted in layoffs, which always struck Denmark first.'
As CO2-levels have risen to a record level, we Danes keep on burning wood, straw and trash, while calling ourselves a "green leader", while our strategy has also left us wholly dependent on electricity imports from Germany, Norway and Sweden.
The inability to act sensibly is depressing and I hate how the entire issue of climate is being politized in such a way, that a civil discussion is close impossible, while lobbyists are having a field day.
So please spare me the praise of Denmark's policies. If nothing else, our deceptions are making things worse.
[0] Electricity prices in Copenhagen are ~ 50% higher in Denmark, than in Sweden. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/map [2] https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2019-09-06-danmarks-klimaregn... (Google Translate should be able to translate most of the article pretty accurately)
Turns out I was probably not pessimistic enough (i.e. my first though was generic skepticism about "climate promises" by someone with no history of "climate fraud", but if what you say is true, my "skepticism" is actually more like "business as usual").
It would be political suicide to start taxing the energy for heating, leading to all kinds of weirdness such as:
- Denmark _paying_ to export electricity when the power stations need to run to produce heat (because if the power plants used the electricity to provide heating, the heat would not be a waste product)!
- Big data centers cannot sell waste heat for heating, because they would need to run heat engines to raise the temperature to usable levels, again rendering the heat "not a waste product".
(TBH, The last one is so clearly stupid that a workaround in the rules is in the books)
Still, Denmark often sold electricity for pennies on the dollar – or literally for free – to Norway, who in turn used the energy to pump more water into their hydroelectric dams. This energy was then sold back to us, at (higher) market rates, whenever the wind died down and Denmarks needed to import electricity, due to its inability to produce enough electricity to cover its own demand.
Often, when Scandinavia is getting a lot of wind, you can even see electricity prices going below zero. In some of those cases, you can sometimes see a group of wind turbines, where some are spinning at great speeds and other are completely still. This is in order for the producers not wanting to pay to get rid of their electricity.
While it is a shame that the storage problem isn't solved yet (except in the case of our shrewd Norwegian neighbours), I don't really fancy waiting for that to happen, when other options are (or rather should be) on the table.
You need a staggering amount of wood and if you want to produce them in a really sustainable way, you simply cannot. You would be able to produce such amount of wood nicely in a sustainable way, you would sell it for furniture or construction wood for way more money.
The only heat from wood I know are really well (not only on the paper) managed are the ones directly working with a network of sawmill to reuse the waste and usually, they are small.
Burning wood even discharges more CO2 in the atmosphere, than coal[1] and we haven't even started to talk about where all those trees must be grown to keep up with the demand of an energy policy based on solar/wind + biofuel backup, like we are planning in Denmark.
It is not a terribly good idea and it is infuriating how little science and facts matter to a political discusssion that one would think was based around those elements.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/opinion/pruitt-forests-bu... [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/...
That sounds like a great way to reduce carbon footprint. All renewable power is used, so every extra (marginal) kWh used comes 100% from CO² producing generation. A price high enough to affect consumer's usage will reduce the carbon footprint.
> That sounds like a great way to reduce carbon footprint. All renewable power is used, so every extra (marginal) kWh used comes 100% from CO² producing generation. A price high enough to affect consumer's usage will reduce the carbon footprint.
I disagree; itis a rather backwards view and a misunderstanding of how cheap and plentiful energy has made the human experience less harsh and more meaningful for billions of people.
In Denmark it means that many Danish homes are being heated with wood stoves, wood pellet boilers, natural gas or even old oil furnaces. Neither of these have any meaningful filtering and emit CO2, whereas cheaper electricity would make heat pumps and other electric heating much more meaningful.
Remember: Cheap energy is not the problem, unless the low price point is due to political legislating, not requiring the producer to pay the entire "bill", e.g. by not compensating for emitting CO2.
Vestas and other wind turbine producers have done some clever lobbying by getting legislators to buy their "cheap" power, while leaving the issue of baseline stability to somebody else.
Each country ought to do what works for them atm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child...
- He will be 75 years old and he won't be accountable for that decision
- We will lose the battle against climate change. We simply do not have 30 years to become free from fossil fuels
My understanding is that despite +2C being an important limit we should not cross, that every bit of warming we stop above that provides increasing benefit because every bit above +2C is increasingly harmful (i.e. the increase from +3C to +4C is much worse than the increase from +2C to +3C).
So are you saying we should do what every other country is doing to end their reliance and production of fossil fuels - namely nothing ?
Currently, Denmark are the world leader, and we should acknowledge that as a HUGE win.
I do appreciate every step in the right direction. I really do. But this is not even an attempt to make a step. The climate minister will be in retirement in 2050 and take no political responsibility.
> The Lindholm Island project, which is intended to house 100 or so rejected asylum seekers who have been convicted of crimes and served their sentences but cannot be deported for various reasons, is explicitly designed to create a less welcoming atmosphere than the facility that currently holds those with a similar “tolerated stay” status.
