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The Sustainable Hour no. 608 | Transcript | Podcast notes
What happens when a country largely stops arguing about whether the green transition should happen – and starts arguing about how to make it happen?
Broadcasting from Aarhus in Denmark, Mik Aidt takes The Sustainable Hour on a journey through a country where wind turbines, bicycles, electric cars, district heating, regenerative farming, circular systems and green innovation have increasingly become part of everyday life.
Denmark is certainly no green utopia. Its intensive agricultural sector has left a heavy footprint on the land and surrounding seas, biodiversity is struggling, and consumption remains high. But something significant has changed in the national conversation.
The green transition – Den Grønne Omstilling – is no longer generally treated as an optional political project. Across much of Danish society, it has become an assumption about where the country is heading.
The argument has moved from whether to how. That may be one of the most important lessons Denmark has to offer Australia.
Mik opens the program by looking at some of the changes visible around him: rapidly growing renewable energy, the extraordinary uptake of electric vehicles, district heating systems serving most Danish households, stronger environmental regulation of agriculture, and widespread public support for renewable energy infrastructure. But the most interesting change cannot be photographed. It is cultural.
There is still disagreement. Farmers protest. Political parties argue. Businesses defend their interests. But underneath the disagreements sits a broad acceptance that change is necessary – and that somehow society has to work out how to get there.
The Danish art of finding common ground
Our guest is Danish journalist and podcaster Bjørn Olsen, creator and host of Grønne Stemmer fra Aarhus – Green Voices from Aarhus.
Bjørn started the podcast because he was frustrated by mainstream media discussions that too often reduced climate action to being either for or against it. He wanted to explore a different question: how can people actually help one another transform society?
His answer takes us from regenerative agriculture and plant-based food to economics, inequality, urban planning, cycling, reusable cups and the Danish tradition of building consensus.
Bjørn is also involved in a local Aarhus group working with Doughnut Economics – the idea that an economy should operate within planetary boundaries while ensuring a strong social foundation for everyone. GDP growth, he argues, cannot remain the ultimate measure of whether society is succeeding. If the economy grows while ecosystems collapse and increasing numbers of people struggle with stress and anxiety, what exactly have we achieved?
The emerging alternative is a wellbeing economy – an economy where human wellbeing and ecological limits become part of what society measures and values.
Agriculture, dead seas and an historic political shift
One of the most striking parts of the conversation concerns Danish agriculture. Denmark produces enormous quantities of pigs and dairy products, but intensive farming has also contributed to pollution of groundwater, fjords and coastal waters. Public frustration over the state of Danish nature has become politically powerful.
Recent agricultural reforms have demonstrated something unusual: environmental organisations, government and farming organisations – groups traditionally positioned against one another – have been brought together to negotiate a common way forward. Part of the resulting green tripartite agreement involves converting hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land into nature and forest.
That process is far from painless or universally popular. But Bjørn sees something important in it: groups that fundamentally disagree have nevertheless sat around the same table and accepted that the existing system cannot simply continue. That ability to cooperate is itself a climate technology.
A transition that has to include everyone
Bjørn also introduces an important warning. The green transition can easily become something enjoyed by people who have enough money. An electric car, high-quality organic food, locally produced vegetables and other sustainable choices are much easier to embrace when you can afford them.
People struggling financially can instead experience the transition as yet another set of demands imposed upon them by people with more choices. That makes inequality not simply a social issue, but a climate issue.
As Bjørn puts it, if ordinary people are given a genuine opportunity to participate in the transition, most will want to. But the transition has to be economically and socially possible for everyone. Otherwise resentment can grow – and with it political resistance.
Small systems that change everyday behaviour
Walking around Aarhus, Mik notices that the green transition is also visible in hundreds of relatively small decisions.
• Petrol stations increasingly double as EV charging stations.
• Cycling infrastructure gives cyclists their own lanes and, in places, priority at intersections.
• Reusable cups are becoming part of public life in Aarhus, with a deposit system making reuse simple.
• Public rubbish bins have holders on the outside where refundable bottles and cans can be left for people who collect them.
• Local groups are experimenting with regenerative farming, community food systems, Doughnut Economics and new forms of circularity.
None of these initiatives alone changes the world. Together they begin changing what people regard as normal. And that is exactly what a transition ultimately looks like: not one enormous moment when everything changes, but thousands of changes that gradually create a different society.
Colin Mockett’s Global Outlook
Before the conversation from Aarhus, Colin Mockett OAM brings us this week’s Global Outlook.
• New research examines the extraordinary financial exposure of Australian coastal properties to future flooding and sea-level rise – including thousands of properties around Geelong.
• Scientists warn that millions of hectares of the world’s kelp forests could disappear as oceans continue warming.
• The latest climate-action assessments show that while the global transition is still moving far too slowly, countries including Denmark, Uruguay, Namibia and the Netherlands are among those accelerating wind and solar deployment.
