Cathrine M. Dyer

The Arctic, once a climate victim, is now becoming a climate stressor. The melting ice has brought us closer to climate tipping points and, simultaneously, has made oil reserves in the Arctic more accessible. As a result, a clash has emerged between scientific warnings and climate change obstruction (CCO) discourses that prioritise economic ambitions over climate concerns. This study investigates whether, despite scientific warnings, Norway defends further oil extraction in the Arctic, thus aligning with CCO discourses by prioritising economic interests over climate urgency. Based on a qualitative inductive approach, we analyse four official White Papers from the Norwegian government, identify their discursive patterns and contrast them with CCO discourses found in the literature. We found that the Norwegian government exhibits an affinity with six CCO discourses: 1) Non-Transformative Discourse, 2) Responsibility Deflection Discourse, 3) Discourse of the Common Good, 4) Discourse of Higher Priorities or Loyalties, 5) The Legal Discourse, and 6) The Discourse of Good Intentions. We conclude that the Norwegian government has constructed a narrative where the recognition of climate urgency does not mean the renouncement of its long-term petroleum interests and further oil extraction in the Arctic. This narrative, named here as the “green oil” narrative, uses renewable energies to electrify the oil industry, thus presenting renewables as an ally of oil expansion rather than a step toward a fossil fuel phase-out. Overall, Norway’s current narrative fails to address oil dependency, defending and justifying oil extraction in the Arctic.

Energy democracy (ED) and energy justice (EJ) are often used synonymously, with scholars and social movement groups implicitly assuming democratized energy systems enhance energy justice. In this chapter, we examine the conceptual and practical interrelationship between ED and EJ. Whereas ED scholars and practitioners typically credit climate and energy justice movements with shaping the formative stages of ED, we examine the specific ways in which EJ and ED connect - and how this relationship can be further strengthened. On the one hand, energy democracy involves a range of moves to democratize energy, from citizens policy forums to direct asset ownership and control in ‘community power’. These variations echo differences between participatory, representative and economic forms of democracy. Work on energy justice, on the other hand, distinguishes between cosmopolitan-, distributional-, procedural- and recognition-based tenets, which can sometimes conflict with each other in practice and do not automatically emerge from practices of energy democracy. We ask: how might the concept and practice of EJ inform the participatory and social justice components of ED projects? Conversely, in what ways do specific forms of ED also advance the justice and rights-based concerns around energy pursued by EJ? What are the implications of these connections and disconnections for the study of both going forward?