By John Ivar Liverød, Motvind Norge CEO
In the debate about data centers and power policy, many paint a picture that the opposition to parts of today’s energy policy is, in reality, opposition to the green shift.
I think this is a misunderstanding that characterizes large parts of the energy debate.
The disagreement is not primarily about climate. It is not about technology. And it is not about whether society should further develop. It is about how we manage limited resources in a time when both the economy and society are changing rapidly.
For several generations, we have been accustomed to thinking that increased energy consumption is synonymous with progress. More power meant more factories, more jobs, and higher prosperity. This logic was largely correct in the industrial society. But we no longer live in an industrial society.
Over the past fifty years, development has gone in a different direction. Industry is producing more and more with fewer and fewer employees. Automation, robotization, and digitalization have made production far more efficient. At the same time, an increasing part of value creation has shifted to the service economy.
Today, large parts of our wealth are created in knowledge-based services, research, health care, software, finance, consulting, culture, and other industries that use relatively little energy compared to traditional industry.
This does not mean that industry is less important; quite the contrary.
But it does mean that the connection between energy consumption, jobs, and social benefit is no longer as simple as many give the impression.
Therefore, we should be careful about using power consumption as a measure of social development.
More power consumption is not necessarily a sign of more value creation.
More power consumption is also not necessarily a sign of a greener society.
This is where I believe parts of the energy debate fall short.
Power is often presented as an end in itself. We must produce more. Build more. Consume more. But far less attention is paid to what the power will actually be used for and what social benefits we will get in return.
Power is no longer a surplus good. Network capacity either. Nature is definitely not. We have to prioritize.
It should not be controversial to ask whether power provides the greatest social benefit when it is used for energy efficiency, electrification of existing industry, public infrastructure, and socially critical functions, or when it is used for ever-new power-intensive projects with limited local value creation.
Asking such questions is not opposition to technology. It is responsible resource management.
Another problem with today’s debate is that the costs of nature are often treated as a necessary, almost insignificant, side effect of development. But nature is not a free input.
Throughout much of the post-war period, economic growth has been measured without taking into account the loss of natural values. Interventions in nature have been recorded as economic activity, while the costs have been shifted to future generations.
The result is that today we are in the midst of a natural crisis that research communities describe as at least as serious as the climate crisis. It then becomes strange when people who point to these costs are portrayed as opponents of development. Perhaps it is rather the opposite. Perhaps it is precisely because they want long-term development that they react.
A green shift that does not take the loss of nature seriously risks repeating many of the same mistakes that created the problems we are now trying to solve. Therefore, it is also not correct to portray the energy debate as a battle between progress and backwardness. The real conflict is between different views on how limited resources should be used. Should we continue to measure progress in ever-increasing energy consumption?
Or should we recognize that future prosperity will increasingly come from knowledge, technology, efficiency, and services that create more value with less resource use?
I believe the latter. And that is precisely why the criticism of today’s energy policy is not about resistance to the green shift. It is about ensuring that the shift is actually green, economically sensible, and sustainable – also for the generations that come after us.
Comments are closed.