Environmental smorgasbord

Evening is falling as I exit the Tvärbanan light rail system into the heart of the Stockholm suburb Hammarby Sjöstad. The glass on the surrounding storefronts and condos reflects the blue February sunlight, and as the cobalt Bombardier tram slides down the tree-lined boulevard, I pause in the Nordic dimness, unsure of where to go.

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I telephone Jonas Törnblom of the Swedish waste management company Envac to direct me. “Cross the street, walk past the real estate office and the café, and I’ll be outside,” he says. ‘Sold’ stickers on most listings in the office window indicate the popularity of the development, which will have 11,000 flats by 2015.

 

It’s hard to believe that this area was an industrial wasteland eleven years ago. Constructed using some of the most environmentally friendly materials available, Hammarby boasts half the ecological footprint of a traditional development. It’s just one in a series of initiatives that has enabled Sweden to achieve what some economists have claimed isn’t possible: strong economic growth and reduced emissions of greenhouse gases.

 

Envac manages the area’s waste—but also facilitates its energy production. Residents drop their pre-sorted garbage into outdoor chutes, and a system of underground pipes sucks the garbage to a central plant. There, waste turns into heat power, electricity, or fertilizer, and the rest is recycled or incinerated. The goal is for residents to produce half the energy they need.

 

Since light rail runs through the entire development, only a smattering of parking spots were planned. New residents complained, says Malena Karlsson, Hammarby Sjöstad Information Officer. So the developers built more garages—but priced spots at 1,500 SEK ($225 CAD) per month, revealing Sweden’s secret to low-carbon success.

 

“Don’t tell people what to do,” Karlsson smiles. “Make the undesirable behaviour expensive.”

How Swede it is

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Pragmatism and the use of environmental economics have allowed Sweden, a country of 9 million, to become a prosperous environmental role model.

 

David Boyd, environmental lawyer and Trudeau Scholar at the University of British Columbia, has been comparing Sweden’s environmental policies with Canada’s since 2002. In 2007, the Riksdag (Sweden’s parliament) invited him to provide an international perspective on Sweden’s progress toward sustainability.

 

“Sweden is continuing to lead the world in terms of tangible progress towards a sustainable future,” says Boyd. “Despite my best efforts, there’s no evidence to show that Canada has even begun to close the gap.”

 

Aside from the differences in size, Canada and Sweden share similar geography, climate, economic composition, and standard of living. Both countries enjoy vast natural resources.

 

But comparing environmental performance is another story. On Germanwatch’s 2008 Climate Change Performance Index, Sweden ranks first out of 56 while Canada places an embarrassing 53. Newsweek’s 2007 Index of Environmental Performance also puts Sweden first out of 134, and Canada 23. While our energy supply consists of 76.5 per cent fossil fuels, Sweden relies on a mix of hydro (10.5 per cent), waste and renewables (19.3), and nuclear (34.4).

 

“The pride of it all,” says Lars Westermark, Head of the Climate Policy Unit at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, is Sweden’s decoupling of its GDP and emissions growth.

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While Sweden’s economy has grown by 48 per cent since 1990, its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have fallen by nine per cent. Yet between 1990 and 2005, Canada’s economy grew by 51 per cent, while emissions grew by 22 per cent. Incidentally, while the Canadian mining industry’s GHG emissions (including the oil sands) increased by 79 per cent, its GDP increased by only 48 per cent.

 

Sweden uses a variety of economic instruments to influence energy use. Its environmental taxes include a carbon tax, enacted in 1991 on the use of fossil fuels and currently at $150/tonne CO2 emitted, plus sulphur and energy taxes. Industry, forestry, agriculture, aquaculture, and heat production are exempt from the energy tax and operators can pay up to five times below consumer rates.

 

In spite of an intense regulatory environment, Sweden is headquarters to numerous multinationals, including retailers IKEA and Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), packaging company TetraPak, and telecommunications firm Ericsson. A composite of international competitiveness ratings (including those of the World Bank and World Economic Forum) put Sweden first and Canada ninth. The International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development found in 2007 that competitiveness does not suffer when exporting countries impose a carbon tax, suggesting that subsidies and exemptions for energy-intensive industries may compensate for the negative effects.

