Delayers and deniers: Centrist fossil ideology meets the far right in Norway

Abstract:

Groups that argue for postponing the necessary action and groups that deny climate science altogether come from different traditions, but can also co-exist and arguably even strengthen each other. This chapter investigates the case of Norway, where the dominant view on oil and gas production – which acknowledges that climate change is primarily caused by humans, but says that Norway can both produce more oil and gas and contribute to saving the planet – exists side by side with a more classical denialist position. The chapter shows how these views co-exist even within the Norwegian far-right Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), which comes from a classical denialist position but needed to officially accept the Norwegian fossil ideology of delay in order to be accepted by the Conservative Party as a governing coalition partner. When in government, between 2013 and 2020, denialism nonetheless remained a strong tendency within the party. It is argued that these two positions can so easily co-exist in a government and within a party because they share a common view on business friendliness and nationalism, and even more important: the two positions are in Norway grounded on more or less the exact same policy for oil and gas extraction.

This point, for example, highlights a phenomenon that few have on the radar:

One international poll published in 2019 compared denialism in 28 countries, and put Norway at the top, together with Saudi Arabia (Smith, 2019).

Perhaps also interesting is this 2024 doctoral thesis by another researcher about the situation in Sweden: Fuelling Denial The climate change reactionary movement and Swedish far-right media Fuelling Denial.

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