The Oil Drum

The current government is our socialist party supported by greens and former communists. The socialist party have in peak oil found an issue very well suited for their old traditions of statemanship. I think they are able to successfully accelerate this process. But I do not find them able to make our authorities more efficient and our business climate better. We need those improvements for thousands of small changes and new business needed to cope with peak oil and our lack of workplaces.

The opposition is a coalition of four parties M, Fp, C, Kd that are more liberal in the free market and free choise way and we are not afraid of doing changes since it is not our realtives who has jobs in the inefficient authorities.  M has allways been pro nuclear, Fp and Kd are now pro nuclear power. C has for 30 years been strongly anti nuclear. C is the traditional farmer party and very green but in reality their members would benefit enourmously from a focus on biomass power. (And our environmnet would benefit).  C are trying to change their nuclear policy but it is a delicate process. This might give a very strong pro biomass power policy for the oposition.

Peak oil might become an important election issue, this depends a lot on the oil world market during this spring and summer. We might get a situation where the current government and the opposition overbid each other with different kind of policies.

Both sides have a strong tendency to listen to well argued scientific reasoning.

Myself I am more or less jumping up and down in internal electronic forums shouting "peak oil" while trying to be a one man think-tank on what would be a better more focused peak oil policy then the emerging social democratic policy. I am part of the fringe of the opositions internal debate.

I think it is a question about focusing on a limited number of key technological  and market bottlenecks and policy issues and leave most of the work to the free market.  Our socialists dearly like to have expensive non focused programs of micromanaged incentives that give lots and lots of work for party members and byrocrates wich is logical since a fair number of them also think this is the best way to do things.

I am sure it is a dumb goal to become totally fossil fuel independent. The good one is to maximise the use of the biomass resources and other things we are better at then most of the world and then trade. This makes us nearly independant, it makes us more efficient in minimizing the global fossil fuel use and it is wise to have good things to export to be able to import whatever we need. That is, not having to buy much and being able to outbid anybody.