• Australia reaches another transport milestone, with electric vehicles surging through the new-car market in August and Chinese manufacturers playing an increasingly significant role.
The contradictions remain enormous: renewable energy and electric vehicles are growing at extraordinary speed while fossil fuel production and climate damage continue. The transition is happening. The question is whether it will happen fast enough.
Be kind
At the end of the conversation, Mik asks Bjørn the traditional Sustainable Hour question: What should we be? Bjørn’s answer is simple:
“We should be kind. Kind to nature, kind to the people around us, kind to ourselves, kind to future generations.”
And perhaps there is something distinctly Danish in that answer too. Change does not necessarily have to begin with conflict. Sometimes it begins by sitting down together, accepting the problem, having the difficult conversation – and eventually sharing a cup of coffee.
The episode concludes with the song ‘The Green Transition’ – a musical reminder that the transition is no longer something waiting somewhere in the future. It is already underway.
The Green Transition | Lyrics
– A soaring call to embrace a better world, already within reach, inspired by our discussions in The Sustainable Hour no. 551
→ More songs from The Sustainable Hour
. . .
Bjørn Olsen is the host and producer of Green Voices from Aarhus (Grønne Stemmer fra Aarhus), coordinator of Doughnut Economics Aarhus (Doughnut Økonomi Aarhus), board member of the Danish Cyclists’ Federation in Aarhus (Cyklistforbundet Aarhus), ambassador for the Shrill Carder Bee (Kløverhumle) with Species of Aarhus (Arternes Aarhus), and chair of The Alternative in East Jutland (Alternativet Østjylland).
→ Find out more about Bjørn and Grønne Stemmer fra Aarhus on gronnestemmer.dk
→ You can follow or interact with Bjørn on Facebook | Mastodon | Bluesky
“One of the biggest obstacles for a proper transition is inequality. We have GDP growth, but people don’t thrive more because of that.”
~ Bjørn Olsen, Danish journalist and podcaster
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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
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TRANSCRIPT
of The Sustainable Hour no. 608
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (00:00)
Cooperation over chaos. We are all in this together.
Jingle: (00:14)
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson: (00:24)
Welcome to The Sustainable Hour podcast. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land of the Wadawurrung people. We pay tribute to their elders – past, present, and those that earn that great honour in the future. We’re on stolen land, land that was never ceded, always was and always will be First Nations land. In nurturing both their land and their communities for millennia before the land was stolen, they accumulated a great amount of ancient wisdom. The same ancient wisdom that is very much going to help us to navigate the climate crisis.
Rupert Read on BBC Radio 4 – instagram video clip:
There was a government report that came out recently. It’s called a National Security Assessment on Ecosystem Collapse. It’s not by hippies or extinction rebellion, it’s by this the intelligence services of this country. And what it says is that we’re in absolutely terrible trouble. We’re staring down the barrel of potential societal collapse. And this is a very difficult historic transition that we have to now start to move through together. And what it means is that the idea that our standard of living, our material standard of living, is going to go up and up and up forever is simply an illusion.
BBC Radio host:
For many people it has simply gone down down down forever.
Rupert:
Look, what we need to do is come together in a common purpose in relation to a terrible and rising threat.
BBC Radio host:
Who is ‘we’?
Rupert:
Everybody. And of course those with the broader…
BBC Radio host:
Lots of people don’t want to go with you!
Rupert:
Can I have a go now? Those with the broader shoulders should take on the greatest burden. So in terms of your worries about the the working class, absolutely! What that implies is that the rich actually have to pay a fair share, fossil fuel companies, the super rich, et cetera. That is the way we actually combine having a more equal future and therefore a future which is gonna give people at least some of what they want with having a future that we can survive through. It’s not about having a socialist ideology or whatever anymore. It’s about survival.
Mik Aidt: (02:29)
Said Rupert Read, a British environmentalist, on BBC Radio 4.
Well, if we are to survive what’s coming at us, we absolutely need to be ready to change. And if you’d like to know what change looks like, and feels like, I recommend: try and visit Denmark – the small country in the north of Europe, which is where I am at the moment. And I tell you, coming here from Australia a lot of things feel and look very different here and they are changing fast.
There are wind turbines and there are bicycles, lots of them, everywhere. And there are electric cars now as well, everywhere. All the houses here are connected by these massive district heating pipes under the streets. And engineers are experimenting with everything from how to store energy and CO2 in new ways to building the world’s largest housing projects with 3D printers.
But as an Australian, I think maybe the most interesting part of the Danish story is something you can’t photograph. It’s something that the Danes have stopped arguing about. They don’t argue about the climate problem here. They know it’s real. They don’t argue about what’s now unavoidable and inevitable, which is like a force that’s driving this country forward, Den Grønne Omstilling, the green transition as they call it. Not only is it happening, it’s well accepted everywhere. All the way from the local neighborhoods to city councils to the national government. And both the left and the right side of politics. They all seem to have this shared assumption that the green transition is real. It’s here. And it’s actually working for them.
