Hotel Mount Pleasant

An Oil-Free Sweden

While wandering around the internet, I came across this interesting article in “The Guardian” from February 2006.

According to the article, it is the stated policy goal of the Swedish government to be completely free of fossil fuels by 2020.

“Sweden, which was badly hit by the oil price rises in the 1970s, now gets almost all its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power, and relies on fossil fuels mainly for transport. Almost all its heating has been converted in the past decade to schemes which distribute steam or hot water generated by geothermal energy or waste heat. A 1980 referendum decided that nuclear power should be phased out, but this has still not been finalised.”

Intrigued, I looked to see if the NYT covered the story at the time. They did not. The closest reference to the policy was in an article about Swedish Prime Minister Persson’s response to a Bush speech, where GWB declared America was “addicted to oil.”

Odd, considering an oil-free economy would be novel, to say the least. The BBC nabbed it. Not to mention a myriad of environmental groups. Searching some San Francisco and LA papers turned up nothing either.

The environment, coupled with fears about climate change, has become such an important issue in the past few years, I find it remarkable that there wasn’t more coverage in American newspapers.

Thoughts?

The entire Swedish government proposal can be found here, in PDF format.