 

It’s clear that a country can balance strong environmental regulation with economic success. So why has Sweden triumphed while we’ve fallen short?

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The secrets of success

 

Much like Canada, Sweden began as a “country of farmers,” says Westermark. “There is a strong feeling for the environment.” The country enshrined allemansrätten, or ‘every man’s right’ to have access to nature, in its Constitution in 1940. Meanwhile, Environment Canada wasn’t established until 1971.

 

When acid rain and the pesticide effects mentioned in Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring impacted Sweden in the 1960s, that tradition galvanized the population around environmental activism.

 

“Sweden was hit hard earlier than most countries,” explains Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, a Swedish scientist and founder of The Natural Step (TNS), an international non-profit organization which seeks to create a sustainable society. “People really reacted, and it moved up on the political agenda relatively quickly.” The oil crises of the 1970s also affected Sweden, and spurred investments in energy efficiency.

The first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment occurred in Stockholm in 1972.

 

“The Conference has kind of followed us,” says Magnus Schönning when I reach him in late January at his job at the County Administrative Board in Skane, Sweden. A Swedish ex-diplomat, Schönning was posted in Canada for six years. “My generation was thoroughly schooled in the need to keep Sweden clean.” An awareness campaign called “Keep Sweden Tidy” began in 1963, and its effects are felt to this day.

 

“The worst thing you could call someone when we were eight years old was ‘environmental crook,’” Schönning laughs. “I think a lot of that is still rubbing off on my—and my children’s—generation.”

 

Swedish politics have reflected this understanding. “The goal to create a truly sustainable society was more or less universally accepted,” says Schönning. “It stopped being a partisan issue.” This was aided in part by Sweden’s party-list proportional representation system, which many commentators view as a better political vehicle for reflecting a population’s concerns. In 1999, all seven political parties of the Riksdag adopted 15 environmental quality objectives to be met by 2020.

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This environmental consciousness has also permeated the Swedish corporate context, where businesses use a broader time horizon than their North American counterparts. “It has always been a long-term mindset in Sweden,” says Åsa Bjering, project manager for the Swedish Institute Management Program.

 

Ingrid Schullström, head of Corporate Social Responsibility at H&M, agrees. “We’re not looking at only the next year, we’re thinking about how we’re going to be successful for many years,” she says. “So we tend to think in a more sustainable way.”

 

As an example, Robèrt says Swedish company OK Petroleum publicly supported the carbon tax. “The jaws were dropping among politicians—why accept a tax on something you’re selling? And OK said, ‘It is the future, and we’re already selling fuels other than petroleum.’ That certainly helped. It is easier to be a proactive politician if there are proactive people around you.”

 

A strong taxation tradition, gradual implementation, and political commitment have allowed environmental legislation like the carbon tax to be implemented with relative ease.

 

“Every time you increase it there’s resistance,” says Leif Holmberg, Political Advisor in the Ministry of Environment. “But Swedish politicians don’t make environmental policy just lip service. They have been willing to introduce instruments that actually steer behaviour.”

And steer behaviour they have. Eva Samakovlis, head of the Environmental and Resource Economics division at Sweden’s National Institute of Economic Research, gives an emphatic “no” when asked if companies would reduce GHG emissions without these kinds of financial penalties, which the government was careful to offset with other incentives elsewhere.

 

“When we introduced the carbon tax, we lowered the energy tax,” notes Samakovlis, which helped shift the tax burden.

 

Former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion campaigned for such a revenue-neutral ‘green shift’ in the 2008 federal election. Many political commentators attributed his dismal results at the polls to his proactive stance on environmental legislation.

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Sweden’s successful implementation of a carbon tax is exactly what Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, favours. “[Carbon taxes won’t] have that much of an impact on the economy overall,” he told the International Herald Tribune in 2007.

 

Since 2003, Sweden has also employed the Renewable Energy Certificate scheme, a market-based system to expand the production of renewable electricity by 17 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2016. The scheme is a renewable energy cap-and-trade system that uses megawatt hours (MWh) instead of tonnes of CO2. This is an example of Sweden’s enthusiastic deployment of the ‘polluter pays’ principle laid out in the Rio Declaration of 1992—which Canada also signed.

