Bad Santa? How Norway can provide real climate jobs
“Pay up, or humanity will pay the price”. With the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House in January, that key message from UN General Secretary António Guterres was seen as even more urgent at this year’s Climate Summit, which ended in dismay at wealthy nations’ inability to commit sufficient funds to repay their climate debt. Oil-rich Norway, however, showed once again that it will gladly pay more than most countries to keep up appearances as a ‘climate leader.’ But will it ever bring a true gift to humanity, one that does not reek with climate hypocrisy – namely, a just transition away from fossil fuels that can serve as a model to others? Seasoned campaigners from the Bridge to the Future alliance, Andreas Ytterstad and Aled Dilwyn Fisher, suggest climate jobs as the way forward in the fight for climate justice in Norway.
Norway’s climate hypocrisy
Climate summits have become repetitive rituals in which the shadow of former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland looms large. Author of the 1987 UN report Our Common Future that spawned the term ‘sustainable development,’ she is also famous in Norway for the one-liner “It is typical Norwegian to be good” from her New Year’s Speech in 1992, the same year the Earth Summit took place in Rio. In Bali in 2007, another Norwegian Prime Minister, and until recently General Secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg picked up the mantle. He put at disposal 3 billion kroner (US$ 27,090,000) per year for three years to kickstart a rainforest protection scheme. “Here’s the proof – Santa Claus is Norwegian, and his name is Jens” ran the jubilant headline all over the front page of a Norwegian tabloid, with a picture of Stoltenberg decorating a Christmas tree. Fast forward to the COP28 Dubai Summit last year, Norway’s universally respected and unassuming negotiators did not need the over-active air-conditioning to keep them from breaking a sweat. They were calmly, reassuringly, situated in their familiar position: pushing for the most ambitious final text possible, including on the fossil fuel phase-out.
However, when confronted by a journalist about what the Dubai declaration would mean for Norway’s oil and gas industry, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre gave the answer Norway always gives – nothing. Global declarations are meant for the bad guys. And, according to its popular image, Norway is irreproachable in its climate and oil policy, setting an example with what the Canadian Globe and Mail calls “the petrostate paradox.” As Norway’s then Climate and Environment Minister Espen Barth Eide put it in an interview with the paper: “We are an oil and gas producing country that is actively striving to reduce the demand for our key product.” Crucially, though, he also said, “We don’t think our key role is to stop the supply.” Understanding how this apparent contradiction has become unquestioned common sense in Norway requires a quick dive into the hegemony of oil in the country – the history of its ‘oil fairytale.’
Living a fairytale: The hegemony of oil
Norway is different. And so is its oil. In fact, it defies the laws of physics. It is part of the solution to – not the cause of – global warming. That is the gist of the oil hegemony that now underpins Norwegian climate policies. To get to this point, we first must understand how both oil and environmental concerns became part of the national identity in the 1970s.
The premise for social democratic oil was set clearly from the outset. The ‘10 Commandments’ for the petroleum industry passed in parliament in 1971 called for national control, and moderate development of oil and gas production on the Norwegian continental shelf that reflected a sense of responsibility for the public good. Heavy state ownership and high taxation on oil profits ensued. Oil workers fought fierce battles for safety, good conditions and a seat at the table where decisions were made. The result was something of a nationalisation of the oil wealth; everyone, including future generations, would feel its effects and therefore feel bound to it. In 1972, the ruling Labour Party, or Arbeiderpartiet, established the state-owned oil company Statoil (today Equinor). It also set up an oil fund, which is, by some estimates, currently the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, amounting to nearly 1.7 billion US dollars (or 17,745 billion kroner by the end of July 2024) and owning around 1.5 percent of all shares in the world’s listed companies.
The hegemony of oil thus started from a good place and, in the space of a few short decades, made the ‘oil fairytale’ a national project.
