29
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Norway is to allow mining waste to be dumped in its fjords after the government won a court case against environmental organisations trying to block the plan
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- Title
- Norway to allow mining waste to be dumped in fjords
- Authors
- Elisabeth Ulven, Tone Sutterud
- Published
- Jan 12 2024
- Word count
- 550 words
What's going on in Norway? Earlier this week there was an article about how they will allow destructive deep sea mining. Is there some political context that someone can share?
The company applied for this waste dump in 2008, and it got approved all the way back in 2015 (formally approved in 2016 because they received complaints), when the right wing parties were in government.
The reason why this was brought up again today is that the environment organizations who sued the government for environment crimes lost their case today (and they don't have enough funding to bring it to a higher court. Unless someone with big pockets step in to help, the case will be lost).
I am not too surprised by the outcome given the political climate these days (it is still sad to be a Norwegian these days 🥲).
The two parties currently in government are:
neither of which have shown that they care much about environment cases if they don't provide more jobs or helps Norwegian farmers/the more rural parts of Norway directly.
The parties in government when the dump was approved was:
Looking at the votes it wouldn't have mattered which parties were in government or not - this dump would still have been approved. Both the workers party and the conservatives voted for the thing, and they have close to a majority vote on their own. Given that all of the parties listed above voted for, and the total number of mandates in parliament is 169, it would have passed regardless if one of them changed sides (keep in mind that I use mandate numbers from the 2021 election. The right wing government had majority votes in 2015, but the parties relative sizes were more or less the same).
Unfortunately the parties that actually want to do things that are positive for the environment are too small to have a real impact in anything but the rare edge case where their vote actually tips the scale one way or the other.
The parties that actually front cases, vote for and want to do positive stuff for the environment (according to what I see on parliaments suggestions and voting lists) are:
These are the big, established parties. There are of course many smaller parties, but bar one party (the patient party, based on the hospital uproar and ambulance plane crisis in northern Norway), none of them received parliament mandates in the 2021 election.
A lot of people have environment fatigue these days as well. People don't want change, and when there are road bumps implementing new, environment friendly stuff (like the electric bus issues in Oslo this winter - it is the first really harsh winter with electric buses, and they have to charge more often and for longer to keep up, which means there are big headlines about the delays and cancellations), people understandably get upset and blame everything on the environment parties, saying how everything was better before with the good ol' [insert previous technology].
Fun fact: I have heard several people refer to the current workers party as conservatives lite, and the central party is referred to as farmers progressive party. Both of which seem just about right in my mind.
Why does the current government have less than a majority? I'm having trouble finding how the government is formed in the Storting.
Good question. It happens because it's not always possible to create majority governments, due to conflicts of interest or that the parties that would have to cooperate is too many/too far apart/certain parties who straight up refuse to cooperate with certain other parties.
As an example of the last one: the progressive party has stated that with no uncertain terms, they will never enter into a government with the green party.
If no majority government can be formed, then the only possible outcome is a minority government. At that point the parties discuss among themselves and with the parties they would like to create a government with, come up with a suggestion, and vote for the alternative they want during the next parliament meeting. The alternative that receives more than 50% of the votes in parliament is then effectively the new government (exactly the same process as for a majority government, except that the answer isn't given beforehand and takes a bit more work).
Why would a party approve of a government that they are not a part of? Even if a party (say the socialist left) wants to be in the government, they would much rather have their side (the political left, which both the worker and central party are a part of) hold a minority government with them as a supporting party, than see the political right in government. The ministry posts that government representatives are put into have value after all.
Minority government is about as common as majority governments in Norway - the conservatives were actually in a minority government most of the time between 2013-2021.
After the 2013 election, conservatives and the progressive party formed a minority government, supported by the liberal party and christian party.
The 2017 election didn't change much.
In 2019 (in between the 2017 and 2021 election) the liberal party and christian party was invited to join them, making it a majority government.
In 2020 the progressive party left the government due to a disagreement, once again making it a minority government.
Okay, so the parties don't just form a coalition and say, "look at me, I am the government now." Their coalition just has to receive a majority of votes to approve it as the government?
Correct.
And if they at any point during their period lose that majority support in parliament, they will have to step down and a new government has to be voted in (not a public election - just internal strife between parliament parties/politicians).