Transcript:
Daniel Sollien: For quite a few years I was very quiet about it. I didn’t tell anybody. But gradually, it just grew and grew. And that was it.
Some years ago, working as a geologist in southwest Norway, Daniel Sollien’s world as he knew it began to slowly unravel.
Daniel: I was starting to read these books about cognitive bias. I was starting to think, hmm, so what type of biases do I have?
At first, it was just about improving his work – which was building geological models for Equinor, Norway’s oil giant. Daniel was keen to challenge any irrational thinking that might be skewing his models.
Daniel: …suddenly I had a bit of time on my hands, and I started reading… I wanted to get better at my job.
But page after page, Daniel found, something bigger was starting to shift. What had started as a professional curiosity soon spilled over into other parts of his life. Until he found himself questioning more than just his geological models.
Daniel: And that became quite difficult. I got really concerned about what we were doing, really. I thought, what are we actually doing?
What they were doing was exploring for and extracting oil and gas from Norway’s continental shelf to export around the world for energy. And, in the process, as Daniel came to realize, changing the face of the planet.
That didn’t sit right with him. Working for the Norwegian oil company was very well respected and very well paid. And no one else around him really seemed to be asking these questions. But, as time wore on, Daniel found the voice inside – the one asking why – just grew louder and louder.
Daniel: Yeah, it transformed me somehow. And as time went past that really bugged me that I don’t see that things are changing… I was really, really frustrated that nothing was happening.
Eventually, in mid 2024 – still working for Equinor – Daniel joined a movement.
Daniel: …because I was working for the oil industry, I thought somebody like me should really speak up.
So, when they asked me if I wanted to come along, I said yes.
The Kårstø is just north of Stavanger, so it takes about an hour and a half to drive there. And I was asked to pick up Greta Thunberg on the way up. So of course that was quite… quite something.
Yes, if you’re wondering, that is THE Greta Thunberg Daniel’s talking about… She was part of the same movement and happened to be staying nearby at the time, so he agreed to collect her.
Daniel: She’s not from here, of course, she’s Swedish, but she was living with somebody on the island, so I went to pick her up, which was nice. We had a nice conversation in the car… and then you need to take a ferry together because you have to go to the other side of the county on a ferry.
We put on our rain gear because we were expecting it to rain all day and then we drove to Kårstø.
We came down to the one main gate and of course that was quite… I’ve never done anything… I’ve never been in protest like this or action at all so that was quite nerve-racking.
Daniel and Greta and 40-50 others were joining an Extinction Rebellion climate protest against the oil and gas industry. It was at a port where ships carrying fossil fuels come to fuel up. Some protestors were blocking the terminal so the ships couldn’t dock to fill up their tanks. Daniel wasn’t involved in that part of it though.
Daniel: I was just standing by the roadside because I was going to be the spokesperson. So that of course meant that they had sent out my phone number. So, I spoke to quite a few newspapers. I was on national TV…
The headlines were striking: ‘Oil worker joins a demonstration against oil industry…’
Here’s Daniel on the evening news:
‘Translation: Despite the fact that I love my job, I am here because the situation is so serious, and far too little is being done. I am worried about my children’s future. We need Equinor and the politicians to create a plan for phasing out oil and gas now. I can no longer just sit on the sidelines; I have to take action.’
Several months after joining the protest, Daniel ended up having to quit his job with Equinor. He and the company made a deal. And he can’t say much more about it.
Daniel: Now comes the bit I can’t really talk too much about because (fade out)
Months down the track, he’s still looking for work. He’s currently retraining to become a teacher. And that conflict – the one that made him question his job and drove him to speak out – he still feels it all around him. And there just aren’t that many people that want to talk about it.
Daniel: It’s a silent taboo. It’s just not talked about.
The silence around Norway’s oil – and what it means for the planet’s future – doesn’t just exist within the country, but outside of it too. Better known for fjords, nature-lovers and social welfare, Norway often escapes scrutiny for its stance on oil and gas.