Hegemony incorporates environmental resistance
Yet hegemony works by incorporating some of the ideas that inspire resistance into mainstream discourse, while taking off their edges, so that business can continue as usual. The rise of the sustainable development narrative and the enormous popularity of Social Democrat Gro Harlem Brundtland – first Environment Minister and, 1981 onwards, three times Prime Minister – is a textbook example of this process. In the period of environmental awakening during the 1970s, Brundtland steered a course between environmentalism and industry. Her personal hesitation at the time is captured magnificently in the recent Norwegian TV series success “Makta” (“The Power”). A group of Sami occupies her office to protest a large hydro project in the Alta river. Yet she cannot bring herself to call the police and have them removed from Parliament. They just stay and get some pastries on a tray. The Sami and the environmental protests eventually lose the battle – the dam is being built – but the struggle helped strengthen indigenous legal rights and forged an enduring alliance between the Sami and the environmental movement in Norway.
When Brundtland took up her third mandate in 1990, a raising awareness of the catastrophic impact of the climate crisis had made its way to Norway: How could the hegemony of oil be reconciled with Norwegian climate policy? According to historian Peder Anker, Brundtland responded by opting for a move towards “technocracy and cost-benefit economics”. The stage was set for Brundtland’s young undersecretary in the Environmental Ministry, who had written his master’s thesis in social economy on how to optimise the use of Norwegian oil revenue: Jens Stoltenberg.
Thinking and acting, but only globally
One key feature of Norwegian climate policy from the 1990s onwards was a conscious attempt to divert attention away from national action to avoid demands for domestic emission cuts that would also require moderation in oil and gas production. In a deliberate effort to shape international climate policy in Norway’s interests, successive governments promoted a narrative of – what was euphemistically termed – “thinking globally” to sustain petro-hegemony in an age of climate concern. At least partly sidestepping thorny debates about historical responsibility for the climate crisis, the attention was put on mitigating emissions wherever it was cheapest to do so, which was, invariably, in the Global South. This justified business-as-usual in the Global North, as long as countries were willing to offset their emissions through carbon trading. Building on the reasoning of his master’s thesis, Stoltenberg personally helped develop and push for global carbon trading schemes whereby Northern companies could offset their own emissions by paying up for rainforest protection in Brazil.
Even when ignoring the neocolonial implications and purely judging this policy on its own terms, it was a failure. By the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, indigenous communities affected by deforestation protested against rainforest schemes tied to carbon offsets. The money flowing to the South was only a small dent in the enormous profits Norway was still making from throwing more and more fossil fuels on the climate fire, a small price to pay in order to outbalance Norway’s national climate accounts. This cooking of the books resulted in few real emissions cuts, while causing a series of land grabs and human rights abuses.
The current government still relies on carbon trading. It remains as the get-out-of-jail-free card for a country that has failed consistently to meet its climate goals since the early 1990s. Carbon offsets with the Global South have been paused as the primary focus of Norwegian climate policy since 2016, when the conservative government scrapped the scheme. Carbon trading with the EU, however, remains Norway’s great hope abroad. Meanwhile, rules for new carbon markets are being developed under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – with a contentious agreement pushed through at COP29 in Baku last week against poorer countries and civil society.
The upsetting consequences of offsets
Rich Northern countries paying for climate initiatives in the global South is not a bad idea per se. Stoltenberg perhaps came across as an “oil tainted hero” at the Bali Summit in 2007, but the billions he brought to the climate summit should not be seen (solely) as a cynical ploy. Like Brundtland before him, he also incorporated some of the ideas of the environmental movement in his policies. In Bali, the Rainforest Foundation of Norway pushed him and the Norwegian delegation to spearhead and pay up for actions aimed at protecting the rainforest. Indeed, support for rainforest protection from Norway has become part of the COP ritual. The Rainforest Foundation was jubilant about the most recent state budget, which committed 4 billion kroner for rainforest protection in 2025, acknowledging the country’s “world leading” role in international rainforest protection. When part of Norwegian money comes with no strings attached, even critics should perhaps at least acknowledge the good intentions of the social democratic Santa.
Yet while this policy might look like solidarity at a superficial glance, it has a very un-social(-democratic) bent. It is based on letting the most powerful market actors decide where climate efforts should be focused, all the while continuing their core business of making money from the underlying causes of climate catastrophe. Ultimately, though, parting with a tiny fraction of the country’s profits from oil and gas in order to pay other countries to safeguard nature would not suffice to keep attention away from domestic action to sustain Norway’s climate paradox.
