ERIC CAMPBELL: It’s a country where even oil companies say they have to end pollution.

BJORN OTTO SVERDRUP: “Climate science is clear – the planet is warming”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: And Norway wants everyone to have an electric car. 

[driving] “This Tesla I’m driving is the cheapest hire car in Oslo”.

But there’s a chilling edge to this green revolution.

[at glacier] “So when I was here 17 years ago this… we would have been in the glacier”.

TOM FOREMAN: “It was. It was about two kilometres further out than it is now”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Incredible and that island has just appeared out of nowhere as the glacier has gone back”.

TOM FOREMAN: “It has”.

RASMUS HANSSON: “I’m deeply embarrassed and I think most sensible Norwegians should be fairly embarrassed because frankly speaking the idea about Norway being such a great contributor to solving the climate change is a scam”.

[TITLES]: Oslo, Norway
Keep Calm and Drill On
Reporter: Eric Campbell

ERIC CAMPBELL: Like her five million compatriots, Thina Saltvedt won the lottery when she was born Norwegian. 

THINA SALTVEDT: “You don’t have to travel very far to get out into nature. You can just go on the tram and it takes you ten minutes and you’re out in the forest where you can go for a run or in the winter time you go skiing, so and you’re even close to the sea so you can go swimming”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: And Norway’s not just beautiful – it’s filthy rich.

THINA SALTVEDT: [Oil analyst] “It has been voted as the best country to live in in the world because the living standard is very high and of course the reason why we have this high living standard is of course the oil. I was born the year we started to produce oil in Norway and of course I’m part of the oil generation here in Norway, where we have seen that the fortune has been increasing, the living standard has been increasing. We get a lot of from the state, school, university, we have the high education here. We don’t even have to pay to go to the dentist”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: When Thina Saltvedt isn’t jogging through the forest, she’s chief oil analyst with an investment bank.

THINA SALTVEDT: “We’ve been lucky, but I’m not sure that the coming generations will be that lucky”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Because Norway now faces the challenge of all resource economies – falling prices and rising emissions. So it’s vowing to lead the world in going green. The State oil company Statoil is even pushing for a global carbon tax. 

BJORN OTTO SVERDRUP: [Statoil] “A carbon tax is a very important thing. It’s a very important instrument to fuel a transformation and provide incentives to minimise CO2 emissions. It might sound strange that an oil and gas company that kind of produce carbon is advocating, please put a tax on carbon, but that’s actually what we’re doing”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Norway certainly has the money to pay for change. Unlike many resource rich countries it didn’t squander its wealth, it put the profits into a national piggy bank called the Sovereign Wealth Fund. The fund was set up in the nineties by some far sighted civil servants led by Martin Skancke. It’s now the world’s biggest.

MARTIN SKANCKE: [Wealth Fund Consultant] “It’s like having an endowment where you spend the returns every year but you leave the capital intact”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “So what is that capital now?”

MARTIN SKANCKE: “It’s about nine hundred billion dollars”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Nine hundred billion dollars”.

MARTIN SKANCKE: “Yeah”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “So that’s about a hundred and seventy thousand dollars per person”.

MARTIN SKANCKE: “Yeah. Yeah”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “That’s a lot of money”.

MARTIN SKANCKE: “So it’s a lot of money. So it, it maybe two times our GDP”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: And Norway has shown how quickly it can transform its economy. You just have to visit the oil capital Stavanger to see that.

[walking along wharf] “Just a generation ago, this was just a sleepy fishing town. But after the first offshore oil fields were found in 1969, Stavanger very quickly became Norway’s Saudi Arabia. In fact the money flowed in so thick and fast, Norwegians started calling it the ‘olje eventyr’ the oil fairy tale. The question now of course is will it have a happy ending?”

For many people life in Stavanger really has been idyllic.

KALLE RINGSBY: “People have lived in this region feels that the economy is strong and I think they have the opportunities to make dreams come true”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Kalle Ringsby and his wife Kristin work for the oil industry association. They have three small children, born under the generous maternity entitlements of Norway’s oil funded welfare state. 

