Description
Denmark’s climate policies centre around developing its position as a global climate leader. The 2020 Climate Law explicitly prioritises Denmark’s role as a first-mover country ahead of cost-effectiveness, protecting the welfare state, and avoiding carbon leakage: “Climate challenges are a global problem. Therefore, Denmark should be a first-moving country in the international climate effort, which can inspire and influence the rest of the world”. Concretely, this leadership has come through co-founding the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA), seeking to influence other countries.
However, I offer a more critical assessment of Denmark’s global climate leadership ambitions. Revieing extant scholarship and analysing key texts (pieces of legislation, government reports, government policy documents, and press statements), I argue that Danish global climate leadership ambitions lack transformative dimensions that could provide meaningful global leadership. I evaluate key components of Danish climate policy and their global effects, including continued commitment to fossil fuel production, lack of supply-side policies, historic contribution to emissions, prioritising of climate consulting over technology transfer, omission of vast shipping emissions, and offshoring of production emissions. These question Denmark’s leadership role. I conclude by setting out what genuinely transformative global climate leadership could look like for Denmark and similar countries.