But when you drill down, here are the facts: Norway is one of the world’s major fossil fuel producers. It’s Europe’s biggest oil and gas supplier. Like Russia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, it’s gotten extremely wealthy off of giant oil and gas reserves. Those riches have created the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which is heavily invested in the global fossil fuel trade . Today, Norway is investing more than ever in its oil and gas industry . All the while exporting hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 emissions .
But unlike other petrostates, Norway has also built a reputation as a climate leader. For its EVs, hydropower and heat pumps.
So exactly how does that square with its fossil fuel expansion? And how did this nation, so deeply invested in petroleum, manage to garner such a clean, green image?
Andreas Randøy: …they just don’t see the contradiction.
Elin Boasson: It’s now a situation where it’s not the common interest any longer, but it’s still perceived in this way.
Daniel: We’re about to run ourselves off the cliff. For what?
As we’ll discover Norway’s story is not just about Norway. It’s about the rest of us too. I’m Charli Shield. You’re listening to Living Planet.
Way back when, in the 1950s, not many people were confident the seas north of Norway concealed rich oil and gas deposits. But after a couple of false starts, drillers eventually uncovered what was to become the bedrock of the Norwegian economy .
Elin Lerum Boasson: Oil was discovered in the late 60s, early 70s on the Norwegian continental shelf. The Norwegian government invested a lot in this new industry. And the investments were enormo us.
Elin Lerum Boasson is a professor of political science at the University of Oslo.
Elin: And I also have a part-time position at CICERO, the Center for Climate Research.
Around the same time as these oil discoveries, scientists were beginning to reckon with an alarming truth: the emissions from burning coal, oil and gas for energy were transforming the Earth’s atmosphere with devastating consequences.
And it was against this backdrop, in 1981, that Norway swore in its first female prime minister – Gro Harlem Brundtland.
A doctor by training and previously the country’s first female environment minister, Brundtland became known for linking public health and the environment. She’s widely remembered as spearheading ‘sustainable global development’ – as chair of the UN Commission that led to the 1992 ’Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro .
Elin: Gro Halem Brundtland, the famous Norwegian prime minister, had a very central role in placing climate on the global agenda.
And while internationally she was busy championing a healthy climate, at home in Norway, Brundtland’s government was greenlighting oil and gas drilling in the North and Barents Seas .
Elin: At that stage, the government had already invested a lot in oil. So, it was simply not an option to stop this activity. It would have been a tragedy economically for Norway, if we had stopped oil and gas exploration.
So, they carried on. And to date, billions of barrels of oil have been pumped from the Norwegian continental shelf – in turn, pumping billions of Norwegian kroner into the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which is now worth an estimated 2 trillion US dollars – for a population of about 5.6 million people.
Andreas Randøy: She allowed for increased extraction of fossil fuels. And there was really no mention of this contradiction.
Andreas Randøy is a climate and energy advisor at Greenpeace Norway. From his perspective, Brundtland’s leadership was the beginning of a powerful, enduring narrative crafted by the Norwegian government. One that made it look as though they were serious about the climate, while never truly contemplating an end to fossil fuel production – the very industry undermining sustainable global development.
Andreas Randøy: The Norwegian government has been very good at communicating, branding the country as an environmentally sustainable country… (fade out)
Andreas says they’ve been so successful at doing this, he believes that’s partly why so many Norwegians don’t question oil.
Andreas Randøy: The government and the oil industry are deeply intertwined. There’s a trend of politicians going back and forth between oil companies or the oil industry lobby organizations and back into party politics… it is just not controversial in Norway to work with fossil fuels, to open up new oil fields despite this clearly being a violation of the climate commitments that we’ve made.
At first glance, Norway’s efforts look pretty good. On average, Norwegians emit 7 tons of co2 per year – which is half of the US average .
