--- Det talte ord gælder ---
Your Highness
Your excellencies
My Lords,
In many of our countries – especially at times of financial crisis – there are some who doubt, whether it is still possible to go green?
Isn’t all this climate and green stuff so much 2008 and for that matter 2009, when the world tried to agree upon a global climate deal in my home town Copenhagen?
Well, ladies and gentlemen – now there is help around the corner, – I guess from the most unexpected corner you could image – the oil tycoon JR Ewing from the TV series Dallas.
As it turns out JR Ewing, or maybe rather Larry Hagman, is now the happy owner of the largest solar array of any residence in the US, maybe the world.
“With all that oil gushing away in the gulf," Hagman recently told The New York Times,
"I figured it was time to call for a new direction in where we're getting our energy”.
“Since Sarah Palin is saying, 'Drill, baby, drill,'
I'm saying, 'Shine, baby, shine.'"
And he is indeed right,
We can’t just continue with conventional sources of energy. Or to move from a TV-icon to an icon of philosophy – Albert Einstein:
”The problems we have today, cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought, when we created them”.
Hence, we simply need to embark upon a paradigm shift in our energy policy.
And there are 3 reasons for this.
First of all, in 2050, the world’s population is projected to increase to 9 billion.
And with a growing global middle class, more people will demand cars, fridges, city breaks, Ipads and all the other commodities of a modern life.
This will put increased pressure on practically every natural resource on the globe – including those that power our current “black” economy like oil, gas and coal.
Secondly, we can’t afford that the increasing demand for energy is speeding up climate change.
That is also why the Pentagon, for the first time in history, has incorporated climate change in its defence review this year.
Thirdly, the increasing energy consumption means rising and unstable prices – especially concerning oil, where it is uncertain, if the production and the research in new drilling methods can keep up with consumption.
Hence, as president Obama has stated recently, we have to begin
“to address all facets of our over-reliance on fossil fuels”.
Or to refer to the new British National Security Strategy, “the disruption to oil or gas suppliers to the UK constitute a threat to the national security”
If we don’t act, we will not only experience higher temperatures, we will experience higher prices – to the detriment of our economy and our energy security.
But that’s the negative side of the story. Just as Prime Minister Cameron said in his introduction, we in Europe also have a lot to gain.
European companies already dominate renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines and solar thermal power plants and many jobs are linked to the clean tech sector.
But we can’t expect to maintain this role position.
No, we can be certain to lose, if we don’t change our pace.
Especially the Chinese are speeding, and this year, China became the world’s largest investor in clean tech.
As the American energy secretary Stephen Chu has said:
"They missed the first Industrial Revolution,
they missed the computer revolution,
a lot of the biology revolution,
now they want to be a leader in the new industrial revolution towards a green energy future".
So, we better act now and the best way to do this, is to limit our overreliance on fossil fuel, oil, gas and coal.
Denmark is a good example that it can be done.
When the oil crisis struck us in the 70-ties,
we chose to prioritise energy savings and renewable energy.
And we didn’t stop, when oil started to flow again in the 80-ties.
And what is more: through out the years, we have shown that investing in renewables goes hand in hand with economic growth.
As a matter of fact, since 1980,
the Danish economy has grown by almost 80%, while our energy consumption has remained more or less constant, and co2-emissions have been reduced.
The share of oil in the total Danish energy consumption has fallen dramatically over the years.
At the same time, renewable energy is now covering almost 1/5 of our energy’s consumption.
Today, almost 12% of our exports comes from clean tech – and it is now part of the Danish brand on the global scene.
We were just made fun of in the American cartoon the Simpsons.
In an episode this spring, Homer – under the clever supervision of his daughter Lisa – buys a windturbine from the Danish wind industry.
- And quite correctly, wind is introduced as “the energy that powers Denmark”.
But we should not rest on our (green) laurels.
That’s why the Danish government in 2008 set up a national commission to help us to become completely independent of fossil fuels.
The Commission just presented its report last month, and its core conclusion is that independence is not a pipedream;
It can be done – and exactly because the prices on fossil fuels are bound to go up, it can be done at only a limited extra cost.
Indeed, you can say that the slightly higher bill for green energy is an insurance premium that we pay for not having to participate in the global energy race – and hence deposit our room for manoeuvre among a limited number of energy producing countries!
Our official goal is now to become independent of fossil fuels in 2050 – but Denmark is obviously not an “energy island”;
We are part of the European Union, so we’ll pursue our energy transformation together with the rest of Europe.
Just to give you two examples.
Together with the UK, we just decided to support that the EU should raise its own reduction target from 20% to 30% CO2-emissions in 2020 – disregarding what happens in Cancun at the COP-16.
This will not only boost our clean tech industry;
it will also breath new life into our common trading scheme of CO2-credits, the so-called ETS-system.
But just as importantly, we are also strongly in favour of developing a common European energy infrastructure, the so-called super-grid system.
To be very concrete, such a system would enable us in Denmark to export our extra wind energy to Germany when their solar panels are not producing any energy.
Similarly we could, with serious investments, import solar energy from Spain, Portugal and Germany when our wind is not blowing.
As a result, the price on renewable energy would come down, and we would be able to adapt large volumes of renewable energy into our grid.
And what is more: the intelligent design needed to build the supergrid will eventually transform itself into a new market opportunity for the clean tech industry.
Although we know that smart grid will be a new growth industry, there are many things we do not know.
Hence, we need more research and development.
But despite this, I’m sure we’ll make many mistakes in our journey toward a low-carbon society.
But the mistakes will bring us forward.
This reminds me of Thomas Edison, who as we all know invented the light bulb.
For years he and Henry Ford worked on creating an electric car.
And Ford believed it would be the most used vehicle in a near future.
But Edison persuaded Ford to give up the project.
Maybe that’s why he years later said:
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
We will make mistakes.
But they will make us wiser.
And they will bring us forward in the global green race.
Thank you!