资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

The shift away from ecology towards climatology in Norwegian environmental policy in the late 1980s and 1990s was not accidental. A main mover was the Labor Party politician Gro Harlem Brundtland who did not want to deal with unruly and highly vocal Deep Ecologists. Better then to start afresh with a different set of environmental scholars appealing to the technocratic tradition within the Labor Party. Instead of changing the ethical and social ways of dealing with environmental problems as the Deep Ecologists were advocating, she was looking for technological and economic solutions. And she mobilized an international regime of carbon capture storage (CCS), tradable carbon emissions quota (TEQs), and clean development mechanisms (CDMs), all of which eventually were approved in Kyoto in 1997. This move towards technocracy and cost-benefit economics reflects a post-Cold War turn towards utilitarian capitalism, but also a longing to showcase Norway as an environmental pioneer country to the world. The underlying question was how to reconcile the nation's booming petroleum industry with reduction in climate gas emissions. Should the oil and gas stay underground and the country strive towards the ecologically informed zerogrowth society the Deep Ecologists were envisioning? Or could growth in the petroleum industry take place without harming the environment as the Labor Party environmentalists argued?

The summer of 1989 was unusually hot in Norway and the sweltering heat wave provided ammunition for a parliamentary argument about global warming. The Prime Minister and the former Chair for the World Commission on Environment and Development, Gro Harlem Brundtland, pushed hard for an ambitious program aimed at stabilizing carbon emissions by the 1990s. Her goal was to prove to the world that Norway took Our Common Future (1987) and its quest for sustainable development seriously. For Brundtland, this was no minor topic. She was up for re-election that fall and for more than one-third of the Norwegian electorate, environmental concerns were the most important issue in deciding whom they would vote for (Aardal and Henry 1995, 19). Brundtland used environmental concerns to push her success in this realm, and sway voters to vote for her.

But why global warming? This paper will examine Norwegian climate politics and policy in the late 1980s and 1990s, and attempt to explain the shift from a focus on ecology towards climate. In the late 1980s there were still valid scientific questions being raised in the scientific community with respect to the evidence provided by climatologists (Weart 2003; Fleming 2005; Edwards 2010). In addition, the Norwegian environmentalists, though concerned about global warming, were pushing politicians to address ecological depletion first. As will be argued, the political shift away from ecology towards climatology was not accidental. To Brundtland, the ecological approach meant having to negotiate with the unruly and highly vocal Deep Ecologists. She decided it was better then to start afresh with a different set of environmental scholars who would appeal to the technocratic and macroeconomic tradition of the Labor Party. Instead of changing the ethical and social ways of dealing with environmental problems as the Deep Ecologists were advocating, she was looking for technological and economic solutions. As a result, she mobilized an international regime of carbon capture storage (CCS), tradable carbon emissions quotas (TEQs), and clean development mechanisms (CDMs), all of which eventually were approved in Kyoto in 1997.

This move towards technocracy and cost-benefit economics reflects a post-Cold War turn towards utilitarian capitalism, but also, as I will argue, a longing to showcase Norway as an environmental pioneer country to the world. The underlying question was how to reconcile the nation's booming petroleum industry with a reduction in climate gas emissions. Should the oil and gas stay underground and the country strive towards the ecologically informed zero-growth society the Deep Ecologists were envisioning? Or could growth in the petroleum industry take place without harming the environment as the Labor Party environmentalists argued?