Prime Minister Støre’s speech to students at the St. Olaf College

Checked against delivery (transcribed from the video recording)

Good afternoon – students, and thank you – President (Dr Susan Rundell Singer), thank you for receiving me here today. Believe me – for a Norwegian Prime Minister to be here, at this fine university of St. Olaf, has a special meaning.

I would like to acknowledge that we stand here on the homelands of the Wahpekute Band of the Dakota Nation. It is an acknowledgment of the people who have stewarded the land, throughout the generations.

I also use the same wording when I address the Sami Parliament in Norway, I mean, paying respect to the heartland of the Indigenous People in my country, their homeland, which we share together.

Bonds to Norway

So – friends,

Almost 150 years ago, in 1874, your school was founded by a group of Norwegian pioneers – pastors, farmers and businessmen from this region. So, right here, in the state of Minnesota, I am as close to home as I can get on this side of the Atlantic – and I can feel that. Yesterday, I was in the Norwegian church and I met a generation older than me who really had those long bonds and ties.

And I would like to say, Mme. President, at the outset, that St. Olaf College plays a very important role in our relationship – this is a solid Norwegian-American platform. Some of you may already be into Nordic languages, but I think that the name of the university gives you an impression of these ties, and in these changing times we need to cherish those historic bonds. For the identity of my country, where so many people left – back then, and went to the new world – it is important to recall that.

I think we are counting 800 000 people who made that journey. After Ireland Norway was the country where most people were leaving during hard times. In some counties in my country up to 40% left. Imagine, in the 1820s, Norway had less than one million inhabitants. The capital of Norway, Oslo – was then called Christiania – had 18 000 inhabitants in 1835, a very small place.

Historians today describe a somewhat nuanced picture of the emigration. One might think that they left Norway primarily because of poverty, hunger, failed agriculture on a big scale or climate change. Some did, yes – but many left because they had heard there were more and new opportunities, and they wanted to escape the church, they wanted to escape authorities, they wanted to develop new ways to earn a living.

Another thing we have learned from historians – and I find this quite interesting – is that many of those who left, quite a few of them, they came back. And what a journey; I mean for me, today – a seven hours’ flight from Europe, but they – first they had a pretty tough journey from their valleys and mountains in Norway to get to the coast and to get a boat – then get across the Atlantic and move all the way up north to Minnesota. And then going back again, equally challenging. But many of those who came back, they brought with them impressions, they brought with them ideas, and I think that is also worthwhile remembering.

Today, we might say that there are more than five million Norwegian Americans in the US – now, that is about the same number of Norwegians in Norway – so, if we put them altogether, we are ten million, that would be quite something.

Knowledge

Now, I often ask a question to students in Norway, in meetings like this:

How could it be that people back then, in the mid-1800s, left Norway – a country that had oil and gas under the continental shelf, a country that had immense water fall resources to produce electricity, clean energy, and a country that had fjords and coastlines where you could have fish farms for salmon – a big industry; how could they then leave a country with all those opportunities? Well, you know the answer: They did not know. They had no clue.

They left because there were really no opportunities for their families for survival and going on. I mention this because this is one explanation of why Norway is what it is today; it is about giving people the opportunity to get knowledge, to get studies, to get access to what it takes to look and go forward and onward.

I often quote one of my predecessors, the Prime Minister in the 1970s – and he was Finance Minister in the 1950s too – Trygve Bratteli (1910-84); he was brought up in poverty, he had barely seven years of education, and he became Minister of Finance. He was a concentration camp prisoner during World War II, but in the 1950s he became Minister of Finance, and he said once – when he sat in his chair as Minister – that in this Ministry, I can do two jobs: I can carry the mail or I can be the Minister, everything in between I don’t have the skills.

