Sweden, Once A Climate Action Leader, Now Lags Behind Its Peers In Europe – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 4th August 2025, 11:43 pm

Most people think of Sweden — the land of Volvos and Saabs — as a leader in taking climate action seriously. It is home to Greta Thunberg, one of the most outspoken climate activists in the world today. In 2020, the European Union pledged to be “carbon neutral” by 2050 and Sweden was a leader in making that goal seem possible.

Swedish leadership on environmental issues dates to 1896, when Uppsala physicist Svante Arrhenius was first to quantify the role carbon emissions played in warming the planet. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 paved the way for international environmental collaboration. By 1991, Sweden was taxing carbon emissions, making it one of the first nations to do so.

According to Inside Climate News, in 2015, Sweden pledged $550 million to the Green Climate Fund created by the Paris Agreement that was adopted that year. Two years later, seven of the nation’s eight national political parties negotiated a Climate Policy Framework that included long-term goals, reporting mechanisms, and a scientific Climate Policy Council in a national law.

In 2018, a young Greta Thunberg started weekly demonstrations outside Sweden’s parliament, which led to a global campaign for climate action. That movement built political momentum for the European Green Deal, which was approved by the European Commission in 2020. It was intended to launch the EU out of the pandemic with investments in clean technologies and innovation.

Climate Action

For many observers, one of Sweden’s most important contributions to climate action was showing how economic growth can be decoupled from fossil fuels. Since 1979, when Sweden had its highest emissions, the nation’s release of carbon has fallen over 50 percent while GDP per person has more than doubled. So much for the doomsayers who claim climate action is an economy killer.

But now, just five years later, a growing list of organizations, companies, and agencies are accusing the EU of reneging on its climate promises. Some critics argue the EU, which is the world’s third largest carbon emitter after the US and China, is now starting to mirror, rather than counter, the dismantling of climate efforts in the US.

Sweden is a big part of the reason why. For decades, it pushed Europe’s climate ambitions upward, but today, Sweden is falling back from its environmental progress. Last year, its fossil fuel emissions saw their biggest increase in 15 years. Carbon uptake by its forests have been cut in half. Sweden’s government swung to the right in its last general election and since then it has slashed investments in climate action. Researchers say Sweden’s position as a frontrunner with regard to climate action is disappearing and weakening Europe’s climate agenda.

In March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a ten-year environmental performance review of Sweden that stated “recent policy shifts have created an uncertain environment for climate action.” A 2024 global assessment by the German Climate Change Performance Index lowered Sweden to 41st after having been ranked 4th in 2021.

“We can say with some confidence that Sweden no longer pushes the European Union to higher ambitions,” said Naghmeh Nasiritousi, a senior research fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs and co-director of the Center for Climate Science and Policy Research at Linköping University.

“Sweden has lost all credibility there,” Thomas Hahn, an ecological economist and associate professor at Stockholm Resilience Center, told ICN, but recent reforms have eroded Sweden’s trustworthiness and ability to prod other nations to do more. “The government has quickly undone policy frameworks with an enraging level of negligence and devastating consequence.”

In April, Hahn co-signed an op-ed with over 1,000 researchers in Dagens Nyheter, a prominent newspaper in the country. The signatories listed a range of policy examples, including several regarding forests and climate, where politicians have ignored or politicized scientific knowledge. They stated that the behavior “undermines the foundation for a democratic and sustainable society.” In a country that prides itself as a global beacon for such values, those were harsh words.

Elections In Sweden

Since the country’s general elections in 2022, Sweden has taken distinct steps away from its environmental legacy. A conservative coalition, supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats, focused their campaign on cheap fuel and public safety. In office, they have prioritized building up the military, being tough on crime, and sharply reducing immigration. Funding for climate action has plummeted. Does that sound familiar? It is a carbon copy (no pun intended) of the Project 2025 playbook that is threatening to end the democratic experiment in the United States.

Sweden has halted investments in high-speed rail, cancelled subsidies for electric vehicles, stopped its support for undersea cables — which in turn has stopped offshore wind projects, increased taxes on solar electricity, and cut its investments in several green innovation funds that help pay for more efficient heating systems and EV charging infrastructure.

At the same time, subsidies for fossil fuels and aviation have increased and gasoline prices have fallen by almost half. Sweden’s carbon emissions rose by 7 percent last year, primarily because the government eliminated regulations requiring biofuels to be blended with gasoline.

Sweden’s government continues talking the climate action talk by highlighting its spending on two areas — carbon credits that pay for emission reductions in less developed countries which allows Sweden to maintain higher emissions — and new nuclear power plants to generate emission-free electricity. Critics argue that those credits have neocolonial implications, as the programs effectively export both the blame and the consequences of emissions from rich nations to poorer ones. Other critics note that nuclear power is an economic gamble that will take decades to implement, and that it is expensive.

Sweden is following a European trend, said Rudi Wurzel, professor of comparative European politics at the University of Hull in England. He developed the concept of an ambitious “green sextet” of nations driving the EU’s climate agenda, but while following ongoing negotiations and statements, he saw five of those countries — Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Austria — all appear to reduce their climate policy objectives. All of these countries have also shifted to the political right. Only Denmark, a leader in offshore wind, is mostly maintaining its aspirations to cut emissions and fight climate change, he said.

The Climate Change Performance Index confirmed his analysis, with its scores for all five nations dramatically falling between 2021 and 2024, while Denmark moved upwards. And Denmark, which currently holds the influential and rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union ahead of a range of important EU negotiations and decisions in the fall, might have room to sustain some European climate ambitions, even as priorities shift in other countries.

Political considerations may help to foster some EU environmental goals, Wurzel added, because in Europe renewables offer immediate security benefits by decreasing dependence on Russian energy imports. “Security considerations may save EU’s climate efforts for now, and we never know where politics goes next,” said Wurzel.

Sweden’s chief climate negotiator, Ambassador Mattias Frumerie, told ICN he is “aware of the debate inside Sweden” but noted that local issues rarely reach international negotiations. Sweden’s message that the urgent need to confront climate change presents a business opportunity is attracting growing interest, he said. Sweden’s Minister for Climate and Environment, Romina Pourmokhtari, declined to make herself available to ICN for an interview.

AI Answers The Call

This whole discussion raises the question: why the lurch to the right by governments all around the world? Europe for decades has been the model for enlightened liberalism. Why are the Swedes suddenly allergic to progressive values? In an article about AI yesterday, I asked why the US is giving $90 billion to tech companies that are already swimming in ready cash? One of our regular readers, who styles himself as Good Guy Locke, thought it was a pretty good question, so he asked ChatGPT for an answer.

The computer gave a long and quite lucid answer, and it you want to see the whole thing, you can find it in the comments to that story. But here was the final thought from the electronic brain:

“Bottom Line — Humans aren’t ‘spending for their own destruction’ out of ignorance or self-destructive intent. They are spending for power, wealth, and competitive advantage, while discounting or deferring the risks. This is a very old story in technology: benefits today outweigh uncertain costs tomorrow, at least until the costs become impossible to ignore.”

This is, so far as I know, the first time I have quoted a computer. I suspect it won’t be the last. Maybe we can program it to broadcast throughout Mar-A-Loco so its wisdom can reach those who don’t want to believe what their eyes and ears are telling them.