That’s mostly because the country has about 50% renewable energy in its energy mix – that comes mostly from hydropower. Since the 1990s, its electricity has been almost entirely clean thanks to the hydropower. It also has the highest per capita rate of heat pump installation in Europe.
And yes, Norway famously also leads the world in per capita electric vehicle sales. Almost 100% of new cars bought in Norway are electric. And EVs now account for about a third of all vehicles on Norwegian roads .
Norway was also one of the first countries to introduce a carbon tax on its oil drilling in 1991 and it currently has one of the highest nominal carbon taxes in the world .
Then there’s the Nordic nation’s enthusiastic support for international climate negotiations. It’s ratified every major global climate agreement since 1993, as well as contributed billions to tropical rainforest protection and given generously to the UN climate negotiations to help support ongoing work and low-income country participation.
Elin Lerum Boasson: Norway has always supported strong international agreements on climate.
But, Elin says, peel back the layers on these efforts and Norway’s reputation as a ‘climate leader’ is less impressive than it seems at face value.
Elin: Because international climate politics have been challenging for several decades, it has not been very hard to be a leader, especially… in the UN-related forums.
Charli: The bar is low, you mean?
Elin Boasson: The bar is super low, and Norway has always been interested in developing flexibility mechanisms that can enable Norway to finance emissions reductions elsewhere. So, it has been the backbone of Norwegian climate governance for a long time to invest in reductions elsewhere.
This strong support for reducing emissions abroad, she explains, was a strategy developed around the time the Brundtland government was trying to juggle its investments in oil and gas with its goal to appear as a trailblazer in sustainable development.
Elin: We can’t be a climate leader and also not go bankrupt at the same time. So, we have to find a way to align these interests. And that’s why we very early on promoted emissions trading.
Since the 1990s, Norway has been a strong advocate for things like emissions trading and carbon offsets. So, those are ways of paying for pollution rather than cutting it directly. In practice, that means either buying credits to keep emitting, or paying for projects elsewhere, like planting trees, that are supposed to soak up carbon.
These tools are widely used by governments around the world to meet climate targets. But they’re also widely criticized… because they don’t reduce emissions at the source, and carbon offsets in particular have been tied to corruption and questionable accounting .
And for Norway, they’ve served a specific purpose. As Elin puts it, they’ve effectively allowed the country to meet its targets without having to take a good hard look at its oil and gas production.
Elin Boasson: The reason that Norway has met its, or at least some of its climate targets have always been that we have been very willing to invest in emission reductions outside of Norway.
Norway has also spent years promoting another controversial carbon policy. Carbon capture and storage. The idea is to trap CO2 from power plants and heavy industries and bury it deep underground. But its track record so far is nothing to write home about – many carbon capture projects emit more than they manage to capture and are extremely expensive .
Elin Boasson: It has taken really a long time. A lot of ministers have invested incredible amounts of time and energy to promote carbon capture and storage. So, it’s like an elephant giving birth to a mouse kind of situation… This has been a really hard and it’s a bit unclear what the results will be.
Earlier this year, Equinor, was forced to retract claims it had made about its flagship carbon capture project, after reporting revealed it had stored only one-tenth of the carbon it had claimed .
All the while, Norway has kept expanding its oil and gas industry. In 2023, the government approved nearly 20 new projects, worth nearly 20 billion US dollars .
Since the 1970s, the country has exported hundreds of billions of barrels of oil equivalent . In 2024 alone, they shipped off 87 billion barrels worth. When all of that is burned, it adds up to billions of tons of CO2 – pollution that far outweighs its domestic footprint.
Andreas Randøy: The emissions from the oil and gas that we produce are almost exclusively sent to other countries where they create pollution there. This of course makes no difference for the climate. Like still these emissions will affect me and everyone else in Norway just as much, but because they don’t show up when we take account of domestic emissions it can seem lower than what it really is.
