Tchicha

With the temperature around -20 degrees when I woke up this morning, I decided to postpone my running until midday which had the additional benefit of being joined by Åsa for a 13k run around Stadsliden. Following the forest trails under blue skies, it is hard not to love “spring winter” or “Gidádálvve” as the Sami call it.

Later for dinner, I made a Moroccan barley and lentil soup, while pondering the latest provocative statement by the Sweden Democrats, namely, to stop all wind power expansion in Sweden (and possibly even take down existing turbines) and instead build more nuclear. While perhaps unnecessarily polemic, I would say that this is very much a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day. After all, just as with domestic energy savings, the expansion of wind power in Sweden does nothing to decarbonize the global economy but much to delay the necessary investments in scalable, high-energy technologies such as next generation nuclear.

However, despite the visible failures of the German energy transition, the general public (not to mention certain academics) has a long way to go until it is ready to reverse course and realize that, far from displacing fossil fuels, wind and solar power in fact lock them in. And while the Sweden Democrats correctly criticize wind power for its large environmental impact, they conveniently ignore that the same is true for the motorways that their own voters champion. As such, if I am to stick to the proverbs, I am afraid that with friends like the Sweden Democrats, who need enemies?