Develop, not dismantle
Crucially, Norwegian oil hegemony is about more than just policy. With the adoption of the Paris Agreement, which entails the gradual increase of domestic emission cuts, the Stoltenbergian approach of “thinking globally” fell out of popularity. As a result, the government has intensified its efforts in framing oil and gas production as a prerequisite for Norway as a climate leader. With Prime Minister Støre, Stoltenberg’s chosen successor, the new party line for the social democratic red-green Santa is to “develop, not dismantle” (“utvikle, ikke avvikle”) Norwegian oil. In an interview right after he was elected in 2021, and just before the Glasgow Climate Summit, Støre was paraphrased by the Financial Times as warning readers that a “drilling shutdown would mean [the] end of [the] green transition.” As an outsider unfamiliar with Norwegian exceptionalism, you may, naively, ask why?
Responding fully to this question might require one thousand and one (Norwegian) nights, however these are three of the most popular storylines. First, without Norwegian gas, the EU would have to rely on even more polluting (Polish) coal or gas from “nastier” countries (Russia). Second, if Norway were to phase out its oil and gas extraction unilaterally, the EU would have to rely on oil and gas from corrupt, non-democratic petrostates, where unions do not even exist and workers have no say at all (Saudi-Arabia). Third, without new oil and gas fields, Norway would lose the skills of oil workers, the technology, and the capital needed for the green transition.
The cleanest and most democratic oil in the world?
Central to the strategy of “develop, not dismantle” is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which the government presents as a way to keep Norwegian oil and gas ‘greener’ than those of its competitors for decades to come. CCS is a technology that can be integrated into existing industrial facilities to capture carbon before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and transporting the carbon by ship or pipeline to an allegedly permanent geological underground storage area. In its most recent iteration, the focus has turned to the production of blue hydrogen from gas, with reduced carbon emissions owing to CCS. On a global-scale, only the US has spent more on CCS subsidies than Norway – a tiny country of just 5 million people.
In reality, however, these technologies are little more than a smokescreen to provide a narrative that continues to give the oil and gas industry plenty of rope to continue extracting fossils in light of alleged solutions that promise to offset their emissions. The vast majority of CSS projects fail (they are put on hold or do not even take off), owing to the perceived risks and high costs with uncertain returns involved – they require billions in state subsidies as costs tend to spiral over time. Even in the rare event that they do end up operating and capture some carbon, their capacity is limited, and they cannot capture by far all emissions they are expected to. Most existing CCS technology has been used to capture carbon with the purpose of injecting it into declining oil reservoirs to force out more oil (so-called ‘enhanced oil recovery’). Not even the recent cancellation of all major blue hydrogen projects in Norway by Equinor and Shell has discredited the Norwegian “green” oil fairytale. As long as the world still needs oil and gas to move forward, the tale goes, it might as well come from the jolly red-green Santa in the North providing the cleanest and most democratic oil in the world.
Defying reality
Norway even goes a step further. It is the first country on Earth licensing deep-sea mining, with the explicit argument that this is necessary in order to extract rare minerals that will power renewables. In January this year, the EU Parliament adopted a resolution strongly rebuking Norway’s decision to advance seabed mining in the Arctic, while the Geological Survey of Norway concluded that the government’s plans “are at odds with reality as we know it.” Clearly, deep-sea mining, as CCS and blue hydrogen, provides yet another lifeline to the petroleum lobby. Not only does it depend on value chains and technologies familiar to the oil and gas industry – it also perpetuates an extractivist logic, opening ocean acreage to an industry that has consistently shown that it values profits above all else.
The Norwegian paradox, then, – a petrostate that is also a climate leader – is not just the broadly positive perception by outsiders of a Northern European country that seemed to steer clear of the continent’s worst excesses. Rather, it is a carefully crafted narrative claiming to permit Norway to have its cake and eat it.
