The fight for protection of vulnerable areas outside the coast of Norway from oil and gas development, will be one of AUF’s most important issues in the years to come. Leader of AUF, Martin Henriksen, says to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that people in the north do not get what the oil companies promise. Henriksen’s biggest frustration is that his own mother party, the Labour Party with Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg as leader, is also being “fooled” by the oil company lobbyists.
The AUF leader has listed five specific arguments of the oil companies, which he claims is a bluff. The first one is that there can not be zero emissions from the oil industry. StatoilHydro has promised zero spills if they are allowed to drill for oil in northern Norway. However, last year, StatoilHydro had a large oil spills from the Statfjord A platform. The company is also spilling major amounts of chemicals outside of Hammerfest, and still claims that there are no spills.
The second bluff, according to AUF, is that StatoilHydro claims it has a high level of environmental awareness. With the help of advertising campaigns the oil company has tried to build up this reputation, at the same time as it has increased CO2 emissions by 1,7 million tons only over the last year.
StatoilHydro also claims that it is interested in renewable energy sources, but only use a small amount of its resources on these challenges. AUF’s fourth argument is that investments in the oil industry are not being reduced even though they have not been permitted to do test drillings outside of the Lofoten area in northern Norway.
The last argument from the AUF is that there will not be any synergistic effects outside the Lofoten and Vestrålen areas from the oil and gas development, as claimed by the oil industry. Recent reports show that even if large investments are made in northern Norway, most of the synergetic effects are shown in the southern part of the country.
