Quite early on in our cruise through Norway’s fjords, we noticed the yellow ribbon we carry behind us. It marks the path of our ship. On the second day, it was even more drastic. The ship’s route curved, and the ribbon stood horizontally at the horizon.
Then we discovered several more yellow ribbons. Those were the exhausts of other ships we saw during our journey.
Our ship, too, uses up enormous amounts of heavy oil. The chimneys continue to emit huge amounts of smoke in different and fearful colours. But you have to see it before the background of the pure oceanic air in order to understand what is actually happening.
All around the world, shipping uses up enormous amounts of energy. I once heard that 10 per cent of the entire crude oil production is used up by ships. New sailing technology will probably only make a small dent. What to do in the future?
Until they found gas and crude oil, Norway was an extremely poor country. The hard soil made agriculture a dire business. Due to the geographic situation, it was always very expensive to build up the necessary infrastructure.
Life in Norway was always hard. In the end, it was just about surviving. The situation was alleviated by the abundance of fish. Nowadays, this is no longer a foregone conclusion. The formerly rich grounds are empty. Now, fish is produced in huge agricultural industries.
But especially in a country like Norway, you get a real awareness of oil as the universal juice of life, even though 98% of their energy is water-generated.
With the exception of the railway, all traffic in Norway is based on crude oil. All the ferries sailing through the fjords, all the lorries carrying products mostly from afar. And, of course, there are cars and busses everywhere. The traffic density in the bigger cities like Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim is not an iota better than in other big cities around the world.
And people fly a lot in Norway, even short distances. Also, there is more than the average amount of individualized flight traffic. We often see water planes and choppers, as well as light aircrafts with inflatable boats as hulls.
Even the small vehicles that carried people up to the glacier were powered by petrol motors, although this would be an ideal use of electrically powered vehicles. They could produce almost as much power going down the hill as they need for going up. And if they went up empty and down with a load of seven passengers, it might even be a zero-equation (it is more fun walking up to the glacier than down).
Especially in Norway, people understand how the infrastructure would suffer a complete breakdown in case of a shortage of crude oil.
Thus, the windmills we saw both in Denmark and on exiting the first fjord high up in the northern fjord mountains and also on numerous occasions elsewhere on our trip appear to be ambassadors from a totally different but not so totally far-away future.
And there is a trivial and yet mandatory conclusion: We have to take real pains to develop new alternative and environment-friendly sources of energy. And we will again have to learn saving and abstinence. We will have to reduce our mobility and consider constructive slowness a positive value.
I wonder how this can work. Will we be able to find a path from our fossil-based “old world” to a different “new world”? It is clear that we have to. Be it because crude oil gets scarce (fact), or be it that our air contains so much carbon dioxide it goes beyond the critical line (the time when that stage will be reached is pure speculation), or be it just because the majority of people no longer feel like continuing to pollute our environment and produce all this unnecessary noise. After all, these factors are not really of any use. Instead, they make us obese and psychologically sick.
Will we manage the transition from the old world to the new world without deep cuts and bruises? Will we be able to avoid an interregnum of chaos, despotism, poverty, hunger and misery on our planet?
Both as a human being, father of seven and owner of a company, I want to help make the transition as constructive as possible. That is one of the reasons why I became an active blogger and even occasionally publish my travel journals.
Every single person I can persuade to join is a cause of delight for me.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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