“Cut emissions, create jobs”, keeping it vague
Besides the claims to offer greener oil and gas than its competitors, Norway also plays on the social-democratic legacy underpinning the most recent rendition of its oil fairytale. As in the past, the Labour Party tries to incorporate opposing ideas – while rejecting a break with business as usual. Since 2018 Støre has written op eds with his environmental minister, echoing the demand of the broad Norwegian climate movement for an interventionist state that creates new green jobs. In fact, among the reasons Støre was elected as Prime Minister in 2021 was his campaign slogan “cut emissions, create jobs”. Støre repeated this message in his speech at the 2022 climate summit in Cairo, and wrote another op ed with the slogan as its title before the Dubai Summit last year.
Yet the slogan remains vague. Støre is not explicitly calling for climate jobs nor is his government adopting the concrete climate jobs plans called for by campaigns in South Africa, Canada or Portugal. “Cut emissions, create jobs” seems to fit more with the “develop”, rather than the “dismantle” narrative. If such jobs were to qualify as climate jobs, employment linked to CCS, for example, may – if the technology were to pull off properly one day – contribute to reducing emissions in the production of oil and gas. However, it might also increase global emissions through export, and overall perpetuate oil and gas production, as discussed above. This demonstrates once again the contradictions resulting from the vague slogan “cut emissions, create jobs.”
Real climate jobs to back the green transition
Parts of the Norwegian trade union movement are calling the bluff on Støre’s vague slogan and as a prelude to next year’s General Election, countrywide marches for a just transition took place in Norway earlier this fall. The regional trade union confederation (LO Oslo) joined with a banner that echoes the core of the Bridge to the Future Alliance’s message: “Create jobs that cut emissions – no more exploration for oil!” The protesters clearly called for a transition away from oil and gas dependence, emphasising how cutting emissions and jobs creation must go hand in hand.
Yet, although the current Norwegian government increasingly talks the talk on offshore wind, for example, they unfortunately do not summon the power of the state the way they did in the 1970s. The government does not appear inclined to even plan for a day in which the oil giant will need to shrink in order to give room for offshore wind as a new giant – one that is integral to “the clean energy revolution” Guterres called for in his Baku statement. The good news is, though, that the skills of offshore oil workers are transferable to offshore wind and many other essential sectors. If trade union rights and conditions are upheld, oil workers can become the heroes of the day after tomorrow. This, however, requires a commitment from political actors to call it a day for the ‘oil fairytale’.
A victory that can lighten up the night
Imagine the headline: “Norway closes down oil fields in the North Sea to provide space for offshore windmill farms.” Climate jobs replacing oil jobs would be a true gift to the world – climate jobs that actually help phase out fossil fuels and replace employment in carbon intensive sectors: the construction workers for the offshore windmills, the electricians, bus drivers, and all the other climate jobs we so desperately need now. When the house is on fire – and it is! – jobs on new oil fields or in deep-sea mining in the Arctic created decades after Earth has surpassed two degrees of global warming will not do the trick. Creating climate jobs and dismantling what is adding more petrol to the burning house now is the only credible route for a just climate transition in Norway and elsewhere.
This will not happen without collective struggle though. Yet, when the outlook is as dark as a Norwegian winter night, this is also the time to focus on one’s own strength. The eight-hour working day, the entire Nordic model, resulted from collective struggles. Any way we can build on the victories of the past should be exploited to the full. Norway experienced huge school strikes for climate over the last years. However, huge was also the parliamentary majority who rejected the protesters’ demand to stop licensing new oil and gas fields. We believe we stand a better chance of winning if we combine the demand for no more oil exploration with demands for real climate jobs. In order to steer us into a different direction than the oil dogma has set out for us, we must put up a real fight. If the broad social forces behind the Bridge to the Future Alliance grow in strength and gain trade union support, this may inspire resistance movements also in other petrostates. Because climate jobs able to salvage our common future must be created in every country. We only need one victory to lighten up the night.
Andreas Ytterstad, professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, is Chair of Concerned Scientists Norway.
Aled Dilwyn Fisher, is a senior research campaigner on the North Sea team at Oil Change International (OCI).