Sweden and Sustainability

Hey,

This was an email I put together, but this is probably a better place to put it.

So, I've been living in Sweden for almost 7 months now. I've been able to see some of the incredible work going on in leading Sweden towards sustainability.

I live in Karlskrona, which is a kind of unremarkable town on the road towards sustainability, other than having the first university in Sweden to declare that it would be climate neutral. Karlskrona does has a biomass-fired district heating plant, and the house I live in on an island (Långö, which translates to Long Island) half way between school and downtown has a ground-source heat pump, because the district heating network's pipes are just being laid down here now. Karlskrona also has some pretty good density in the town centre. However, it is fairly sprawled and has a power centre, not unlike those of Canadian cities. On the other hand, it has good public transport and bicycle paths to get there.

Karlskrona is 90 km south of Kalmar and 115 km southeast of Växjö. These two cities are doing much better on their road to sustainability.

I completed a project on looking at how Växjö, which has the slogan "The Greenest City in Europe" (originally given to it by The Independent in August 2007, could make future developments as sustainable as possible. Växjö is a pseudo-success story. They set a target to reduce fossil carbon emissions by 50% from 1993 levels by 2010, and have made a 32% reduction so far (as of 2007), mostly through shifting their combined heat and power plant from oil to biomass (largely locally-sourced wood residues, given its location in Småland, which is one of the leading lumber regions in Sweden). However, transportation emissions remain intractable, and have gone up 15% over the 15 year period.

Interestingly, Kalmar has started to steal some of the thunder from Växjö. The Smålandsposten, which is the regional newspaper for the area covering both Kalmar and Växjö, has been criticizing Växjö Kommun (somewhat unjustly) for not buying new biodiesel buses and instead getting older ones from Kalmar. However, Växjö plans on using biogas from their wastewater treatment in new buses starting in 2010.

It is interesting to note how Swedes have very similar conditions to Canadians and yet are so much further ahead. I still haven't nailed down exactly what it is, but there is no doubt culture plays a large part in it. How often have we heard Swedish companies say that they're moving towards sustainability because "it's the right thing to do"? More than once...

There is one thing, however, that really changes things. For all taxes collected up to the 30% tax bracket, 2/3 are directed straight to the municipalities. The other 1/3 goes to the county. Beyond that, the national government gets to collect taxes, e.g. the exorbitant 25% sales taxes on goods as well as gambling and alcohol revenues, and carbon taxes which will raise about SEK28 billion (CDN$4.5 billion) in Sweden this year, at about $150/tonne (I can't find the actual rate by searching through the Swedish government website in either Swedish or English, since carbon taxes and energy taxes are lumped together).

That may explain why Swedes are more willing to pay taxes - because they see the benefit at the local level. To me, this is a much better system than the property tax system in Canada (i.e. municipalities can only collect from transfers and property taxes). I don't pretend to have a strong grip on tax systems, and am welcome to comments on what I've written here.