Take electricity. Last year, in 25, the wind turbines in this country produced two-thirds of the electricity that the Danes used. Solar then added another 14 per cent to that. So wind and solar together supplied more than three-quarters of Danish electricity production.
Just five years ago, solar was producing not even one per cent.
If you compare that with Australia, well, in Australia renewables supplied around 40 per cent of total electricity generation. So whereas Australians are really proud of that, well, the Danes have already reached double of that.
And what’s all this talk about “unreliable renewables” and “blackouts”? Hmm. Not here, I tell you. It’s unheard of. The Danes know how to operate a modern electricity system with renewable energy. They have simply redesigned their system for that.
And just last month in August, another chapter of the wind story opened here in Denmark. Two huge offshore wind farms are now going to be built, providing enough electricity for the consumption of around almost two million households.
And the way things change from one year to the other. It feels like almost every car you see is an EV, an electric vehicle. 86 per cent of new passenger cars that were sold in Denmark in August were electric. So that’s almost nine out of ten new cars.
And because Denmark is a really cold place in the winter, so around 70 per cent of the Danish households are connected to a district heating system where the heat is generated centrally and then distributed through water networks, long pipes beneath the towns and the cities. So in that way the Danes have treated this problem with heating the houses in a shared way, a shared infrastructure, created to solve that problem. Instead of each household having to work out for themselves whether to buy gas or install a heat pump and so on. No, here It’s been done as a society that builds better systems when they build together.
And in that way the green transition often comes out as making the better choices for everyone.
In the Danish agriculture sector there’s been some really loud disagreements recently, and that’s the farmers who are angry here because Denmark has a quite large agricultural industry, produces lots of pork and dairy products. But it’s also a major source of greenhouse gases and pollution from fertilisers and pesticides that goes into the waterways and puts pressure on Danish nature.
So as I was mentioning last week, the farmers have been protesting against a new law that put a strict limit on how much fertiliser they can spread on their soil. But interestingly, regardless of all this protesting, the Danish parliament passed a new fertiliser law last week.
And where a 119 parliamentarians voted for, and only 34 voted against it. And I think those numbers, you know, four out of five politicians in the parliament voting for stricter laws to protect nature – that gives you an idea of what I’m talking about here. Because yes, there’s friction, but also there’s a very firm majority for change. There’s an understanding that we need to change.
And misinformation in the media or in social media? I don’t know. I haven’t seen it anywhere. Not that the climate denial doesn’t exist, I think it does. It’s just not seen in the mainstream politics and media.
And maybe it’s because of that that so many… – like, survey after survey shows that there’s a large majority of Danes who support new solar parks in their local area and who support having wind turbines in their local area.
The Danish Climate Council made a report recently which said that 65 per cent personally support having wind turbines in their local area. 65 per cent. But it’s obviously because of the way the media is treating the climate crisis that the Danes are not discussing whether the climate crisis is real or whether the green transition maybe would be a good idea or not. They have moved the argument forward to talking about not ‘whether’, but ‘how it can be done’.
Denmark gives us a glimpse of what change looks like when the conversation moves, when the story moves, and when the question about ‘whether or not’ becomes a question of ‘how do we do it’. It’s only when a country stops arguing about whether the future is coming that it can actually finally start building it.
So today in The Sustainable Hour, let’s talk about change and what change looks like with the Danish glasses on. And we’ll be listening to someone who has spent a lot of time looking into just that.
But before that, as always, it is time for a global outlook – for which we have Colin Mockett OAM ready with his news bulletin as usual. So Colin, what do you have for us today?
Colin Mockett’s Global Outlook: (10:03)
Yes, thank you, Mik, and my roundup this week begins here in Geelong, with a new report from the Climate Council which listed the number of Geelong properties that are in danger of flooding because of rising sea levels.
They didn’t just do Geelong, of course, they listed Australia state by state, and then broke that down into towns and regions. And because the lists are worked out in money terms, they are insurance claims. This will probably carry much more weight than warnings from scientists.
Anyway, in Geelong it lists that there are 3,879 addresses that are in danger of flooding due to sea level rise, bringing insurance claims that would total an estimated $19.5 billion dollars. The report actually reviewed data that was collected by the University of Melbourne’s professor Tom Kompass.
It’s another recent report that’s been enabled by the number crunching from AI supercomputers in new data centres. It rates Victoria third among the nation states in danger of floods from sea level rise behind Western Australia and Queensland.
And that’s surprising, bearing in mind that we’ve got among the smallest of coastlines. Victoria faces a $167 billion dollar economic hit from its 17,364 properties that are judged to be at risk. But even then it warned that those figures are much likely to be higher.
