The MDGs and the big plan

COMMENT: It must be repeated again and again: the MDGs must get out of the seminar rooms in Oslo and into reality.

MDG will meet this weekend for a national meeting at Fornebu outside Oslo. There, a new party program will be drawn up, which according to the plan will get the party over the barrier again. In 2021, the party ended up just below the threshold, and they are still there in the opinion polls.

When the party evaluated itself after the election, they concluded that the demand for a search halt and end date “took all the oxygen in the room, at the expense of visibility on the rest of
our environmental policy and weakened credibility on other matters.”

It seems that MDG anno 2024 has forgotten. Because the discussion at the national meeting now is not about whether the oil industry should be wound up, but whether the end date should be in 2035 or 2040.

Year after year, MDG has talked about the need to create a plan for winding down the oil industry. This is described in a resolution that is considered at the national meeting.

Here it is said that “it is time to unleash Norwegian creative power to ensure welfare, jobs and security for the next hundred years”. The MDG proposes that the supplier industry can use its capacity for, for example, offshore wind, shipping, to plug wells, shut down oil and gas installations and much more. And that their expertise is in demand in zero-emission technology and carbon capture, renewable energy, space travel, automation, bioeconomy, the construction industry, the technology industry and many more.

One can wonder if the MDGs have been sitting under a rock for the past decade, or if they have taken root in the seminar rooms in Oslo where “the big plan” is discussed and drawn up, without anyone having set foot outside the capital.

In an article in Aftenbladet this week, Torgeir Stordal, the Norwegian Continental Shelf Directorate’s chief, wrote that the production peak is expected in 2025 for the Norwegian continental shelf.

The Norwegian continental shelf is mature. And of course the oil companies and the supplier industry are fully aware of this. The oil and gas industry is by its nature not a perpetual industry. Trying to explore other things to make money from has therefore been at the forefront of these companies’ minds for years, without MDG noticing anything about it.

Such as Aibel, for example, who in January could say that they have six deliveries to European offshore wind for a total contract value of NOK 15 billion. Or Flexible Floating Systems, which has a license agreement with Rosenberg in Stavanger, where they develop floating offshore wind turbines that will also be able to utilize wave energy and solar power.

According to the MDGs, the workers we are going to get into new industry need state support and help from the public sector to get there. But isn’t it better that the new industries are built on top of the one we already have, without it costing society money and without us losing expertise? At the same time we make money.

Because while the MDG will phase out our most important source of income, the plans are also big for scaling down the work effort. For example, the party wants parents of young children to be able to work 90 per cent for full pay in order to pick up at the nursery, and they want shorter working weeks with full pay. This at the same time as we see that we will have a major shortage of labor in the future. The MDG claims, but has no documentation, that these very expensive measures will lead to a reduction in sickness absence.

MDG’s leader Arild Hermstad was unable to answer in NRK’s ​​Political Quarter on Friday morning why the party is not getting over the blocking limit.

But the answer is actually very clear. Much of MDG’s policy is not something people are able to recognize in their everyday lives. There will be many theoretical thoughts and a constructed reality that does not reflect what actually happens in the country. Then it hits only a small minority of voters.

Commentator Hilde Øvrebekk