His generation of Norwegians made a pledge: they would do everything they could to give that opportunity to their children and grandchildren. So, this is why we, as a country now – when our main focus now is not oil and gas – it is on finding a way to get out of oil and gas – and into renewables, into offshore wind, into onshore wind, into solar, into hydrogen – these new energy sources: We hope that we can manage – because we have the skills, among people, in groups like you represent, in universities that I visit around the country, and I think that is very inspiring.

So – the question today is, of course, if we move ahead a couple of generations from where we are now: When they will be looking back at the 2020s, will they say: Why didn’t they do that? Because they didn’t know? So, what is it today that we do not know? And what do we need to know because it is urgent to make changes? You need to get on to this because you will work until the 2070s or something. That is – for me – a great inspiration, really.

Saint Olaf

I will briefly, if you allow me Mme President, turn to Olaf, Saint Olaf, who carries the name of this university, and there is a lot of interest in this personality also in my country. He was Olav Haraldsson, later king Olav the 2^nd, who fell in a major battle in 1030, almost a thousand years ago, and he was, in a way, the man who formally christened Norway back then. The famous battle made him Saint Olav and it will be celebrated seven years from now, I think it will be a big event.

Now, all this is a long story in itself, but this Viking king-to-be brought his inspiration back from the Middle East, he brought ideas, new ideas, about a belief that he brought to Norway which had little knowledge of Christianity, they had their old gods from ancient times. An important point is that he brought Christianity, by sword – but the fact that he brought ideas from the outside is a message: We have to be open. Where are the new ideas? Where is the insight? Not necessarily in my own village, in my own local community, in my own country. We have to be open to ideas that are coming from the outside.

So – while I am saying this, you are not here for the Vikings and the past – it is a great name though, Saint Olaf – now, you are here for the future and you will be occupied at public or private workplaces until the 2060s and beyond.

Transitions

So – before we get to the questions from you – which I look forward to. What are the scenarios, and the challenges, and the opportunities ahead of you?

Let me reflect on this, because I believe that we are in the midst, or at least we are entering into some very critical transitions or shifts, or what we call “omstillinger” in Norwegian; we have to change, quite fundamentally, things we do. I am dealing with them now, and you will have to deal with them to an even greater extent in the future.

Demography

First – it is about people. We live through a demographic shift.

You told me, Mme President, it was interesting, you told me that universities like St. Olaf can now count when people were born – and then what is the number of students that will come here five or ten years from now? So, you can do some calculations and see if the class of 2005 or 2010 is shrinking, that there will be fewer to draw from. This is about that end of the age scale.

Then, if you are a politician, in a local community or in a government, the great challenge of the society is the size of the other side, the elderly. You mentioned that I had been Minister of Health Care, and in 2012-2013 we saw that the number of people in Norway older than 80 years went down. – Because they were the people who were born in the 1930s, when it was a decline in demography, so it went down. Now, we have the post-war classes coming of age, and now, if I am lucky, I will be 80 in 2040, and I hope I can be in good health.

To prepare the society for this shift, which is quite fundamental and massive, this is a great challenge for all of us. We may call it ‘an aging population’, but remember that older people are wise, they have experience, we can draw on that, we have to invite elderly people to take part, to make all kinds of contributions to families and societies at large. This is a big transition.

We witness – for example – in China: Last year was the first year that China’s population declined since 1961. Every year, after 1961, it grew, and they have had this one-child policy in China, you could only have one child. They are going away from that but now the population is starting to decline. And I think in general, countries and nations that decline, are less innovative and less prosperous in a way, than countries that have at least the ability to increase. In the West, generally, the number of kids per family is going down. So, we have to prepare for that.

The green shift

Secondly, we are standing in this enormous transition linked to energy, which is of course coming from challenges of nature and environment, the climate change, the climate crisis.

I remember Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale (1928-2021), coming from this great state, and he was Norway’s Honorary Consul General here in Minneapolis, he once said: “We have no right to poison, to eat up, to chew, to pollute this wonderful country of ours. We are required to save it and purify it and protect it”.

Now, Walter F. Mondale’s paternal grandfather emigrated from Norway with his family in 1856, settling in southern Minnesota. And his name, Mondale, derives from Mundal, in Western Norway.