Because they don’t include insurance costs rising significantly.
Looking at the nation as a whole, the report predicts a worst case scenario that puts the financial cost at $1.9 trillion dollars for Australia. That’s the payout of insurance for flood damage due to climate change.
But back to Victoria. The report estimates that 267,000 coastal properties are at risk statewide, along with about two million hectares of land. All will face regular risks of future flooding if the situation stays the way that it is today. New hotspots that are named there are Melbourne’s Docklands, the Crown Casino and South Bank, Point Cook, Lake Entrance, and Bellarine Peninsula. They’re all at danger of sea level rise.
The report did say that much of the flooding and costs could be avoided if Australia stopped burning and exporting fossil fuels, but in this regard it righly commented that as a nation we don’t appear to have the political will to address it.
It’s a pretty high price to pay for having weak politicians.
Now another new report that was released last week found that global seaweed forests are declining in size faster than restoration efforts can replant them. The forests soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and there have been efforts to plant more in the battle against rising carbon levels.
A University of Western Australia team estimates that twenty five million hectares of wild kelp and they’re called wild kelp forests, they’re going to be lost to climate change by 2050.
And last week there was also an update to the State of Climate Action Report for 2026, which lists the nations according to their efforts to combat climate change. And guess what? One of the tables lists Australia at the very bottom, stone cold last, and that one has New Zealand in the top two. But I’ll get to that after going through the headline figures.
The report started with the calculation that if the world is to achieve net zero emissions, solar and wind power generation should needs to make up between 57 per cent to 78 per cent of the global electricity mix by 2030. That would require a very fast pace of change, one which no nation is on track to achieve. However, Uruguay, Namibia, the Netherlands and Denmark are all close. Now that’s got to be fitting with today’s show, doesn’t it?
They’re achieving about three quarters of the growth that is required. Lithuania, Chile and Jordan are about to join them in this top group, with their rates growing many times faster than the global average. The nations at the bottom of the list are predictable and unchanged. That’s the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
But that report contained another interesting new category, and that’s one that lists the safest places to live in the future if we don’t cut emissions and the planet warms by more than two degrees. It says if that were to occur, these are good places to live. Among the safest places it recommends would be Canada and New Zealand.
And the report Riley notes that both of these nations are right next door to two of the largest emitters. That’s the US and Australia. Australia is there because they counted the emissions from the gas that we export cheaply to the rest of the world. And that left us at the very bottom of the list, well below the US, Russia and
And all the Middle Eastern oil states. But there was better news for Australia last week as electric vehicles in August outsold petrol and diesel cars in Australia for the first time. A total of 27,089 battery EVs were sold, representing 24.9 per cent of the overall market. Now that’s according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries.
Combined with hybrids, electric vehicles now account for more than half of the market. Plug in hybrids accounted for ten point five per cent of total new car sales, while conventional models, which don’t need to be plugged in, represent eighteen point five per cent, as more Australians look to escape fuel prices.
Chinese brands also dominated the top ten overall new cars sold – with BYD, Geely, Chery, GWM and Zeekr now the most popular marks in Australia. Of the traditional brands, only Toyota Ford and Isuzu remain in the Top 10.
And a spokesman said that Chinese EV’s low pricing had led to people who would normally have considered buying a used car, and now buying new vehicles, which has to be safer all round when you think about it. And that note of optimism in an otherwise pretty gloomy outlook ends my roundup for the week.
Jingle: (18:25)
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.
Mik: (18:32)
Our guest today is Bjørn Olsen who is a journalist and a podcaster who runs his own podcast in Aarhus, the town in Denmark where I was born and where we’re broadcasting from right now. The podcast is called something like Green Voices of Aarhus. Is that right, Björn? And welcome to The Sustainable Hour, which is really pleased to have an opportunity to learn something from an expert.
Bjørn: (18:48)
That’s correct. Thank you very much.
Mik: (18:57)
That’s how I feel about you because, you know, you have been doing how many programs by now? A whole season of podcasts?
Bjørn: (19:04)
Yeah, I’ve just finished the first season and I’m starting up on second season now.
Mik: (19:08)
And where you cover what’s happening locally in the field of sustainability and climate and so on. And where you’re also active in the local environment of activism, both with climate but also with the Doughnut Economics. Is that right?
Bjørn: (19:23)
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I find the economic perspective really important. So yeah, we’ve started a small group, around 15 people or so meeting every third Tuesday. And then we are actively working for transforming the economy into the 21st century’s way of thinking economy. So yeah.
Mik: (19:50)
Let’s hear a little bit, Bjørn, about your own background and what led you to even start a podcast about climate and sustainability.
Bjørn: (19:58)
First of all, thank you so much for for being here. It’s a pleasure. The Sustainable Hour is actually the first sustainable podcast I was listening to ten years ago. So it’s very… yeah, it’s great to be here!
