Boise News

Column: Climate Change

Copenhagen: Climate Conference’s Well Deserved Host

By Nick Gier, Unfiltered 12-12-09

When I arrived in Copenhagen as a Rotary Foundation Fellow in 1966, one of the first things that I did, after drinking a few bottles of world famous beer, was to buy a bicycle. During my Rotary year there, I rode all over Copenhagen and its immediate environs.

Long before introducing the first and longest pedestrian shopping street in 1962, Copenhagen had built an extensive system of bike lanes, complete with their own miniature traffic lights. For home-to-work commutes, 38 percent of 2 million Copenhageners take their bikes, while only 11 percent of Americans do.

Only the people of Holland bike more than the Danes. Daily they rack up 1.5 miles per citizen, while each Dane cycles 1 mile per day. In contrast Americans bike an average 315 feet per day.

Northern Europeans did not always bike this much, because they too developed a love affair with the automobile. When oil embargo hit in 1973, their governments, much more so than the U.S., committed themselves to an intensive campaign to make their countries both energy independent and energy efficient.

In Denmark years of government subsidies to wind farmers have now expired and the result is that wind provides 20 percent of Denmark’s energy needs. Denmark also helps other countries to become greener by producing and exporting one third of the world’s wind turbines.

My main obligation as a Rotary Fellow was to give speeches (the first one in English and next 21 in Danish) on international understanding, and I traveled to clubs all over the country by train.

During my 1978-79 sabbatical to Denmark, the government committed itself to an ambitious program to phase out diesel-electric locomotives and electrify the main lines of its national rail network. The result has been the saving of hundreds of millions of liters of diesel fuel.

Denmark is on track meet its Kyoto treaty obligations by reducing CO2 emissions 21 percent by 2012. At the Copenhagen conference Denmark will, along with other European Union members, promise to cut CO2 emission another 20 percent by 2020.

Obama’s promise of 17 percent by the same date is based on 2005 figures, and this means only a 3-4 percent cut over the 1990 levels the Europeans are using.

Denmark is the most energy efficient country in the European Union at 8 percent “energy intensity,” defined as the ratio of energy production to real GDP. U.S. energy intensity stands at 15 percent, primarily because each American burns an average of 429 gallons of gas and diesel each year while each European uses only 76 gallons.

Denmark was able to become the King of Greens while at the same time growing its economy by 78 percent over 30 years without increasing appreciably its energy consumption.

Denmark has maintained high tax rates to make the necessary infrastructure investments. The government has alternated between budget surpluses and very low deficits.

Year after year Denmark has been ranked among the top ten competitive economies in the world, and in 2008 the free-market journal The Economist rated Denmark as the least corrupt and most business friendly country in the world.

I submit that the Danish example, among many that can be cited from the world’s progressive countries, proves that conservatives are simply wrong that keeping taxes high and going green means the ruin of a nation’s economy.

It was a tax-cutting, Kyoto-rejecting Bush administration and an unregulated financial system that almost destroyed the U.S. economy. Think of what a President Gore could have done with revenue lost through tax cuts for the rich, building a green economy and rescuing a failed education system.

According to a study done at the University of Massachusetts, “a $150 billion investment in clean energy could create a net increase of 1.7 million American jobs and significantly lower the national unemployment rate.”

Under both left-wing and right-wing governments Denmark has chosen to invest heavily in physical infrastructure and human capital, and it now has much to show for its wise decisions. The Danes have more than earned the right to host the most important international conference of the 21st Century.

Nuclear annihilation was the greatest threat in the late 20th Century, but dangers of global warming, while slow and subtle, may lead to the end of the conditions that made human civilization possible on our planet.

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. You can always listen to or read all of his columns.

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