interview > Skúlason > skulason 16

Skúlason 16 (1:17)
Topic(s): Biofuels / Foreign Oil / Iceland / Renewable
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Video Transcript

Well, being sustainable, Iceland was fully sustainable 1000 years ago. Then we only had renewable energies—we used peat, which is the only fossil resource we had, we used wood which, in a sense, it is not renewable, but that was used for heating and construction and etc., we used wind to sail, we used horses for transport. In a sense, there was no emission of green house gases from except maybe from burning of wood and if that was replenished, it was a renewable sense in that sense. We're going back a thousand years; we're going back to the Viking times again to try to create a renewable island. I don't know of any renewable island—in a sense, there might be some very, very tiny island somewhere in the Caribbean or Middle East where only a few inhabitants are, but I don't know of any society working like that.

And a lot of island societies have approached us where you have developing nations spending maybe 75 to 90 percent of their whole export income to buy fossil fuels. That's- there's no way you can turn from being a developing nation to a developed nation if you spend 90 percent of your income to buy oil. And they're looking at us if Iceland can create a hydrogen society like that, maybe we can do also and become a renewable island just as Iceland.