In fact, the annual CO2 from Norway’s fossil fuel exports is around 10 times higher than its domestic emissions . Per capita, that makes Norway the world’s second biggest emitter after Qatar .
And that really puts the country’s pro-climate policies into perspective.
Take the electric vehicles. Norway currently leads the world in EV adoption, and switching away from gas-fuelled cars has helped them reduce transport emissions at home. But those savings have been in the order of millions. And although that is better than nothing – when you compare it to the billions of tons of CO2 emitted by burning the oil and gas they sell , it is just a drop in the bucket.
Andreas Randøy: There is a lot of talk about climate in Norway, but way too little about the oil industry. We talk so much about slightly improving the energy efficiency of cars and so little about the absolute biggest contribution to climate change.
And EVs have taken off largely because they don’t pose a major threat to the contributor that Andreas is talking about – the oil industry.
Elin Lerum Boasson: It has been a big success… This has not resulted from a major plan from Norwegian politicians. Most of the policies for electrical vehicles have kind of sneaked in when the green political parties, they have lost kind of the big discussions on oil, on gas, on transport infrastructure, and then they have gained support for electrical vehicle policies.
It’s only in recent years that Norway’s domestic emissions have started to fall thanks to the EVs – by about 12% since 1990 . And while you could argue that there wasn’t much fat to trim because Norway already had clean hydropower, Elin says that excuse only goes so far.
Elin Lerum Boasson: Yeah, that’s a very popular argument from Norwegian politicians. But all countries will argue ‘my country is so special. We have special conditions that makes the climate transition much harder for us than for everyone else…’
Norway was very lucky in that regard that we have a lot of large hydro. Most of the large hydro was developed way before climate was put on the agenda in the early 1990s.
So, for Norway, we would have had to focus on other sectors than many other European countries. But we were not willing to do that.
And it appears the country is still unwilling. Today, the Norwegian government has no plan to phase out oil and gas .
The push for more fossil fuels hasn’t gone unchallenged.
In 2024, Andreas’ team at Greenpeace Norway, along with the climate group Nature and Youth, took the government to court. They argued the approvals for three North Sea oil and gas fields were illegal because the government hadn’t considered the future emissions from burning all the oil and gas. The Olso District Court agreed, declaring the approvals invalid. The case is now under appeal, and awaiting a ruling on just how far climate impact assessments must go .
Andreas Randøy: Actually, one of the fields, the biggest one called Yggdrasil, they even told the public that this will reduce global emissions.
And we’ve shown in court that that is just not at all true. It will massively increase global emissions. And if the oil and gas from these three fields are being used over their lifetime, it will cause the premature death of over 100,000 people… that is the type of information that we say should be open to the public. I don’t think that Norwegians know that we can today calculate how many people will lose their lives because we are opening up this oil and gas field.
All this might sound like its ignoring Norway’s role as a key energy supplier to the world. Norwegian oil and gas have helped power homes, factories and economies for decades.
Hasn’t it simply been answering the world’s call for fossil fuels? Well, not exactly.
Andreas Randøy: It’s not true. It’s not true that if we stop producing oil and gas, this will be purely replaced by other producers. It contradicts economic theory and empirical data on how markets respond to changes in production levels.
Research shows that producing more oil and gas actually drives up demand, and the only way to effectively reduce fossil fuel consumption is to cut production . No industry is more acutely aware of this than the fossil fuel industry itself. Extensive reporting has also shown that oil and gas companies – who are keen to preserve demand for their products – actively lobby against investments and support for clean energy .
In other words – by continuing to drill and pouring billions into new projects, Norway isn’t ‘meeting’ demand so much as it’s creating it.
Meanwhile, some countries are choosing a different path.
Andreas Randøy: We are seeing a trend internationally where countries are ramping down fossil fuel expansion on behalf of the climate. Denmark is doing this. Costa Rica has vowed not to open new oil and gas fields. Greenland has done the same and they have larger oil and gas reserves than Norway. The UK might be going down that path as well.
