The Green Petrostate

Norway appeared ready to give miners what they wanted.

In June, Norwegian officials cordoned off more than 100,000 square miles of the ocean floor off the Nordic country’s coast for seabed mining projects, Mongabay wrote. It was the first in the world. Licenses were scheduled to be issued next year. By 2030, miners were planning to dig up cobalt, copper, zinc, and rare earth elements.

Politics derailed the plan recently, however, when the Socialist Left party announced they would not vote for the government’s budget if it included the mining project, Reuters reported. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre presides over a minority government, giving small parties like the Socialist Left significant power.

The project, meanwhile, was bucking a coalition of 32 countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, that oppose deep-sea mining.

Environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund, which was suing Norway over the proposal due to its potential damage to undersea habitats, applauded the Socialist Left’s move. “This is a pivotal moment for Norway to demonstrate global leadership by prioritizing ocean health over destructive industry,” the group said in a statement.

The development illustrated Norway’s unique relationship with sustainability.

On the one hand, Norway is extremely green-minded and a leader of sustainability internationally, using its sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, to put pressure on companies to be more sustainable. Meanwhile, for example, more electric vehicles roam the roads of the country than gas-guzzling vehicles, according to the BBC. Two-thirds of Norwegians heat their homes with heat pumps. Sustainable hydropower generates the country’s electricity. Officials are leading the fight against plastic pollution, too, added Phys.org.

But on the other hand, Norway is also a petrostate. Oil revenues are a mainstay in the economy. And the country is the largest per capita exporter of CO2 emissions, due to its large petroleum industry.

Some argue that the seabed mining is also vital to manufacturing renewable energy technologies, like solar panels and wind turbines. Officials said they wanted to access their own minerals for these technologies in order to avoid dependence on China, too, Le Monde noted.

This situation has been called the “Norwegian paradox,” explained the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd. “The global climate emergency is causing a wide range of human rights violations across the planet today and threatening to do so on a devastating scale in the years ahead,” he said. “In some ways, Norway is at the forefront of the global transition to a fossil-fuel-free future.”

But it must do more, he added.

Meanwhile, officials said the deep-sea mining plan has only been postponed. Two political parties that are slated to win in the parliamentary election next year, the Conservatives and Progress Party, support deep-sea mining, suggesting the proposal will be revived.

The government’s decision and other trends – including the success of left-wing political parties among voters, as Jacobin reported – suggest the paradox might be coming to an end. As climate researcher Esmeralda Colombo argued in the Verfassungsblog, activists have succeeded in challenging fossil-fuel projects in Norway’s courts, signaling that the massive industry is not as omnipotent as one might assume.

Even so, analysts say that Norway is headed for more turbulence because of its economic dependence on oil and gas.

Norway has done “some very wise things” in managing its petroleum resources, Erlend Hermansen at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo (CICERO) told the Guardian, adding that it faces a hard landing if it does not plan for its decline. “How do you transform that business in a society that’s going to net zero? That’s the billion-dollar question.”