Our world is boiling, we see it on every continent, wildfires, heavy rain and all the rest of it. And the climate is changing more in some places than others. It is changing more in the High North than it is on the rest of the planet. Svalbard – for example – which is the northernmost part of Norway, the archipelago between the mainland Norway and the North Pole; if the average temperature on the globe goes up by a couple of degrees, then it will increase by ten degrees there.

And, of course, you have all the challenges from the ice melting and so on. The polar expeditions of Norwegians like Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, or the American Robert Peary – or later on, Ann Bancroft from St. Paul, Minnesota, the first woman to reach the North Pole (in 1986) – would have been a lot more different today – and they will be, in the future.

So, rising temperatures is our challenge; we see it, as I said, in the Arctic. This is all linked to the energy transition that we have to go through; we have to go out of fossil fuels and into renewables.

And while we do that, we have to do every effort to capture CO2 from the fuels that we are today running our countries from, and deposit it safely, far, far down under the seabed or wherever it can be safely deposited. But we cannot go from one day to the other, closing down all of the energy systems today and say that – well, tomorrow there is a new one.

As we take down oil, gas and most importantly, coal, we have to build up wind, offshore wind, solar, in parallel. Because if we don’t do that, we will have a crisis, social crisis among people, and they will turn their back to environmental change policies. This is why we really have to put our focus on that.

Cut emissions

We will from Norway’s part to our part. We will cut our emissions by 55% by 2030. We do those alongside other European countries. We are doing it by a number of measures, we are increasing our carbon taxes, we are part of a carbon tax common in Europe, a trading system among countries to bring down emissions, and on top of that we have a Norwegian specific tax. We invest heavily in offshore wind and in carbon capture and storage.

I can tell you, as Prime Minister, I handle in my government, applications for drilling in the North Sea. But this is not primarily for oil and gas, they are drilling for reservoirs under the seabed, to store CO2.

And then you may ask: Does that work? If you pump CO2 into the seabed, will it not leak? Well, Norway is able to say: We have done it for 30 years, we know it works. We have enough reservoirs in our seabed structures in the North Sea for most of Europe’s CO2 for almost a century. It is a fact. So – what they ‘simply’ do, is that they drill, and they pump CO2, two to three thousand metres down in the rock structure, and it becomes rock, to put it simply. Not easy, but it has been done and been tested.

So, the green shift is happening, but I believe we have to push it hard. I will go to New York tonight, where we will have the General Assembly of the United Nations, and there will be focus on climate and sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals, and we have to continue pushing very hard for that.

Offshore wind

Around the North Sea, if you can imagine, now look at the map: around here – this is the North Sea – and here you have offshore wind installations coming up all around and we will also get those in Southern Norway. This is rather shallow water, so the wind mills are screwed down into the seabed as permanent installations. But if you move north, along the Norwegian coast, or at any other coastline around the world, it is too deep, so what you need to do is that you build floating offshore wind mills. Floating means that it is a huge wind mill with three anchors – technologically a great challenge. But this is what we need to do to produce electricity that can replace fossil fuels.

The white area you can see up there is Svalbard, that is the archipelago which is part of Norway, and you can see that it is between the mainland Norway and the North Pole.

So – this is where it is happening right now. It is a challenge because when all countries want to do the same thing at the same time, spare parts and all the rest of it gets expensive. And even here, with all the stimulus you put into it – that president Biden has put into renewables – the wind power production is going down, last year, for that specific reason; it is getting much more expensive.

And on this we need to work together, and my slogan is that we have to cut emissions and create jobs. It can happen at the same time. I’ll tell you: The people who are now building the offshore wind mills, many of them are of my generation who started their career by building oil and gas platforms. Now they build wind power platforms, because these installations are so huge and technologically so advanced, but it is the same principle. And some of those who were experts on drilling to find oil and gas, are now the ones drilling to find reservoirs to deposit CO2. So, we have to build on that knowledge and bring them along; give people new training and embrace new technology and move forward.