KRISTIN RINGSBY: “I can stay home for… I think it’s, is it 49 weeks? And still get paid through work. So it’s wonderful”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Wow. What about the fathers? Do you get time off as well?”

KALLE RINGSBY: “Yes, yeah”. 

ERIC CAMPBELL: But these days they don’t just think about their children’s future, they worry about the planet. 

KALLE RINGSBY: “Of course in our job it’s a discussion and people talk about it, but I think the Norwegian oil and gas industry are good about... think about the environment. They’re trying to invest in the environment and I’m pretty comfortable that we will find a solution together. Because that’s Norwegian’s strength – they find a solution together”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: At last year’s Paris Climate Change Conference, Norway agreed to aim for carbon neutrality by 2050. In June, Parliament voted to move the target forward to 2030. Norway already has a carbon tax of around fifty dollars a tonne. The conservative government says it’s working well. 

TORD LIEN: [Minister of Petroleum and Energy] “It’s good for financing the welfare state and it’s good for really giving the industry a strong incentive to reduce CO2 emissions”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: In most countries electric cars are an expensive statement for cashed up greenies. Here, massive subsidies make them the cheapest cars to buy or hire.

[driving in Norway] “I’ve just been to the main hire company and the electric cars are less than half the price of diesel cars and because the small model I wanted wasn’t available, I’ve been given a free upgrade to a Tesla S90D. So this Tesla I’m driving is the cheapest hire car in Oslo. Only in Norway… oh and you don’t have to bring back a full tank or any tank”.

Norway exempts electric cars from the crippling import and registration taxes that petrol guzzlers have to pay. You even get unlimited free parking at city metres and you just plug in a cable to charge for free. Perks like that have made little Norway the biggest market for Teslas after the US. And all the electricity comes from water. 

TORD LIEN: “Our very important and very efficient hydropower facilities do supply 96% of our total consumption and on top of that, we also have some very good wind resources that increasingly are developed at the moment”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: There’s just one small problem. While Norway’s subsidising electric cars and building bike lanes across the land, it’s continuing to mine oil and gas at sea. In May the government granted 13 companies exploration licences in the south Barents Sea along the Russian border. That will potentially open vast new fields of oil and gas on the edge of the High Arctic.

TORD LIEN: “Oil and gas fields do tend to deplete and to be able to maintain our position as a supplier of energy resources to a global population that demands increasingly more energy, we do have to continue exploring new acreage”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: And that has geens seeing red.

RASMUS HANSSON: [MP, Green Party] “I think it’s absolutely undeserved to call Norway a leader on climate policy. We have exported oil and become rich on exported oil which has, when it’s been burned all over the world, contributed something like fourteen billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. And on top of that, we’re continuing to explore new oil so that’s what Norway is really doing”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: And that is the great paradox of Norway, a country that prides itself on green measures at home, but pays for them by selling fossil fuels abroad. It’s an odd look for a country on the frontline of climate change. 

[at the port] “Norway prides itself on being a polar nation and the next place we’re heading is where the change is happening fastest – a place where no one stays a global warming sceptic for long”.

This is the very edge of Norway, the Svalbard Archipelago high in the Arctic. It’s as far north as any country has settled and even boasts the world’s most northerly town, Longyearbyen, just 1300 kilometres from the North Pole. 

It began life as a coal mining settlement, but as the coal ran out it reinvented itself as a base of Arctic tourism. Even at the height of summer it’s a chilly place – though not nearly as cold as it used to be. 

[just outside of Svalbard] “I first came to Svalbard 17 years ago, and I have to say it’s extraordinary how much things have changed”.

Back then in April 1999, Svalbard wasn’t just frozen, the sea was too. Before the annual summer melt, you could ride snow mobiles right across the archipelago, dodging the odd polar bear as you scooted across the fjords. 

We rode ten kilometres over the frozen Arctic Ocean to an iceberg. Our guide then was Jason Roberts, an Australian adventurer who’d moved to Svalbard to be an Arctic cinematographer. Jason Roberts is still here – the ice often isn’t.

