As a commentator at Document for ten years, I have exposed in both articles and books how climate policy is an incubator for corruption. When public and private interests and money are mixed together in this way, corruption and Ponzi schemes are not merely possible: They become completely irresistible because the authorities ask for corruption, encourage it, cultivate it and actively protect it.
Now, incredibly, even the legacy media have begun to react to what is going on. On 1 August, Nettavisen published an opinion piece by Jonas Kristiansen Nøland, professor at the Department of Electric Energy at NTNU. In the headline, he points out that “Stoltenberg warned against green corruption”. Stoltenberg did so a long time ago in his 2016 autobiography “Min historie”, in which he criticises “the power triangle of NHO, LO and the environmental movement”. I have written about this power structure many times, as here in 2019, and here about the results in 2026.
In the opinion piece, Professor Kristiansen Nøland lists a number of examples of how the state takes the risk through subsidies, while business leaders take bonuses and taxpayers are left with the bill. The state cannot, after all, build the “climate measures” that politicians have commissioned on the basis of zero science and empirical evidence of success. Private profiteers have to do that, and since it has to happen at express speed in order to “save the climate”, all parties understand that private companies need “risk relief” and subsidies in order to carry out the politicians’ commission.
A public spending spree with no requirement for results
Climate policy is a lure for every actor with more greed than ethics, all over the world. Climate hysteria has become the largest transfer of public money to private profiteers in history – and anyone with an IQ above 85 understands that this public–private collusion invites backroom deals, shortcuts, “kickbacks” and creative business practices, so that everyone involved ends up with something in their pockets.
All these private profiteers hide behind the lie that they are concerned with saving the climate and the planet. It was an accelerating money-go-round between 1991 and 2015, but when the insane Paris Agreement was signed, it became mandated by law and thus unstoppable. Business leaders and boardrooms went from focusing on profits to wanting to save the planet through subsidies. Perhaps this was what Jens Stoltenberg understood and warned against, to no avail:
In 2019, Norway got its Climate Change Act, and when Støre became Prime Minister in 2021, one of the first things he did was lift the 2019 halt on wind-power licences, which Erna Solberg had introduced in a panic after a popular revolt. The corrupt wind-power industry thanked him for this, and now they wanted billions for offshore wind. And in 2022, Støre launched his “Green Industrial Initiative” together with major private capital. With that, the days when the market and private actors decided what should be produced and how are over. The politicians know better, and they have an endless supply of your money with which to make the “visions” a reality.
The state dictates what businesses should do
The “Green Industrial Initiative” defined the state’s seven priority areas for Norway’s future business sector: offshore wind, batteries, hydrogen, CO2 management, the maritime industry, the bioeconomy, and the forestry and timber economy. And when the plan showed signs of failing, Støre reinforced the planned economy with “Roadmap 2.0: Green Industrial Initiative” from 2023, in which, among other things, battery factories remain at the heart of the Labour Party’s industrial policy. That went brilliantly.
Professor Kristiansen Nøland points to Terje Aasland’s comment in 2023, when he said that the most important aspect of the offshore wind initiative was not the green transition, but building Norwegian suppliers and industries. The problem is that it is not the state’s role to build industries. That is not the state’s task in a democracy, but rather in socialist dictatorships such as Mao’s China.
Critics argue that wind power and offshore wind are industrial policy disguised as climate policy, and that is also wrong: It is neither industrial policy nor climate policy. It is planned-economy policy – and planned economies do not work. As we can see.
The government rewards fraud
Kristiansen Nøland highlights two examples of the collapse: Tom Einar Jensen was co-founder and CEO of Freyr, and his fortune increased from zero to NOK 99 million. Morrow CEO Lars Christian Bacher was paid NOK 15.8 million out of the battery fiasco, and received a million-kroner bonus in the same year that the company posted a loss of NOK 423 million.
There were never any major sales of batteries. The only things produced were endless promises, PowerPoints and applications for support. The taxpayers took the risk; the men in suits made off with the money. Because there are no requirements to deliver anything at all, succeed at anything or repay the money when climate projects fail. Støre’s green value chains are completely devoid of value.
The owners of the climate limited companies therefore do not really need to have any plans to succeed. They merely need to promise that they do, and need the closest possible contacts with those who hand out the money. And once public officials have accepted bribes, they are trapped. And this is where Professor Kristiansen Nøland stumbles at the finishing line. He forgets to mention the single most important factor surrounding green corruption: opportunity
Total lack of oversight bodies and oversight
When politicians decide to adopt an entirely new economic system in the form of a “green circular economy”, based on a planned economy, climate panic and public subsidies, they open the door to collusion, cronyism, fraud, Ponzi companies, kickbacks and gross corruption. The only responsible thing to do then is massively to strengthen oversight bodies such as the Office of the Auditor General (Riksrevisjonen) and the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Økokrim) in order actively to counteract this problem, which undermines both society and honest businesses.
That never happened. Quite the opposite. Battery factories are still at the heart of the Labour Party’s business policy. It is still open to anyone to apply for climate subsidies without a shred of guarantees of results or repayment. And no oversight body is standing there with a magnifying glass, watching to see whether anyone is tempted to take shortcuts, harbour false intentions or reward those who pay out the subsidies. Many cases should have been investigated. Many climate profiteers should have been in the dock long ago – instead, they are protected by the politicians, and they laugh all the way to the tax havens. It is unfathomable.
It was the danger of precisely this that probably concerned Jens Stoltenberg as early as 2015 – because the problem was unavoidable. But then another uncomfortable question arises: Why did he do nothing? Why did Stoltenberg write about it, but not force the issue into focus? And why did he agree to join a government in which Jan Christian Vestre’s family business received millions from the state while he was serving as Minister of Trade and Industry?
There is nothing to suggest that Stoltenberg has demanded that Støre strengthen oversight and anti-corruption efforts. And this is not naivety, it is negligence. Someone must have been talking to someone.