Mik: (20:11)
That’s nice to hear!
Bjørn: (20:13)
I think the reason I started a podcast last year was… Actually it grew out of a frustration of the way mainstream media was treating the sustainable discussions, the discussions about climate change and so on in Denmark. Often the discussion was still pro or against climate action and it was just not constructive in any way.
It’s of course, it’s been changing during the years, and some of the media is as actually doing better now, but it’s just the real conversations about how we can transform the society and how we help each other with these changes that are necessary, they were absent.
So I thought that well what I could do as an educated journalist, what I could contribute to actually put some light on all the local initiatives and lift the discussions about how do we help each other. So that’s the reason why I started the podcast.
Mik: (21:28)
So I would love to hear your assessment on where is Denmark at today and where is Aarhus at?
Bjørn: (21:34)
Actually, it is a very difficult question because it really depends how you look at it. If you look at it in the major picture, things are not really where they’re supposed to be because we are far away from doing what is needed to do. But what gives you hope is that we see a lot of people actually taking action into their own hand. They start… We have regenerative groups. We have a lot of young people actually who want to be farmers, who wants to transform the landscape from from conventional farming with pesticides and too many chemicals. They they want to transform it, they want to feel the earth beneath their feet. And they want to connect with nature. And they want to provide the local society with healthy food and so on.
We see more and more of these people, and that’s the kind of local initiatives that are that are great. We see people working with the plant-based food, how to make it taste delicious, because if we want people to eat less meat and more plant-based food, it it has to taste good. Otherwise nobody wants to eat it. So that’s in itself is yeah some expertise we need. And so on.
Mik: (23:08)
Denmark is certainly famous for its transformation when it comes to food – with Noma, the famous gourmet restaurant, which also has some sustainability aspects underneath it, growing their own food and sort of being very innovative around what it means to eat Nordic food, locally produced food.
Bjørn:
And that’s the funny thing because because you mention a really high class restaurant. I mean, the good food, the sustainable food is actually something for the rich people as it is right now because it’s so expensive. And that’s where we we lack action actually, but that’s on a political level. We’ve been pushing the municipality in Aarhus or trying to push on for more local food production because Denmark today is is producing almost nothing of its own food.
If if we’re talking on plant based food we import more than 95 per cent of all our vegetables. I think it’s something it’s crazy. Instead we we produce 40 million pigs and that takes up all our land with this agricultural feeds that needs to be produced there, which is given to the pigs and actually we produce so many pigs that that we take land from from Amazonas because we can’t produce it ourselves, all the agricultural feeds. So we are… yeah. That’s a big transformation that needs to be done. But the hope – the things that give you hope is that we see all these ordinary people who want to make the change with creating a new way of farming regenerative bioorganic foods in in for the local society.
So we need to have the municipality, we need to have the government remove all the obstacles so we can so we can make it possible for more people to do what they actually want.
Mik:
So in the work you do with the Doughnut Economy and the group you have, what’s top of mind for you there?
Bjørn: (25:28)
Well, the group grew out of a frustration with the municipality because it wanted to make even more growth with increasing the harbour, the activities and the industrial harbour in in the city. They wanted to increase it because they see workplaces, they see growth, they see more traffic. It’s the biggest harbour in Denmark with when it comes to container traffic. So that’s what they wanted to do, but they didn’t see all the damage it it would make to the sea and to the environment. because the the way they could increase it would be out in the sea.
So they would take land and they would grab resources from from further out in in Kattegat. And that will damage also places where all the fish actually lives today and where they have a place to actually be themselves. So that was the big issue with that.
And what we could see is that we could talk as much as we wanted about environmental damage, about the crisis that it makes to our biodiversity, but it didn’t help anything because the only thing they counted was the money. So we realised that we needed to talk about money. We needed to change the way of seeing how we create value in a city like Aarhus. And that’s what Doughnut Economics does.
It’s a new way of of thinking economics. It includes the planetary boundaries, it includes the social foundation. So it means that you set a new goal. Growth is not the goal. And we need to change the economy to be able to make that change, I believe, because otherwise we will just keep banging our head against the wall.
Bjørn: (27:48)
And they will stand on the other side and say, well we need we need economy to grow because that’s how we make this society. not enough to change yet. But actually one of the good things is that the new government we’ve had here in Denmark in their commitment paper, …we call it the most green government actually in in history in Denmark… They made a commitment paper where where Wellbeing Economy for the first time is mentioned. And that’s a huge news because that’s that would be impossible to imagine just even 3-4 years ago. But that window has changed. So now we can talk about wellbeing economy in Denmark. And that’s, yeah, that’s really important.
Mik: (28:37)
Meaning: an economy that doesn’t put ‘growth’ up as the goal, but more: ‘how do people feel?’ Are they actually happy?
