Abstract
Norway is a petroleum exporting country that, simultaneously, is at the forefront of implementing ambitious climate policy measures. Through a discourse analysis of official documents that address petroleum policy, this article examines how the Norwegian government justifies a place for Norwegian petroleum in a low-carbon future. Our findings show that the frames used to justify continued petroleum production between 2011 and 2018 remains predominantly stable, despite the growing opposition to this official discourse in relation to climate change and the societal dependence on petroleum revenues. This article highlights the tension that Norway, as a petroleum-producing country, face in an increasingly carbon-constrained world, and how this is handled in the official petroleum discourse. It shows how the official discourse portrays continued petroleum production and exploration as both valid and necessary and how this framing is discursively linked to a strong commitment to mitigate climate change.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
We apply the analytical framework of Scrase and Ockwell [15,16], to explore and analyse the main justifications for continued petroleum production and exploration in Norway
We do this by identifying the discursive links between state imperatives and energy policy goals in the official petroleum discourse
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The report looks at the discrepancy between the planned fossil fuel production by different nations worldwide and what is seen as the needed reduction in order to achieve the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement (2015) What they find, is that ‘governments continue to plan to produce coal, oil, and gas far in excess of the levels consistent with the Paris Agreement temperature limits’ [1] Coal has been a primary target for greenhouse gas mitigation for a long time, attention toward other fossil fuels, such as oil, and gas, is clearly increasing This is partly due to the special report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2018) on the impacts of a 1.5 ◦C temperature increase. Energies 2021, 14, 5411 with no major changes in the framework conditions for the petroleum industry, except2foorf 15 a ‘temporary tax relief package’ for the petroleum industry due to COVID-19 [1] (p. 5)
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