Tuesday 15 January 2008

High Voltage Hypocrisy

Riksdagen, the Swedish Parliament, continues to march out of step with it's constituency. In the Old Days, it was the Temperance movement that traditionally was the most over-represented of all lobby groups when a vast majority of the MPs were Teetotallers, far more than in the population in general.
Today anti nuclear sentiments are chronically overrepresented. A recent poll verifies again that Swedish MP:s are more negative than the common Swede, something that pollster and professor Sören Holmberg at the University of Gothenburg has been able to show through more than two decades now.
Energy policy and energy politics in this country have been gridlocked ever since the misfortunate referendum in 1980. It's inconclusive result (you could either vote no, yes or maybe, to nuclear power, yours truly voted yes, of course)have ever since held swedish political system ransom to their own dated standpoints, hastily made a quarter of a century ago.
Meanwhile in reality, power demand have soared, not diminished. "Deregulation" (of demand, not sypply) and "CO2-tax" (for virtually emission free nuclear and hydroelectric power!) have quadrupled electricity prices. At the same time the ten remaining reactors (two are shut down) are trimmed to produce much more energy than they were designed for, resulting in a wave of incidents and reports of criminal sloppiness the last couple of years.
So, after 30 years of trying to rid us of nuclear energy, it still produces close to 50 percent om the nations needs. Hydroelectric power supplies the other half – with the exception of a measly 3-4 pct of politically correct and vastly more expensive "renewable" sources.
In spite of all this, Parliament still sounds like if people would only dim their lights and powercompanies only would invest in one or two more windmill parks out at sea and in the wilderness up north, things would be just fine. Like drinking so many glasses of ginger ale while people are getting sloshed on moonshine, to complete the analogy of sobriety above.
The solution? Well, six out of four Swedes are for more nuclear energy. There are still four great rivers up north (no-one lives there anyway) to explore for hydroelectric power. Either won't add a single molecule of CO2 to the atmosphere . . .

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"It's inconclusive result (you could either vote no, yes or maybe, to nuclear power..."

I've read (elsewhere in the blogosphere) that the choices were more like No, Emphatically no, or Hell no! There really wasn't a 'Yes, we'll have more, please' option. But perhaps the real choices had lost something in the translation.

Would you care to comment? How was the pro-nuclear choice worded?

Ola Tedin said...

Dear Brad,

Thank's for your comment.here´s what happend:

The referendum on nuclear power in Sweden 1980 had three options that got the following results:

1 Yes: 18.9 percent

2 Keep it now, but get rid of it when possible: 39.1

3 No: 38.7

As you can see both yes and no get's a majority when combined with no 2.
The resulting gridlock has completely paralyzed energy politics in this country.

Ola

Anonymous said...

Thanks Ola. The Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Sweden tells it a little differently, and appears to be what I read before.

Ola Tedin said...

Well, that just goes to show the basic problem of Wikipedia, does it not? Knowledge by consensus.

The stats I used in my first answer are from scb.se, Swedens bureau of statistics.

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