 

By changing the incentives, the polluter-pays tactic has had a profound impact on Sweden’s approach to waste. “We make use of the waste streams of society,” such as forestry and organic wastes, explains Anders Nyberg, Political Advisor in the Ministry of Energy and Enterprise. Many extractive industries strive to use their waste to power their operations.

 

The energy-from-waste philosophy means that Sweden only sends 5 per cent of its waste to landfill (compared to 74 per cent in Canada), recycles 44 per cent, and incinerates 50 per cent. The incineration process is usually connected to systems of cogeneration, district heating and cooling, and combined heat and power throughout the country—as in Hammarby Sjöstad—in order to maximize efficiency.

 

“When you have a district energy network with one power plant and thousands of consumers, instead of changing a furnace in every house, you only have to refit the one plant to change the fuel source to renewable,” illustrates Schönning. District heating has a penetration rate of 50 per cent and growing, while in Canada, it’s five per cent.

 

Although Sweden’s overall population density is six times that of Canada, our urban centres are denser than most of Sweden’s. So we’re ideal targets; currently, Enwave provides downtown Toronto with district heating and cooling.

 

But hydro and renewables still account for only 30 per cent of Sweden’s energy. There is another, controversial source for the nation: nuclear. This is a debate Canadians can relate to.

Nuclear reactions

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Nuclear has always been a radioactive topic in Swedish politics. Sweden began using nuclear power in 1965. After the partial meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, Sweden held a referendum to determine the future of nuclear power. Citizens voted to phase out nuclear at the end of plants’ lifetime with provisos. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 further strengthened this resolve.

 

Between 1999 and 2005, Sweden closed two reactors. Ten reactors currently operate at three plants, and nuclear accounts for 45 per cent of electricity generation, with hydropower (45 per cent) and renewables rounding out the rest.

 

In February 2009, the governing Alliance for Sweden, consisting of four centre-right political parties, including the traditionally anti-nuclear Centre Party, agreed to lift the prohibition against constructing new nuclear generators. The terms specify that the government will not support the nuclear industry, through either direct or indirect subsidies.

 

Contrast that to funding for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., a Crown corporation responsible for managing nuclear energy development, which averages $433 million annually and has tripled since 2006.)

Also, the Swedish government is exploring unlimited plant operator liability; currently, it is capped at 3.3 billion SEK*, or $488 million, with the government insuring the balance. (Ontario operator liability, by contrast, is capped at $75 million.)

 

“This is a big compromise, obviously,” sighs Holmberg (a Centre Party member), his frustration evident. “But energy policy in Sweden has been locked for 35 years. And now suddenly, it is so much easier. I don’t like nuclear, but I think this is a great deal.”

 

In return for allowing new nuclear, the Alliance is aiming for renewable energy to make up 50 per cent of the country’s energy supply by 2020 (one per cent more than specified by the European Commission); for all cars in Sweden to be independent of fossil fuels by 2030; and for the country to be carbon neutral by 2050. Holmberg believes the financial and administrative roadblocks for nuclear will be a deterrent to new builds. “Before [nuclear operators] get the permits, we will have built a lot of renewables,” he says.

 

The Alliance recognizes uncertain energy policy causes instability, leading to high electricity prices and lack of adaptation for climate change. The plan represents a long-term strategy based on ecological sustainability, competitiveness, and security of supply.

 

“Nuclear is the most sustainable of all energy sources,” says Dr. Sven Kullander, Chairman of the Energy Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “It’s environmentally-friendly because it is a small turnover of material. The energy consumption of Sweden is equivalent to one truck filled with nuclear material [or] two million trucks filled with coal.”

 

Kullander recognizes proliferation, expense, and radioactive waste management concerns (Sweden stores all of its waste within the country, in long-term passive storage), and points to

renewables as a means to temper nuclear dependence. “Nuclear can never be a complete solution,” he says.

 

TNS founder Dr. Robèrt uses stronger language.

