Why Britain will feel the cold more than Iceland this winter

A winter of discontent is underway in Europe. Germany, France and Britain are the biggest economies in Europe: all face a battle to keep the lights on over the coming months. There are warnings of energy rationing, blackouts and the forced closure of factories as the continent weans itself off Russian gas. How did it come to this? The countries that drove the industrial revolution are out in the cold. Europe is stuck in a quagmire of its own making. But these countries could do worse than look north – to Iceland – for inspiration on how to make it through winter.

As the name suggests, my home country can get rather cold in winter when the temperature can hit -30 °C. In fact, it is chilly in Iceland most of the year; even in summer, the average temperature is 10°C. Yet Icelanders have managed to survive and thrive for 1,150 years despite the inhospitable conditions. But although Europe is not in a position to learn from our successes it might learn from our more recent mistakes, especially in the push for ‘green’ energy.

After surviving in Tolkienesque turf houses for over a thousand years, sometimes using livestock as a form of central heating, Icelanders gained our independence in the early 20th century. It was a time of optimism in the far north. We quickly started making use of the opportunities presented to us. 

Iceland has the good and bad fortune to sit on a seismic fault and a geological hotspot. This means we have to put up with a lot of volcanoes, but we also have an infinite amount of energy streaming from the core of the earth. Ingeniously my ancestors found ways to use this energy to heat their homes and create energy.

Iceland also has another geographical blessing: dozens of fast-flowing rivers with the potential for the production of hydroelectricity. Most of the country’s electricity is produced through such sustainable means. As a result, energy is cheap and homes are usually too warm for my liking. I often have to open the windows to let out the heat. 

When I moved to the UK around the turn of the millennium to study at university, friends and family told me to take plenty of warm clothes. It was common knowledge in Iceland that British homes are notoriously cold. Victorian houses are nice to look at (and should be preserved without being spoiled by PVC windows) but they can be freezing inside. My grandmother sent me packing with knitted socks and sweaters to help me survive.

I made it through the cold British winters, returning to Iceland periodically to get my clothes washed and for me to warm up. But with soaring gas bills, homes in the UK are even chillier this winter: many people can’t afford to turn the heating on. 

Of course, Britain – and indeed most other European countries – don’t have the good fortune to be located on a hotspot; nor are they suitable places to build large-scale hydropower plants. As a result, they lack Iceland’s energy resources. Yet even with such plentiful supplies, something troubling is unfolding in Iceland.

This winter, Icelandic energy suppliers are asking people to save hot water. What is going on? We have grown accustomed to pumping hot water under pavements and car parks to melt any ice or snow. Leaving the water running while drinking my morning coffee and contemplating whether to take a shower or not was no problem. After all, we have by far the largest per capita freshwater resources in the world, and we use the ample hot water to heat up the fresh water. If it doesn’t go through the shower, it just runs to the sea.

But the soaring cost of energy has still resulted in a nasty shock for many Icelanders because my country has, like the UK, neglected to invest in our energy infrastructure. How did this happen? The answer is simple: our enormous energy resources meant we became complacent. 

The green lobby must also shoulder some of the blame – their desire to protect the environment at all costs made it much trickier for energy projects to get the green light. In a 180-degree turn from the progressive mentality of the 20^th century, the production of energy was seen by some as a bad thing.

If Iceland’s energy resources had been more fully harnessed, my country could have helped mitigate Europe’s energy crises. Large amounts of oil and particularly gas are believed to sit under the seabed east of Iceland. This is the same strata as the seabed west of Norway, formed before the countries started to drift apart some time ago. Unfortunately, exploration of these rich resources is now unlikely.

Iceland’s government seeks not only to ban the use of oil and gas resources in the country’s jurisdiction but even to block research on the subject. This is bad for Iceland – it is even worse news for Europe.

Just after I started in politics, shortly before the 2009 elections, a left-green environment minister said she was not sure Iceland should make use of the country’s resources in oil and gas. This was greeted with some hilarity, and the left-green’s parliamentary group wasted no time in issuing a statement saying these views were in no way representative of the party’s agenda.

How things have changed. Now we have Iceland’s (former) conservative party proposing a ban on the use of natural resources and even on researching the potential of these oil and gas supplies.

This is the result of the politics of image above content. As long as the ‘dirty’ energy projects are done elsewhere, we can deceive ourselves that our hands are clean. That’s why the US president asks Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to produce more oil and gas, but is unwilling to fully capitalise on the US’s huge untapped resources. The same can be said about the UK’s reluctance to frack.

Thankfully, it is not too late to change tack – and this year’s energy crisis might be the prompt we need to do so. Iceland remains blessed with plentiful energy supplies, even if untapped pools of resources sitting off the coast remain off limits. But Britain, and other European countries, have fewer resources to count on. To prepare for life without a ready supply of Russian gas, the country that led the industrial revolution needs to rediscover what being progressive really means. This means fracking sensibly and when it comes to North Sea gas: drill baby, drill!