Emphasis:
> 100 or so rejected asylum seekers who have been convicted of crimes and served their sentences but cannot be deported for various reasons
Going to European States because they have social welfare systems and then committing crimes knowing the punishments are most likely not as severe as in their home countries is unacceptable and should lead to them being automatically thrown out of the country. Unfortunately their home countries in most cases don't want to accept them back or the migrants have "lost" their passports/documentation before coming to the EU thus there's no country to deport convicted criminals back to.
For the record, I as a Western/Central European have nothing against immigrants, as long as they come here to work/study/lead law-abiding lives like it's been done for decades. However coming here for no other reason than to be an eternal drag on the social benefit system and then on top of that committing crimes?
IMHO that minority (from TFA ~100 out of thousands for Denmark) of immigrants is not and should not be welcome in any country.
Not trying to justify the use of an island for this purpose, but they would be imprisoned anyway since they are disbarred from residing in the country.
It is not intended for regular refugees or asylum seekers.
On the right track, though experience suggests that there’s always a lot of low hanging fruit that is ripe for picking. It’s rare that the last quarter of improvement comes anywhere near as quickly as the first quarter.
Meanwhile in Canada you have the government claiming it's a climate leader because it'll plant trees and ban plastic straws meanwhile expanding development of oil sands. It's completely disingenuous.
Software engineers with any experience in profiling should know how to make big gains on a problem quickly. Find the biggest problems and cut those down to size. Fiddling at the edges isn't gonna get us there.
Compare that to Denmark which employs about 2000 people in resource extraction [1]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/oil-and-gas-gdp-growt... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Denmark#:~:text=Denm...
- About 2,000 persons worked in the oil and gas extraction sector in 2016, and another 1,000 persons in extraction of gravel and stone, or in total about 0.1% of total employment in Denmark" [1]
Compare this to Alberta whose oil and gas section employs about 145,000 people and has a similar population size (Denmark: ~ 5 million; Aberta: ~4 million)[2]
It seems the journalists here, instead of keying in on the success in moving to renewables, have spun a sensible and uncostly decision for Denmark into a politicized headline which would be extremely costly elsewhere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Denmark#:~:text=Denm.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Denmark#Natural_res... [2] https://alis.alberta.ca/occinfo/industry-profiles/mining-and....
To really make a dent in greenhouse gases you need US, China, India, etc. to come to the table.
Denmark has taken a decision against its own economic interest, same as Norway before it (and maybe others). This is a decision worthy of a lot of respect.
By making energy energy more expensive all you have done is taking a step further towards ex keeping 1 billion people in energy poverty because you are making it more expensive for them.
Denmark have invested heavily in wind over the last 40 years, as a replacement yet it only covers 8% of it's energy needs.
We don't need to curb climate change, we just need to control the consequences of it which we have done historially using fossil fuels.
The idea that the climate before the industrial revolution was some perfect equilibrium and that our emissions are a grave danger to the world is simply not historically true.
What is true is that what used to be a dangerous storm today can be a setting for a romantic dinner because humans have been able to invent ways to control the consequences of climate leading to much fewer people dead from it.
Isn't this like a basic human principle? That we are taught as children? That sacrificing one's own interests for the commonwealth is typically considered virtuous? So your question is total nonsense unless you were brought up in a forest by a bear somewhere and actually genuinely don't understand.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing but "doing something against their economic interest" is a really low bar
On the one hand, you have US states that don't want free healthcare because they are uneducated and think it's "communist". There is no sacrifice, no bravery, no nothing. It's just a lack of understanding.
On the other hand, you have Denmark which has put the health of the planet ahead of their economic wellbeing. This is something that very few countries have done.
You are comparing apples and oranges here.
A government can always undo the actions of a previous government.
Also changes the perspective on the progressive social welfare programs for which Denmark is often lauded to know that they are financed by fossil fuels and climate destruction.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-top-oil-producing-na...
Occupied (Norwegian: Okkupert) is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that depicts a fictional near future in which, due to catastrophic environmental events, Norway's Prime Minister has stopped the country's oil and gas production.
Russia, with support from the European Union, occupies Norway to restore its oil and gas production, in response to a Europe-wide energy crisis.
I'm not sure how does that work. What is the point of any government if it can not change laws to accommodate whatever situation might arise.
I understand that people care for the environment, but I hope people do understand the economics and politics behind these things, right?
[1] https://ing.dk/artikel/teknologisk-spredehagl-skal-klemme-si...
https://www.businessinsider.com/denmark-is-unbelievably-mass...
Part of the same plan is that Denmark needs to be CO2 neutral in 2020 - but not without using fossil fuels. This just means Denmark will be capturing CO2 using storage and planting trees. This is not my claim, it is right there in the proposal from the Danish govt.
So Denmark WILL consume oil in 2050 - but now it has to come from abroad.
So Denmark gets poorer as a result - and have to consume oil that other countries have produced anyway - but at least it feels and sounds good now!