 

“Justifying nuclear power by the fact that it releases less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is [like choosing between] a plague or cholera, which is unworthy of leadership,” he says. “Leaders should talk about a future where we have neither plague nor cholera. … The nuclear debate worries me, because it takes time from the more constructive debate that we need now.”

 

But Swedish pragmatism prevails. Public opinion polls have shown growing support for nuclear because of the perceived lack of alternatives.

 

“It’s such a big part of the energy mix that I can’t really see it not being there for some time to come,” says government energy advisor Nyberg, who admits he is “not a great fan” of nuclear. “I think eventually nuclear will be phased out but [if eliminated now], electricity would have to be imported, and to be honest, our neighbours don’t always produce the nicest type of electricity.”

The myth of abundance

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The strong Swedish sentiment about their energy mix makes me wonder why Canadians remain so complacent. I ask ex-diplomat Magnus Schönning how two nature-loving countries can react so differently to climate change. He replies that Canadians aren’t always as close to nature as we believe.

 

“On rainy days in Ottawa, only two families on my street let their kids out to play—mine and another Swedish one. All the other kids stayed inside,” he remembers. “To me that is not being close to nature. Implementing environmental policy is harder when you don’t have that total appreciation of nature.”

 

Canadian scholar David Boyd identifies another misconception that has impeded progress. “It’s been a part of our founding myth as a nation that we have endless natural resources,” he says. “Cultural myths are pervasive and hard to dispel. We’re struggling to come to terms with the fact that one of our founding myths is profoundly flawed.”

 

As a result, Canada has taken a “wait and see” approach, says Maral Kassabian over tea in Toronto. Kassabian is a Canadian engineer who lived in Sweden for four years, and now co-edits Swedish-headquartered magazine Bioenergy International from Toronto.

“We have the resources, we have the technology. We’re not missing anything compared to Sweden,” she laments.

 

But we have something Sweden doesn’t—the oil sands. And this moneymaking resource has contributed to the resistance to meaningful carbon pricing and other polluter-pays environmental legislation, notes Per Rosenqvist, a climate expert with Sweden’s Ministry of Environment. Even closing coal-fired power plants in Alberta and Saskatchewan has been slow, says Boyd. (Ontario plans to cease coal-fired generation by 2014, but is replacing much of this with nuclear.)

 

Karl-Henrik Robèrt points to Sweden’s neighbour as an example of good oil management.

 

“In Norway, where oil and gas earn a fortune, oil companies are investing highly in the hydrogen economy in Iceland and exploring new energy systems,” he says. “Just because you have a natural resource, doesn’t mean you have to be aggressive to defend [it]. The future will need [renewable] energy.”

 

It also needs leadership on all fronts. “We need governments that are willing to craft visions of the future that incorporate sustainability,” says Boyd. “And they need to have the intestinal fortitude to implement policies that are going to change the country and the economy.”

 

While Stéphane Dion failed to effectively defend the carbon tax against heavy opposition, a stronger communicator with the support of the business community could succeed, says Boyd. But citizens and industry also need to take responsibility, like OK Petroleum did in Sweden.

 

There are signs of progress. Utility Epcor Power operates the largest biomass power plant in North America. British Columbia has implemented a carbon tax. Ontario and Quebec signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a joint cap-and-trade system, ready as early as 2010.

 

Back in Toronto, waiting impatiently for an antiquated red streetcar, I wonder if we’ll ever be able to catch up to the Swedes.

 

Schönning says we must try. “I could understand Canada having maybe twice the [per capita] GHG emissions that we do. But not almost four times higher. … I don’t think you can go on at the current levels. It’s simple as that.”

 

“I don’t think the world can accept having Canada not doing anything substantial.”

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*Note: The current Swedish legislation, released after the publication of this piece, talks about a 3.6 billion SEK cap.

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Also, several facts in this article are sourced from:

Chen, Yong and Francis X. Johnson (2008), "Sweden: greening the power market in a context of liberalization and nuclear ambivalence", in William M.Lafferty and Audun Ruud (eds), Promoting Sustainable Electricity in Europe, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, pp 219-250.