It’s quite a symbol: for the first time since 1987, Sweden finds itself without a ministry of the environment as such. Until then president of the Young Liberals Movement (LUF), Romina Pourmokhtari, 26, the youngest of the government presented Tuesday, October 18 by the conservative Ulf Kristersson, has certainly been appointed Minister for the Climate and the Environment, but she finds herself under the supervision of the Ministry of Energy and Industry, led by the leader of the Christian 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 conservative liberal right and the far right. Greens spokesman Per Bolund denounced “a historic decision that will have devastating consequences for climate issues” and which shows, according to him, “the low value that this government places on 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 out of sixty-two. And even, “it is reduced to the question of energy, which itself is reduced to that of nuclear power”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”assured Ebba Busch, now Minister of Energy and Industry, during the presentation of the coalition’s program. But “we will do this without destroying Swedish businesses and the family economy”, hastened to add the patron saint of the Christian Democrats. For the government, this means building new nuclear reactors as quickly as possible.
Nothing in the agreement says how Sweden intends to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, except for a paragraph that mentions vague distant CO capture and storage projects.2. The agreement does not mention biodiversity more, while a report by the association and the environmental protection agency, in May 2021, found that the country had not achieved any of the twenty objectives it had set itself in this area for 2020.
Scientists and NGO leaders were therefore impatiently awaiting the general policy statement from Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson on Tuesday 18 October. Surprise: in front of the deputies, the head of government affirmed that after the oil crisis which occurred in the 1970s, Sweden is “became one of the first industrial nations in the world, almost entirely without fossil fuels”.
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