Bjørn: (28:46)
Yeah. It’s two sided. It’s the social foundation and it’s the planetary boundaries. You need to take these two really important things into account when you set your goal. Otherwise the economy makes no sense at all. Because that’s what we see today and that’s what we see in all Western countries: We have GDP growth, but people don’t thrive more because of that.
On the contrary they actually… We see more people with stress and anxiety and things like that. And so we need to look at the way we count our values in a better way. And that’s Wellbeing Economy which will be a part of the new government. They want to see how can we implement that in them. And they also… that’s also a part of the new government. For the first time ever we have the word ‘regenerative’ in the commitment paper. That’s also huge news because that would, yeah… previously it’s always about the conventional farming but now they see that one of the ways forward is regenerative bioorganic food production in Denmark and they also want to make it possible for small scale farming to grow and so we can have more of these.
Mik: (30:17)
And I can tell you as someone coming from the outside, I find it very inspirational what’s happening with the agriculture here because the agriculture traditionally has a quite strong voice in parliament. However, there’s been a really heavy debate in the last couple of weeks because there’s new law now about limiting the amount of pesticides or is it no fertiliser that that the farmers are allowed to put on the land. Why? Because that fertiliser goes out in the sea. And then it causes, you know, it takes the oxygen and then the fish die. And it’s a big problem in Denmark that… I don’t know how much, but a lot of the sea is actually dead and the fishers can’t find any more fish.
So what really was interesting for me was to watch an interview with a man… – and to the Australian audience I can explain, like. if you’re seeing the leader of the National Party, you know, the farmers’ party – who was actually defending his position that he was going to support this law while at the same time the farmers came with their tractors rolling into the city and demonstrating in front of Parliament. He still maintained that we need to change. We are on a journey and we need to go towards what he called the green transition. And to me, coming from outside, that was a very impressive moment to see someone who is representing the farmers who actually spoke against the farmers because he thought it was more important to stand up for the green transition.
Bjørn: (31:49)
That’s historical. It is. But he needs to, because they can’t get enough voters if they don’t. And the reason is that … as you mentioned, the sea around Denmark, the coast near areas, they are empty. They’re dead, almost dead. We don’t have a single area in Danish sea which is in healthy environmental state. It’s all in bad environmental state. And it’s so it’s so frustrating for all the people in Denmark – or at least so many people that we saw at the last election that that it was moving voters because people has had enough of that. We don’t want… And it’s our whole nature in Denmark. We have officially the numbers says that we have around 15 per cent protected areas on land. If you look into it, we have well maybe one per cent, which is… Actually the 15 per cent which is the official number is including conventional farming, it’s including golf courses, it’s including even gasoline stations. So the actual number is one per cent. We are the country in Europe with the worst nature conditions, where the biodiversity is actually yeah, so bad that it’s… and people just had enough of that.
So when you see party leader from from Venstre, which you are talking about here – because he stands on hundreds of years farming lobbyism. And he has been representing that, and his party has been representing that for hundred years. But now he cannot do it anymore because, well, the sea is empty. So this is historical.
Mik: (34:02)
That’s very transformational. Yeah. And I’m interested in whether that could spread to other countries.
Bjørn: (34:10)
Well well, we need to, right? If things get bad enough we need to transform. We shouldn’t end here actually before we see the transition. I think what we can learn from… What other countries maybe can learn from Denmark is what we call the Three Part [the Green Tripartite Agreement – ‘Den grønne trepart’], which is actually a political setup with the government and with the biggest lobby organisation for the farmers, and the biggest organisation for nature, Denmark’s Naturfredningsforening, as it’s called. These three parts have been sitting down and making this plan for how to move forward because everybody could see they needed action. And they made a common decision, which they all agreed into that we had to take out 250,000 hectares of land from the farming. From it’s transform it from farming land to nature. So that’s the good thing about that is cooperation between parts that basically would stand upon each other. From the beginning they wouldn’t agree on anything, but they sat down and actually found found a solution. So that’s, I think, that’s unique also.
Mik: (35:35)
Could that have to do with something deeper about Danish culture, which is, as I see it, that the Danes are actually taught through childhood and adolescence about consensus making, about finding common ground. And that this is actually entered all the way into politics and where it’s not about the politicians themselves, but actually society together with politicians finding a consensus.
Bjørn: (36:04)
I think that’s very Danish, yeah. It is. We Danes don’t like conflicts. We don’t like war. So we want to… We want it cozy and we want it relaxed, and then we can have a cup of coffee afterwards and, you know, so that’s maybe what we see on a a big political level here.
Mik: (36:28)
Like also the Danes never declared a climate emergency the same way that your neighbour country England [did]. It was 95 per cent of councils in England that declared a climate emergency. And I don’t think a single municipality in Denmark…
Bjørn: (36:41)
No, no. And that’s really mind blowing, which, yeah, it puzzles me too. But I guess you’re right. It ends up with the same way… the cultural way of seeing things that we don’t want to make people worried, we don’t want to escalate things into conflicts, we want to be happy and find happy solutions and make the consensus.
