Another reason to love Scandinavia

I just love Scandinavia. It shifted my politics so far left I actually BELIEVE in the United Order (the Mormon principle of collective ownership that the current population of Utah Republicans try to pretend never exisited). Anyway, check out this reminder of why Scandinavia is so cool:

Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy

In a response to climate change and the dangers of rising fuel prices, Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years. And it plans to do so without building a new generation of nuclear power stations, reports John Vidal in The Guardian.

The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.

The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.

"Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020," said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development. "There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline."

According to the energy committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, there is growing concern that global oil supplies are peaking and will shortly dwindle, and that a global economic recession could result from high oil prices.

My favorite part is that the transition committee includes industrialists, farmers, and car makers. Can you just imagine getting Wal-Mart, GM, and Ford to help transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels. I think they'd be more likely to argue for a $15 raise in the minimum wage.

You can read the entire article here.