Yesterday evening and in the course of the day I had so many interesting talks it’s hard to know where to start.
Heidi Sörensen is Norway’s deputy environment minister and she seems to be really passionate about her job and the urgency of tackling climate change.This is just based on my encounter today.
Being a politican must sometimes be frustrating when things can’t move as fast as you would like them to – and you feel the future of the world is at stake.
In view of the extent to which the Arctic is already melting, she argues for rapid adaptation as well as mitigation. There was a lot of discussion about her government’s insistence on carbon capture and storage as the way to make sure Norway can keep on using and selling its oil and gas while reducing emissions, given that this is in the experimental stage. Quite a few experts here expressed doubts. She is confident that the technology will work – and reasonably fast, although she accepts that there could still be problems. Of course this would allow Norway to exploit the rest of the oil and gas thought to be there in the Arctic. But the Minister also actually said the Greenpeace moratorium idea was worth thinking about.Well, well.

Our venue today.
At the moment I’m listening to a Canadian speaker, who is presenting figures on the huge extent of Canada’s Arctic territory. As he says, it seems amazing Canada has no northern University and no Polar Institute. Good luck to those who are trying to change that.
He finds Tromsö amazing, with such an infrastructure so far north and a renowned university.
Meanwhile Siegfried from Germany has visited the blog and wonders if there will be insights here into what way the new Obama government will go in terms of climate protection.
Well, there is no quick answer to that here, but expectations are certainly very high that a new President Obama will be a positive influence and have the USA sign up to an effective post-Kyoto agreement, and to several other international conventions essential to protecting the Arctic, which the previous administration kept out of.
More later.