- cross-posted to:
- energy@slrpnk.net
Didn’t watch the video but a guess would be:
Because Swedish is hard to learn and internet trolls are less likely to learn it for a small population. This removes much of the chaff that English language news receives from many different sources, resulting in much more honest news.
This means that ten or twenty years ago the Swedes were given accurate climate information and trusted the people who said it was a danger. They actioned on it by pivoting into new energy technologies like recycling and reuse.
The lack of oil industry lobbying helped preserve the trust in government and so government was trust to make the right decisions for public policy with regard to that climate information.
Swedish news media is also held to a higher standard than English language publications. All major English speaking countries having a “garbage paper” that spouts bottom feeder ideas and they are conveniently owned by one company that coordinates the fronts of the culture war.
With Germany it’s the opposite: If our economy sucks, our emissions go down. Mostly due to lower energy (fossil fuel) consumption.
To be fair 10% fall in emissions for 0.3% fall in GDP is still a great trade.
Also Germany did have falling emissilns with a growing economy.
Yeah, the emissions have nothing to do with the faltering economy. Over 30 years of inaction in creating modern (including digital infrastructure) by conservative politicians a lot more so. Germany is a museum of the 90s.
Deutsche Welle (DW) on top.
Have to watch this later because of the surprising title. The current governemnt declared they would abandon some climate goals and hope that this strategy would help long term climate goals in the future, as by magic or something.
They are looking at the time since 1990. So a lot of these are decisions made by previous governments, which just take time to go to actual infrastructure. As an example, when you want to turn your district heating system green, the government first has to pass the laws to push the company owning it to do that(regardless of state owned or private). Then the actual engineering begins of what to built instead, then it gets built and only then you are actually saving emissions. Obviously that process takes years from the first law to the actual say large heat pump being built. However when you have the company already in the process of building the heat pump, even a change in government and sometimes even a change in law, does not mean they shut down the project. At this point it is fairly likely that sunk cost just drives it forward.
That is to say the current Swedish governments actions will start to be felt about now and really start to cause problems maybe around 2026 or so.
Yeah, if they where not it would be terrible. When it comes to their starting province Sweden chose easy mode.