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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.