[owen] Ok, so it's tiresome, but I HEART Denmark

[Arne & Athena Kildegaard]

  Flush With Energy


By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: August 9, 2008

Copenhagen

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html#secondParagraph> 


Thomas L. Friedman

Go to Columnist Page » 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html> 


The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on 
the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons — 
maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room 
after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall 
light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our 
toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I 
say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! 
I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could 
be as energy efficient as Greenland!

A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in 
Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush 
hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the 
traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the 
percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or 
school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike 
lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, 
too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.

What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was 
raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for 
biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab 
oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to 
that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today 
it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians 
making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more 
offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was 
lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes 
imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and 
building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow 
their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave 
birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most 
competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of 
its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with 
energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said 
Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It 
just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste 
heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and 
hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to 
provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)

There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline 
because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy 
standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has 
actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For 
example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, 
one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from 
Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency 
products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 
to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 
2007 for Danish exports as a whole.

“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is 
one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, 
said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. 
Today it is zero.”

Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil 
shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, 
people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” 
Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is 
not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher 
to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax 
reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the 
revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — 
so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save 
energy and develop renewable energy.”

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy 
companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s 
and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply 
can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend 
the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 
months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”