Mik: (37:11)
It seems to be working pretty good, at least when the United Nations make their annual surveys of… the happiness reports and so on, Denmark seems to always come up in top.
Bjørn: (37:22)
Yeah, I don’t think you see the whole picture there, to be honest. We have around 400,000 Danes who are struggling with stress, anxiety and that’s so many people it’s also a financial problem because they can’t work. So the health condition and the mental condition of the Danes are more complex than that. We are not just ‘happy people’. We are, I think, we are in many ways. We feel safe and comfortable, but I think also many young people are actually struggling with climate anxiety. And more than we want to talk about because we don’t want to see those things for real and because they yeah, we don’t like them. But they are there and we need to deal with them.
Mik: (38:25)
So let’s talk about how you deal with them and also in your podcast, the solutions that you talk about. I can say as a again, as a someone coming from the outside, I’ve been absolutely impressed with how fast the the streets have changed from the sound of petrol cars to now eight out of ten cars that are driving in the streets where I am are all EVs, electric vehicles. So that transformation has happened so quickly. We’re talking about just 3-5 years or something. It’s gone from being petrol everywhere to now being electric. And also I’m impressed with seeing that the petrol stations now have both petrol and charging stations. It’s not like you have to go somewhere else. No, you just go to where you used to get your petrol and you get your charge instead.
Bjørn: (39:11)
Yeah, I still remember I think it’s eight years ago I got my first EV car and and it was, you know, all the neighbors came saying, ‘Hey, can we try it?’ Can we, you know, we were just walking around it as as something strange really coming into the neighborhood. We didn’t have electrical vehicles at that time, so it’s it’s a really fast development. I think, yeah, almost all cars today that are sold are EVs. I think that matter has to do with prestige, to be honest. I think it’s because it shows that you are on the beat, it shows that you have the the possibility actually to buy that this kind of car. It’s more convenient, it’s more comfortable if you are driving in an electrical vehicle, you know, it’s it’s very quiet, it’s very comfortable. It’s just better and more comfortable than the old fossil car. So it’s something that people want if they can afford it.
And so it has something to do with price, I think, that matter. And actually it’s a funny thing because one of the big issues with the transition is that the people who have the most difficult conditions in this country are actually also some of the people who are most against the transition because they feel that they are, you know, just run over by the development and they feel that they are forgotten and they feel that they can’t afford to live like people now want everybody to live because everybody on the surface wants to be a good environmental citizen. But they can’t afford it so they feel bad about it and they feel left behind. And that’s actually I think we should take very seriously because it could be a democratic issue, it could be something that will fuel the right wing parties. so yeah.
It’s a really important matter, I think.
Mik: (41:33)
Mm. And you’re saying it’s an economic divide?
Bjørn: (41:37)
Yeah. Because if you have the money, it’s easy to do all the right things in an environmental sense. You can show off. You can show that you have a nice electrical vehicle. You can show that you have the time to take the train if you want. Not that I don’t think that that rich people do that, but you have the option. You have the possibility and often you do that because it makes you feel good. But if you don’t have the money for it, well you just – if you don’t have the money you can’t buy buy bioorganic food. You can’t buy local food because that’s for the expensive restaurants. As you you mentioned, Noma earlier. Yeah, yeah. So that’s…
Mik: (42:26)
So focus on equality in society is actually also an important climate solution.
Bjørn: (42:34)
That’s my experience! That that’s one of the biggest obstacles actually for a proper transition – that’s the inequality. If everybody felt that they had a real opportunity to participate in the transition, I think most of the people want to. So it’s about making it possible for ordinary people to actually make the change. And they need to have this opportunity both mentally but also when it comes to their economy.
Otherwise if their life conditions don’t provide the opportunity, well, they are lost. And we can’t blame them because they don’t have a chance then. So it’s up to us actually to make it possible to everybody to participate in the transition.
Mik: (43:26)
So if we talk about how Denmark, you know, could inspire us in Australia, which items or which developments would you focus on in terms of export possibilities?
Bjørn: (43:40)
I think the way of collaborating, the way of making consensus is one of the big things that we can share our experiences with. I think that…
Mik: (44:01)
I’ve seen when I watched the news in the evening almost every second day there’s some report about some new innovation. Someone in a laboratory or someone in a cellar somewhere who has invented something, done something. There seems to be… or maybe it’s just the media that focuses on that, I’m not sure – but there seems to be a lot of activity in business – that the Danes seem to see this as an opportunity for business.