JASON ROBERTS: “Since your visit last time, the climate has changed drastically. The oceans have become much warmer, and the open water and not frozen ocean in summer is not new to climate change, that’s historical, that’s normal. What we’ve seen in the recent years is no sea ice, or very little sea ice in the inner fjords in the winter and that’s due to climate change”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Last winter for the first time anyone could remember, the water didn’t freeze at all. 

JASON ROBERTS: “This winter was impossible to do what we did 17 years ago. The ocean was nearly not frozen anywhere on the west coast of Svalbard. Completely open water up to the beach line which we’d never experienced before. We’ve experienced low sea ice years, but this was no sea ice year I call it. So you could really see the change which affects us living here. Well you know as I said, you know, we love it when the ocean’s frozen. It’s our highway to get out of town”. 

ERIC CAMPBELL: We’re heading out to see for ourselves. Our destination is one of Svalbard’s fastest retreating glaciers, Nordenskjold. Even on a calm summer’s day you need to take survival gear. Arctic weather is unpredictable and can turn dangerous in an instant. 

Our guide, Tom Foreman, is armed and we soon see why. This hungry polar bear has been roaming the glacier in search of food. Nordenskjold looks enormous as we approach, but it’s not as giant as it used to be.

TOM FOREMAN: “It’s gone back about five kilometres, since the 50s or 60s”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Wow”.

TOM FOREMAN: “Yeah. Previously the island ahead of us, that was completely covered and the island was first became visible somewhere around 2000”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Oh right so when I was here 17 years ago, this… we would have been in the glacier”.

TOM FOREMAN: “It was, it was about two kilometres further out than it is now”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Incredible and that island has just appeared out of nowhere as the glacier’s gone back”.

TOM FOREMAN: “It has. The glacier you can see now here is back on its grounding line so it’s the base of the front of the glacier is all standing on rock, rather than floating on the open ocean”. 

ERIC CAMPBELL: We soon see the awesome might of the natural forces at work here as giant chunks of ice carve into the fjord. [Ice cliffs crashing into the sea] We have to stay back hundreds of meters to avoid being swamped by the waves.

“Wow! That’s amazing”. 

TOM FOREMAN: “Yeah, that’s absolutely spectacular. This is a small face compared to some. When you see those blocks and they’re the size of skyscrapers coming down – it’s awe-inspiring. It’s kind of hard to believe that we’re having such a heavy impact on things that are just this big. They’re such immense fields of ice, so much erosive power as well. If you go over there, there’s actually a melt water tunnel. The melt water river coming out, that’s why it’s all such dirty brown water”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Sediment being washed out”.

TOM FOREMAN: “Yeah”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Even more striking is behind the face of the glacier where the ice has thinned dramatically. Glaciers do advance and retreat naturally, but it’s the speed of the change that’s alarming. 

TOM FOREMAN: “So glaciers thin, glaciers grow, they get longer, they get shorter. I mean they’re… the ocean has been hotter in the past than it is at the moment. There’s been times in the past, in the Earth’s history, that there’s been no ice at all, but the times and the scales of this change though was geological time scales and species and animals had time to actually evolve and catch up or die off in a natural way. The changes that are happening now I think on this planet are on a scale or a time, a timescale, that is happening over is mass extinction time scales – really fast – too fast for species to keep up”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Svalbard has become emblematic of the changing climate, but the government says it has no plans to mine for oil this far north. The south Barents Sea has far less ice. 

TORD LIEN: “Ice will mean some operational challenges. But of course they will not, the companies will not be allowed to conduct any industrial scale activities in the region if they can’t prove that they are prepared for all kinds of operational challenges they could meet in the region”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: But many who work across the Arctic believe oil mining anywhere in the region is inherently unsafe – even the Barents Sea experiences months of total darkness. Freezing weather compounds the dangers of oil spills.

TOM FOREMAN: “Any sort of oil exploration in the Arctic I feel is irresponsible, it’s a very, very high risk area to do it and everything about it is more difficult”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Tom Foreman gained a Masters in Environmental Sustainability before coming to work in Arctic logistics and risk assessment. 

