I get it......the right just doesn't like the earth.
Industry's benefits, costs divide Iceland
Rivers flowing from the enormous Icelandic glacier of Vatnajokull are being harnessed for electricity to fuel an aluminum smelter. The project has angered environmentalists.
By Sarah Lyall
The New York Times
NORTH OF VATNAJOKULL GLACIER, Iceland — Tucked into Iceland's central highlands, where the Karahnjukar mountain meets two powerful rivers flowing north from a major glacier, a nearly completed jigsaw of dams, tunnels and reservoirs has begun to reshape the wilderness.
This is the $3 billion Karahnjukar Hydropower Project, a sprawling enterprise to harness the rivers for electricity that will be used for a single purpose: to fuel a new aluminum smelter owned by Alcoa, the world's largest aluminum company. It has been the focus of the angriest and most divisive battle in recent Icelandic history.
The culmination of years of effort by the center-right government to increase international investment in Iceland, the project has begun to revitalize Iceland's underpopulated east. But it has also mobilized an angry and growing coalition of people who believe that authorities have sacrificed Iceland's most precious asset — the pristine land itself — to heavy industry from abroad.
Now, with proposals on the table for three more power-plant and aluminum-smelter projects, environmentalists say that the chance to protect Iceland's spectacular, and spectacularly fragile, natural beauty is running out.
"If all of these projects get through, then it's a total environmental apocalypse for the Icelandic highlands; they'll have developed every single major glacial river and geothermal field for heavy industry," said Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, one of the organizers of Saving Iceland, a coalition of groups opposing further development. "It is a very rare nature that we are the guardians of, and we are squandering it."
Unspoiled, unpredictable
One of the most unspoiled places in the developed world, Iceland is slightly larger than Indiana, with a population of about 300,000 people.
Icelanders tend to treat their unpredictable environment — carved from volcanoes and ice and full of spectacular waterfalls, geysers, fjords and glaciers — with respect and awe. The air is so pure that the Kyoto Protocol gave Iceland the right to increase its greenhouse emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels.
The pending proposals call for four more dams, as many as eight new geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, two new smelters (one owned by Alcoa) and the expansion of capacity at an existing smelter. If all are built, foreign companies would have the capacity to produce as much as 1.6 million tons of aluminum a year.
They are also allowed to pollute: Another Kyoto exception gave power-intensive industries that use renewable energy in Iceland the right to emit an extra 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide a year until 2012.
Pollution concerns
As a whole, the new smelters would require about eight times the amount of electricity used for all of Iceland's domestic consumption, putting a huge strain on the country's rivers and thermal fields, said Hjorleifur Guttormsson, who served as Iceland's energy and industry minister from 1980 to 1985.
Guttormsson, a naturalist, said pollution was another concern: Aluminum plants are heavy emitters of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride and other chemicals.
But Alcoa says it has fitted state-of-the-art pollution controls in its new plant.
A spokesman for the company, Kevin Lowery, said the new smelter would produce 1.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of aluminum it produced compared with 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide per metric ton of aluminum for a coal-fired smelter. "The emissions from this facility will be less than for any other facility of this size elsewhere in the world," he said.
Jon Sigurdsson, Iceland's minister of industry and commerce, said that the proposals were subject to multiple hurdles, including, in some cases, local referendums. The government has always applied rigorous environmental standards to development projects, he said, and is preparing legislation that would set out a master plan for the country, designating which areas are to be protected and which have the potential for development.
A perfect fit?
Iceland is a prosperous country, but its prosperity is concentrated in Reykjavik. The government has long sought ways to bolster the economy by exploiting the country's second-biggest natural resource after fish: electric power, derived from a vast network of rivers and from underground geothermal fields.
But since power cannot feasibly be exported, the idea has been to import demand. Aluminum in a way seems a perfect fit. It is a power-intensive industry that needs easy access to ports for importing raw materials and exporting the finished product.
Iceland has clean, available power, abundant coasts and proximity to the lucrative European market.
Iceland's first aluminum plant was built in the 1960s; there are now two, both near Reykjavik.
"The government has done everything in its power to make way for these plants," said Kolbrun Halldorsdottir, a member of Parliament from the Left-Green Movement. "They have been fixed to this scheme like Saudi Arabia is fixed to oil. They don't believe in entrepreneurship, job opportunities in our culture, tourism. They only believe in aluminum."
In opinion polls, the majority of Icelanders have consistently supported the Karahnjukar project, saying it would bring jobs and money to the eastern fjords.
But environmentalists say that the project will devastate 3 percent of Iceland's land mass, destroy or affect 60 large waterfalls; cause widespread soil erosion; and flood an area covered in unusual moss and used by reindeer, and myriad birds.
They say, too, that the dam here is inherently unstable, built on an unusually thin, fractured crust of earth near one of the most volcanically volatile areas in the world. Just south, the Vatnajokull glacier is melting rapidly from global warming, adding to the geological uncertainty.
In 2001, the Icelandic Planning Agency rejected the Karahnjukar plan, ruling that any economic benefits would not compensate for the potential environmental harm. But Iceland's environment minister at the time overturned the decision, set some new conditions and allowed the project to go ahead. Opponents now say that many Icelanders did not appreciate its scale or potential effect.
Last September, Omar Ragnarsson, one of the country's most respected television reporters, announced that he could no longer cover the Karahnjukar project with a journalist's impartiality and would campaign against it. In a country where public demonstrations are relatively rare, he led an anti-dam rally in Reykjavik, attended by 8,000 to 13,000 people.
At 2,400 feet wide and 650 feet tall, the dam is the highest of its kind in Europe. The reservoir will eventually cover 22 square miles.
The harnessed water is to be sent through 45 miles of tunnels blasted into the mountains to a new, 690-megawatt hydropower station built deep inside a mountain.
The electricity is to be sent along 32 miles of overland transmission lines to the Alcoa smelter in Reydarfjordur.
"Hangover will come"
The smelter is supposed to begin producing aluminum by this summer, and the initial effects are obvious: There is a building boom going on in the east. "It's like gold fever, or when everyone is drunk — and you know that the hangover will come," said Greta Osk Sigurdardottir, a farmer who lives in the area and who opposes the project.
Reydarfjordur, population 650, has its first mall. Housing prices have gone up. People are moving back and the extra money has begun to give the town the amenities of a modern city, said Helga Jonsdottir, mayor of Reydarfjordur and five other villages.
But others are not so happy. Gudmundur M.H. Beck spent his first 57 years in Reydarfjordur living on the same farm as his father and grandfather did.
When 18 electricity pylons were built across the land and the government banned grazing there, Beck took his animals to the slaughterhouse and moved.
"This is the most horrible thing that has ever been done here," he said. "I really have no words to describe it."
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