Bjørn: (44:28)
I think you’re right that actually it was one of the first things that happened when we started taking climate change seriously in Denmark. We started a public discussion about okay, how can we do this in a smart way? And everybody came up with the ideas of how could we earn money on this? Because that’s how we run the society today. We run it through economy. So we see a lot of businesses who are trying to come up with a solution, both technical solutions also.
Here in Aarhus we we have a lot of reuse of things. So we have reusable cups in public space. So if you go to a bar or if you go to a street bar of kind where you can buy street food or something like that, you will be offered a reusable cup. And this cup you will pay a small amount, just a small fee, and then you are when you are finished, there you can l bring it back in public places easily. So the point is that you don’t have this single use materials that you need all the time you have you have the possibility to reuse it again and again and again. So this is this is the kind of ideas that comes up to make it smarter and make it easy to live more yeah environmental wise.
Mik: (46:05)
And I see some generosity and some kindness in the Danish society as well. I noticed that on the public bins there’s an extra little outside bin where you can put the cans that are refundable. Because maybe someone who needs the money could then take these cans and go and cash the money. Yeah. And that seem seems to me so charming. Yeah, it’s such a nice little feature.
Bjørn: (46:28)
Otherwise they would just be thrown into the can or into the basket and then then they will have to Yeah, sort them out later and that’s, so yeah.
Mik: (46:41)
And the other thing I notice is the cycling, you know, that the especially in Copenhagen but also here in Aarhus, that the pathways, there’s a lot of thinking into how can we make life good and safe for the cyclists. You see it in the infrastructure. There’s even special lights that go on green before the cars get green light the cyclists get green light before so they get ahead.
Bjørn: (47:05)
Yeah, that’s right. We we actually wanted to yeah do a lot more than we see right now. we if you if you go to a to a city like Houten in in the the Netherlands, you will see how they actually built the whole city around bicycling and pedestrians. And if you come buy in a car, you’ll have to park the car in the outer ring of this city. It’s around 40,000 people living there, but you will have to park the car in the outer ring. And if you really need to drive into your house to if you are moving or you need to have big things bringing with you then you will then you’ll see that you’ll have to stand back and you’ll have to wait for the bicycles.
So you actually changed it… the whole thing of the hierarchy is changed. That’s the real way of actually prioritising this kind of of traffic. We wanted to go much further that way and wanted to get the fossil cars all the way out of the city if we could. But yeah you’re right. We are on our way. We’re doing things.
And I think it’s good that you see it from outside because sometimes when you’re in the middle of it you don’t really see the progress that you should see also along the way. Because of course we have improvements all the time, but we need a lot more to do. So yeah.
Mik: (48:54)
Thank you very much to Björn Olsen from the Danish podcast about Aarhus, the Green Voices of Aarhus, and for telling us about what’s going on on the other side of the planet. I hope we can collaborate in the future, you know, and have more exchanges and keep each other notified when there’s something really interesting going on, in the future.
I will also be talking to a scientist and a researcher who’s got some incredible ideas, potentially big ideas about how to cool the planet, but that’ll be for a later Sustainable Hour.
For now we have reached the Be-section, as we call it of The Sustainable Hour where we talk about what should we be, what should we become? What do you say, Bjorn? What should we be? From the Danish point of view.
Bjørn: (49:44)
We should be kind. Kind to nature, kind to the people around us, kind to ourselves, kind to future generations. We should be kind.
. . .
SONG (49:56)
‘The Green Transition’
Intro:
The world is turning, faster than before
Between lightness and love, and power and lies
Verse 1:
I’ve seen the floods, I’ve felt the storms
Watched the news as cities drowned
Want to shut off, can’t watch this breakdown
It’s hard to see we can turn this ship around
Bridge:
They say it’s too late, they say ‘just wait’
But I won’t watch it wash away
I choose the truth, I change my ways
I’ve signed up and, I’m ready to join
Chorus:
The Green Transition is inevitable
From home to work, from town to town
Solar’s shining, wind is strong
The air is clean, life is fun
Verse 2:
They call them ‘natural’ — disasters untamed
But I know better, I know who’s to blame
Coal, gas, oil — the damage they do
But I’m the one to choose, I know what’s true
Bridge:
They said ‘just go slow, don’t shake the ground’
But I refuse to back down
Not someday, no, right here, right now
I make it right, I make it count
[Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest:
“Australia has called for a phase out of fossil fuels.”]
Chorus:
The Green Transition is inevitable
From land to sea, around the world
I speak the shift, I share the news
A great renewal, a bold decision
Bridge:
I build, I vote, I call out the lies
We shape the rules, we change the tide
It’s not impossible, it’s on the rise
A world reborn before our eyes
Final Chorus:
Welcome to the Green Transition
It’s in our hands, it’s underway
No more waiting, the time is now
We rise together — this is the way
. . .
Audio clips:
Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest:
Australia has called for a phase out of fossil fuels
Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Hey
Mo Gawdat:
You should be leading this revolution
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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