TOM FOREMAN: “If there’s any spills, if there’s any difficulties, if there’s any breaks of equipment, everything is more difficult, everything takes more time and at the same time, it’s so much harder to clean up because it’s colder and also the ecosystems are so much more sensitive up here. The infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, there’s so much oil infrastructure there already designed for cleaning it up and it still took weeks for them to get Deepwater Horizon.” [huge chunk of ice falls into fjord] 

ERIC CAMPBELL: “Mm but here things could go wrong”.

TOM FOREMAN: “Yeah [laughs] things can go very wrong up here. The number of predictable elements up here are fewer. There’s very much more that you can’t control, that you wouldn’t even imagine could go wrong in an environment like this”. 

ERIC CAMPBELL: [in boat by ice] “The first place Norway looked for oil was actually up here in Svalbard. Now it was never exploited and for decades the high Arctic has been exempt from mining. But as the sea ice thins and the pack ice retreats it’s quite possible Norway will extend its oil drilling areas even further north. The government insists the age of oil isn’t ending any time soon”.

But the age of coal is, at least for Norway. Just as falling prices have closed most of Svalbard’s mines, Norway’s wealth fund has sold all its coal investments.

MARTIN SKANCKE: “For coal I think it’s obvious that the best strategy is to get out of coal as soon as possible”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: “But you see a time where the Norwegian Sovereign Fund won’t be investing in oil?”

MARTIN SKANCKE: “Well I see a time when oil companies will not exist because at some point we cannot produce more oil, we cannot produce fossil fuels at all because... unless we find effective and efficient technologies to extract the O2 emissions”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: The industry insists it’s doing just that – Statoil hasn’t just lavished money on its headquarters it’s invested heavily in carbon capture – a process of removing carbon dioxide before it pollutes the atmosphere.

BJORN OTTO SVERDRUP: “What we’re doing there is we take CO2, capture it at the facility and we deposit it underneath in…kilometres deep…in depleted oil and gas reservoirs and store it permanently. So over the last years we have stored a total of nearly 50 million tonnes of CO2”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: But so far the process captures just 9% of CO2. So to meet its targets Norway is buying carbon credits from the EU. That means it’s paying other countries to pollute less so it can keep polluting more.

RASMUS HANSSON: “I am deeply embarrassed and I think most sensible Norwegians should be fairly embarrassed because frankly speaking the idea about Norway being such a great contributor to solving the climate change is a scam. We aren’t. We are contributing to the problem, much, much, much more than we are contributing to the solution”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: But in a world that still needs oil, Norway says it’s doing it best.

BJORN OTTO SVERDRUP: “We’ve been able to produce the lowest CO2 per barrel produced in the world. You might call us petroholics but at least we’re trying to be responsible petroholics then”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Like his government, Kalle hopes the oil continues to flow for generations.

KALLE RINGSBY: “I would definitely recommend my kids to work in the industry”. 

ERIC CAMPBELL: But even here the fairy tale seems to be ending. Global oil prices have halved since 2014. While Norway’s wealth fund has cushioned the blow, Stavanger has been feeling the winds of change.

KALLE RINGSBY: “The biggest change is that some neighbours have lost their jobs and in the family people have lost their jobs and I think everyone is concerned about the situation in the industry and for the country. But in Norway I think they have invested in a good way, in funds and in the future so I think the country itself will stand strong in this and continue a little bit more”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Optimists hope prices will recover. Thina Saltvedt fears Norway’s easy run is over. She wonders if there will even be a profit from the new Arctic oil.

THINA SALTVEDT: “I’m not sure about that. I think that’s a question which is important to ask, because I think that, you know, the change or the switch to other energy sources, especially in the transportation sector will have a big impact on the oil market and I think they will go much faster than the oil companies are predicting today. So I’m not sure if they’re actually going to be profitable in the next twenty/thirty years so we might actually be investing in something which is not giving us the opportunities we hope in the future”.

ERIC CAMPBELL: Summer is now over in Oslo. People are looking forward to the ski season though in recent years it’s grown much shorter and wetter. The government is proudly pressing on with plans to cut emissions while exporting the fuel that cause them. The end of this fairy tale is still to be written.