In the light of the measures announced by the new government, which depends on the extreme right, researchers and NGOs fear a leap back in the fight against climate change and a weakening of the protection of biodiversity.
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This is a whole symbol: for the first time since 1987, Sweden finds itself without the Ministry of the Environment proper. Until then president of the Youth Liberal Movement (LUF), Romina PourMokhtari, 26, the youngest of the government presented Tuesday October 18 by the conservative Ulf Krissels, was certainly appointed Minister of Climate and the Environment, but she finds herself Under the supervision of the Ministry of Energy and Industry, led by the leader of Christians Democrats, EBBA Busch.
Barely announced, the decision was the subject of massive criticism in the Scandinavian kingdom. The climate and biodiversity were little discussed during the campaign for the legislative elections of September 11, won by the liberal conservative right and the extreme right. The spokesperson for the Greens, Per Bolund, denounced “a historic decision which will have devastating consequences for climatic issues” and which shows, according to him, “the low value that this government gives to the environment and the climate” .
In the coalition agreement presented on September 14 by the four parties forming the new majority, the climate is only the subject of one page in sixty-two. And again, “it is reduced to the question of energy, which itself is reduced to that of nuclear”, regrets Karin Bäckstrand, professor of political science at the University of Stockholm and former member of the Climate Policy Council.
New nuclear reactors
“Sweden will honor the Paris Agreement,” said EBBA Busch, now Minister of Energy and Industry, during the presentation of the coalition program. But “we are going to do it without destroying Swedish companies and the economy of families”, hastened to add the patron of Christians. For the government, it involves the construction, as quickly as possible, new nuclear reactors.
Nothing, in the agreement, says how Sweden intends to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, if not a paragraph which mentions waves distant projects of capture and storage of the co 2 . The agreement does not mention more biodiversity, while a report by the association and the environmental protection agency in May 2021, noted that the country had not achieved none of the twenty objectives that it had set itself in this area for 2020.
Scientists and NGOs officials were therefore impatiently awaiting The Prime Minister’s general policy declaration , ULF KrisSSON, Tuesday, October 18. Surprise: before the deputies, the head of government said that after the oil crisis that occurred in the 1970s, Sweden “became one of the industrial First Nations in the world, almost entirely without fossil fuels”.
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