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Given that Denmark has the highest standard of living in the
world, Americans' anti-tax mentality seems to be akin to opting
to go down with the sinking ship instead of chipping in to buy
lifeboats -- but considering what poor stewards of the public
good U.S. elected officials have become, perhaps we've learned
that the safest route is to rely on our own little personal
inner tubes. I wonder if the Danes have legalized
corporate/government corruption the way we have.
August 10, 2008
NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Flush With Energy
By
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copenhagen
The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little
place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a
Four Seasons — maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I
walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned
down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered
by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two
different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this
delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet!
I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only
we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!
A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in
Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m.
rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent
of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is
roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to
and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city
that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the
airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic,
less pollution and less obesity.
What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was
raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and
pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as
Denmark!
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973
Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while,
responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and
systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it
didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid
by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)
What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us
and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite
that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2
taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that
allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their
energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power
industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today.
Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from
wind. America? About 1 percent.
And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market
with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In
one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate
and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like
the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power
plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way
they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide
home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)
There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon
gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market
with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the
Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job
creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it
was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial
wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10
years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have
tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to
more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise
in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.
“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard.
It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6
percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our
energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”
Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973
oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.
“I have observed that in all other countries, including in
America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline]
are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen,
told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the
contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil.
We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of
even
higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will
be used to cut taxes on personal income
— so we will improve incentives to work and improve
incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”
Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred
Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president
of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine
company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the
U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production
tax credits for wind development in America.
Why should you care?
“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18
months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”
A Few Speculators Dominate Vast Market
for Oil Trading
Regulators
had long classified a private Swiss
energy conglomerate called Vitol as a
trader that primarily helped industrial
firms that needed oil to run their
businesses.
But when
the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
examined Vitol's books last month,
it found that the firm was in fact
more of a speculator, holding oil
contracts as a profit-making
investment rather than a means of
lining up the actual delivery of
fuel. Even more surprising to the
commodities markets was the massive
size of Vitol's portfolio -- at one
point in July, the firm held 11
percent of all the oil contracts on
the regulated
New York Mercantile Exchange.
The
discovery revealed how an individual
financial player had gained enormous
sway over the oil market without the
knowledge of regulators. Other CFTC
data showed that a significant
amount of trading activity was
concentrated in the hands of just a
few speculators.
The
CFTC, which learned about the nature
of Vitol's activities only after
making an unusual request for data
from the firm, now reports that
financial firms speculating for
their clients or for themselves
account for about 81 percent
of the oil contracts on NYMEX,
a far bigger share than had
previously been stated by the
agency. That figure may rise in
coming weeks as the CFTC checks the
status of other big traders.
See the complete article
HERE
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