Fifty-four years ago, on this day, December 3rd, 1970, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme tries to get some future-thinking going,
When, on 3 December 1970, he expressed the government’s intention to appoint a working group for futures studies, Olof Palme reiterated this outlook on futures studies, seeing them as a tool for national policy choices and based on Swedish values of neutrality, independence, and solidarity. If Sweden did not engage in the study of the future, Palme said, it would be dependent on future visions foreign to Swedish values. The study of the future was to seek a Swedish path between two seemingly existing alternatives of the future. Heidenblad 2021
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that all sorts of futurology, horizon-scanning stuff was getting done. And Olof Palme had just been talking about the threat of climate change. And his point about if you’re not doing it yourself, you’re gonna have to accept someone else’s vision is a really solid one.
What we learn. Palme was a cut above.
What happened next. More futurology work got done. You can read about it here. All of Palmer kept doing stuff until 1986.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
November 28, 1974 Olof Palme tells Sweden “The risk of a changed climate… is of utmost importance.”
Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, in a newspaper interview, nails the big long-term threat.
“Three months after the conference, the momentum concerning the threat of climate change seems to have led Olof Palme to speak out on the issue. In an article structured as a duel, Palme and the leader of the Conservative Party (Moderaterna), Gösta Bohman, talked about their vision of Sweden in 2000. Palme was asked which threat concerned him the most and answered: ‘The risk of a changed climate due to human activities … To me, this question seems of utter importance.’”
Tom Selander, ‘Partiledare om Sverige år 2000’, SvD 29 Nov. 1974,
Below is a brilliant guest post, by Swedish historian Kristoffer Ekberg. If there are other folks out there who want to write guest posts – please do get in touch! drmarchudson@gmail.com
14 June 1979 and the messy inclusion of climate change in energy politics
Kristoffer Ekberg
On this date, 14 June 1979, the Swedish government gave the state-owned utility Statens Vattenfallsverk AB or short Vattenfall (meaning water fall) the task of undertaking a large scale investigation into ways of introducing more coal into the energy mix without harming the environment or the health of the population, Kol-Hälsa-Miljö (Coal-Health-Environment).
The aim was to increase the use of coal. The task might not seem strange given the fear of volatile oil prices during the 1970s and the fact that in the beginning of the 1970s up to 75% of Sweden’s energy consumption came from imported oil. Transitioning to a source of energy that was seen as more secure due to the possibility to source it from the proximity in northern Germany seems like a rational choice when only looking at this development.
But understanding this as a strategic move based on solely energy security shows only part of the picture and obscures the dubious enterprise, given the already-existing knowledge of climate change present among the political elites.
Famously hosting the first UN meeting on the human environment in 1972 the issue of climate change was already present among the leadership of the Social democratic party and Swedish political leadership. Bert Bolin (who would later become the first chairman of IPCC), had the year before also convened with the world’s leading climate scientists in Sweden.
In 1974 the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme publicly stated that climate change was one of the most pressing issues in the period up to the year 2000. In 1975 climate change was mentioned in the energy plan that would guide Sweden’s actions the coming years, clearly influenced by Bolin’s work. Climate change science was not unanimous but the Swedish leadership nonetheless engaged with the threat.
Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister (source: Wikipedia)
In these years, climate change became a useful argument for a Social Democratic leadership wanting to push for nuclear power. As opposition to nuclear grew larger and more forceful every year, partly resulting in the loss in the election of 1976 ending a 40 year period in power, nuclear became a problem but so was oil.
In governmental reports in 1978, climate change, which had initially been framed as a concern in relation to national energy production and consumption became associated solely with future threats on a global scale.
Even though the coal investigation was tasked with incorporating all available knowledge, the issue of climate change and CO2 was in most parts excluded, despite the previous reports from Bolin and others. Further, during the investigation the issue of CO2 came to the fore through trips to – for example – the Department on Energy, in the US but was deemed a problem not for Sweden but for high emitters like USA, Soviet Union and China.
When finished in 1983, the report mentioned climate change but these formulations were critiqued by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) arguing that the investigation had failed to account for the impact on CO2 emissions from introducing more coal.
Why this matters
The episode told here speaks to the messy ways in which climate change entered discussions and speaks to the different strategies that have been used to keep climate change of the table in periods when energy issues are highly debated. The construction of delaying arguments is not new in contemporary society but is something that has happened constantly since climate change entered on the political arena.
Kristoffer Ekberg is an historian working at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research focuses on the political history of climate change and the environment, corporate anti-environmentalism as well as social movements and utopian thought.
On this day, the 25th of April 1974, German climatologist Hermann Flohn is flown – see what I did there? – to Stockholm (well, maybe he took the train who knows?) to brief the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on the build-up of carbon dioxide. in the atmosphere This was at the behest of Swedish scientist Bert Bolin, and part of the Swedish government’s increased awareness of environmental issues including climate change.
Hermann Flohn
Palme apparently listened carefully and intently – he was a serious character. One of the things you’d do on Alternative Earth is have him NOT getting assassinated in 1986, so he was able to be a key player in the 1988-1992 policy window…
How do I know this – as usual with this site, thanks to the hard work of climate historians, in this case Kristoffer Ekberg and Martin Hultman…
“Amid the oil crisis and with raised critique against nuclear power, the issue of climate change was presented to Swedish politicians. On 25 April 1974, meteorologist Bert Bolin and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had in Hermann Flohn from Bonn to Stockholm to talk before the government’s advisory board on research. Flohn was a climate scientist who had already in 1941 published a paper discussing anthropogenic climate change. The reporter present at the time, Tom Selander,46 wrote that Prime Minister Palme listened ‘thoughtfully’ during Flohn’s exposition.”
We need to know that in the 1970s people with in positions of power, senior politicians and policymakers, were well aware of the co2 buildup
What happened next?
Flohn keep kept alerting people. His name pops up at all sorts of important events throughout the 70s…. Olaf Palme was assassinated in February 1986. And therefore he wasn’t there to push the issue along during the 88-92 big wave, so it goes.
