pic: siberiantimes.com
In order to support Swedish companies in their efforts to export goods and services, Sweden has offered export credits in the form of guarantees or loans. DN reports that in 2017, these export credits had a total value of 3 billion kronor. A small part of that money, about 0.5%, went to support the exploration and extraction of fossil fuels.
Not anymore. The government has directed the Swedish export credit system (Exportkreditnämnden) to look into how they can contribute to lessening greenhouse gases. To that end, all investing in exploring and extracting fossil fuels will be ended by 2022 at the latest.
This directive is to come even more into compliance with the Paris Agreement, which Sweden ratified in October, 2016. In this agreement, financial products were included in measures to be taken to lessen CO2 emissions.
Much of the 0.5% was spent in fossil fuel extraction in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, where the amount of greenhouse gases estimated to have been released was 5.3 million tons – almost a tenth of Sweden’s entire emissions (DN.se/greenhouse). This was first revealed by the TV4 news program “Cold Facts” (Kalla Fakta).
(Too bad TV4 is no longer able to be seen on TV by a full third of the country: Com hem (owned by Telia’s only competitor Tele2) hasn’t been able to reach a distribution agreement with TV4 (owned by Telia, which is 38% owned by the Swedish state). See this post. Let’s hope we can count on the state television news channels SVT1 and SVT2 to reveal similar news when necessary.)
“This is an extremely important step we’re taking, to show that we are the country to watch (föregångsland)” said Minister for Foreign Trade Anna Hallberg at a press conference earlier today (SvD.se/greenhouse). “It’s an important measure with which we can deal with the climate crisis in the world.”