Europe is also set to move in a different direction. The EU wants to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040. The UK has pledged 80%. That’s a decade before Norway expects its own oil and gas production to slow n.
Andreas Randøy: The European countries, they see it as an economic problem and a security problem that they are reliant upon fossil fuels from countries outside of themselves. They want cheap and renewable energy. And this is both because of economics, because of security and because of the climate.
Beyond Europe, recent data shows China’s widespread electrification and clean energy boom is creating the conditions for a global fossil fuel decline .
Andreas Randøy: This will have massive implications for the demand for oil and gas. So I’m not saying that we should shut off the deliveries of oil and gas today. Not at all. But I certainly think we should not be opening up new oil and gas fields or spend billions on exploring for new resources further and further north in the Arctic Sea like we’re doing right now.
So where does this direction place Norway? Possibly out in the cold.
Andreas Randøy: I’m really concerned that we could end up with a Norwegian rust belt, really, especially on the west coast of Norway. I mean, now all of the companies are focusing on building up new oil and gas fields. Some of them will be profitable, sure, but some of that exploration activity, it’s funded by the belief that you can open up new oil and gas fields and have profits from that way beyond the point where the EU has said, we will not be buying your oil and gas.
And according to political scientist Elin, far from leading the world on effective climate policy, Norway is betting its future on everyone else failing to act.
Elin: We do spend a lot of resources trying to identify new oil and gas fields. If you take climate seriously, we kind of bet on that we will not be required to actually reduce our emissions.
So, what could an alternative path be? Both Andreas and Elin point to Norway’s Scandinavian neighbor.
Elin: Denmark has betted on increasingly strong and serious climate policies internationally. So their main economic strategy is to develop green industries. And this is how they plan to remain a wealthy country. So Norway has done the opposite.
Norway has the engineers, the technology, and it certainly has the capital. A lot of what powers their oil industry could be shifted.
Andreas Randøy: We could be the green and democratic provider of renewable energy and renewable industries.
I mean, a lot of the same companies that are today building supply ships and equipment and supplying oil wells and oil platforms. They could be producing offshore wind. It is a lot of the same technology, a lot of the same skills. If we do not start that transition now, we will be falling behind.
Back in southwest Norway – a year on from leaving Equinor, Daniel still isn’t sure why he wrestled more with the cognitive dissonance than those around him.
Daniel: I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking why didn’t I just ignore it? And I don’t really have a very good explanation why I reacted differently. I don’t know.
In oil-rich Stavanger, questioning the industry can mean questioning your community, your family, your entire way of life. But for Daniel, staying silent became impossible. And though he lost a well-paying job, he’s convinced he made the right choice.
Daniel: I don’t really want to be part of a company that is all about growth and just profit. Now I’ve finally gotten out of that type of business, even though I enjoyed the job, I want to make a positive contribution.
It’s a message he knows many of his former colleagues and fellow Norwegians aren’t ready to hear – but Daniel believes Norway’s incredible wealth gives them a unique opportunity: to lead the world away from fossil fuels, rather than deeper into them.
Daniel: I think Norway should really, first of all, look at the science. And if you understand the science, you should work for change.
For me, arguments around, yeah, we have to think about the economy first, they are completely false we have lots of money so we should use that for better purposes.
Now that, he thinks, would be real climate leadership.
This episode of Living Planet was produced by me, Charli Shield. It was edited and mixed by Neil King. Our sound engineer was Ziad Sleiman. What did you think of this episode? We’d love to hear your thoughts – you can send us an email or a voice note at livingplanet@dw.com. And if there are any climate or environment topics you want us to cover, or if you have specific questions you want us to try to find the answers to, send those in too. If you’re listening to this on the radio, remember you can find and subscribe to Living Planet on any podcast platform – which is also where you can leave us a rating and review if you’re feeling extra nice. Thanks for listening.