The Politics of Climate Change by Anthony Giddens Page A

change are indeed many. Yet one should not use them to reach a counsel of despair. After all, it is these countries that have helped create the conditions under which environmental issues have come to the fore. 3 Totalitarian states have generally had poor or disastrous environmental records. So also have most of those that have undergoneprocesses of ‘authoritarian modernization’, such as China, Russia or South Korea.
    Several factors explain the difference. Democratic countries not only permit but positively encourage the open development of science, the very basis of our awareness of the problems of global warming and also of most other forms of environmental threat. They provide for the possibility of the mobilization of social movements, environmental pressure groups and NGOs. By contrast, non-democratic states usually maintain a high degree of control over civil society organizations, involving registration of members and supervision of their activities, with the right to close them down if they are deemed a challenge to the world-view of the authorities. Non-democratic societies have proved themselves able to stimulate technological advances in the military sphere, by concentrating their resources there; but they have lagged far behind the democratic countries in most other areas of technological development.
    Taking a wide set of indices of environmental criteria, the best performers are all democratic countries. As ranked by the Environmental Performance Index developed by Yale and Columbia Universities, the top five countries in the world are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and, interestingly, a developing society, Costa Rica. 4 Costa Rica is a middle-income country, but one that has long-standing democratic traditions – a notable exception in this respect among Central American states.
Sweden, Germany and Denmark
    It is worth having a look at the policy records of the countries which have been most successful in controlling their carbon emissions. I shall concentrate more on them than the laggards, of whom there are all too many, in order to form some idea of best practice. To do so, we have to begin well before the Kyoto baseline year of 1990. I shall start with Sweden, which, according to most criteria, is the outright leader in environmental performance, and will move on from there to consider some of the other states mentioned above.
Sweden
    Sweden took major steps to improve its level of energy efficiency following the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Shortly afterwards, because of worries about oil dependency, several major regions in the country announced programmes for reducing domestic and commercial energy use through improvements in insulation and generation of local block heating – programmes that have been refined and improved over the years. 5 The country also turned to nuclear and hydroelectric power. Since the early 1980s the use of oil has fallen by nearly 50 per cent. In 1970 fossil fuel imports corresponded to 80 per cent of the total energy supply of the country; today the figure is only 35 per cent.
    Sweden has an ambitious programme to become the world’s first oil-free economy by 2020 and has been in the forefront of states pressing for international regulation of emissions. It plans to cut its own emissions from transport by the extensive use of biofuels, derived from its vast forest areas. Biofuels have been used in transport in the country for some while (for the story of how this happened, see below, pp. 127–8), and biomass, mainly from wood pulp, has been used increasingly since the mid-1970s. The green movement has been influential in Sweden and a referendum was held in 1980 which led to a decision to phase out nuclear power. In spite of protests from green groups, the government allowed the development of six new reactors before the resolution actually came into force, and for the two decades after that date nuclear power more than doubled its share of energy