This is, of course, not something that one country can do alone, we have to work on it together, and between Norway and the US there are huge opportunities doing this together. And believe it or not, the renewable energy transition will depend more on something which is not about energy – it is about digitalization. On how you optimize renewable energy production. So, AI and Artificial Intelligence and so on will be important to help us make the green transition.

Ukraine and Russia

Now – my last point on transitions, is – of course – what is taking place in the world of politics, on security. If you look at this map again, you can see that Norway is a long-stretched country with a coast. Our neighbour to the west is the ocean. If you take Finland; the longest land border with Russia is Finland’s border with Russia, and Norway has 200 kilometres with Russia up here in the north. Up here you have Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal installed. And this is Russia, our neighbour.

And Russia is now, as you know, launching a major, full scale military attack on Ukraine, the country down here on the map. This is not any country, it is the second largest country in Europe, 40 million people, so it is not an easy ‘take-over’, to put it that way. So, we have here, in this part of Ukraine now, military battles that are like during the First World War with trenches and immense suffering and tens and tens of thousands of people being killed. And also bombing around in Ukraine.

This is a completely changed security pattern on my continent. You know, Europe, together with the United States, used to pride itself that there had been so many wars throughout our history, but modern Europe would say that now we have a toolbox, with political tools, to deal with differences, so if there is a challenge, on borders, on people, or on resources, we can solve it through politics, arbitration, negotiations, deals, and so on.

A full-scale war, you know the fall of 2021, I became Prime Minister, in October, and we were witnessing that Russia was amassing 150-200.000 troops on the border of Ukraine, something they had never ever seen. And most people thought that this was done to frighten Ukraine and to put pressure on them, but it was meant for a full-scale invasion, and here we are.

Solving conflicts

We have to work to come back to the fact that this is not the way we solve issues between countries; it has to be political, because of the sufferings coming from war – war is unpredictable, it is very seldom going according to plans, and as journalists will say, the first victim in war is the truth. And we see the same thing in Ukraine.

We are, as a neighbouring country – now, let me put it this way – we do not fear that next after Ukraine Russia will start attacking neighbours in the north. I think that is too simplistic, but of course, having a neighbour that goes to this measure of mass-invading another neighbouring state, is bad news.

We have, up here in the ocean (as you can see from the map) – somewhere here in the ocean – there is a border between Norway and Russia. The point is, for 40 years, we had no border, because with the Law of the Sea that changed, countries were obliged to negotiate where would the dividing line go, and we were able in 2010 to agree with Russia where the dividing line would go, after long negotiations. The same people who are waging war against Ukraine now negotiated with Norway – I was Foreign Minister – and the dividing line, the border in the north, and that was agreed.

And that is how countries should deal with differences; negotiating and finding an equitable solution, and not by military means.

Supporting Ukraine

We have to support Ukraine. Although we are up in the north and Ukraine here down in the south, this is really about principles. Ukraine has the right to defend itself. You know you can use violence or military means for two reasons in the international system; if you are attacked or if you are granted the right by the UN Security Council.

Ukraine is attacked. This is self-defence. So, Ukraine has the right to defend itself and we have the right to help Ukraine to defend itself. But I can tell you, as a Prime Minister, that we had 48 historic hours, to conclude that Norway would do something that we had never done before, namely provide weapon and military equipment to a country in conflict. We have never done that before. But this was different, and it was all about – you know – not standing passive and look from the side-line, as this attack went on.

I mentioned Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, earlier. After the First World War he did humanitarian work here in this region, so we named our programme after him, the Nansen Assistance. And what Norway has done is to pledge a five-years plan to support Ukraine. That is support which will go 50% to military support and 50% to economic and humanitarian support; help them to repair power stations, help them run the government, help them run hospitals, and so on. And help them also to defend themselves.

And president Zelenskyj – who I met three weeks ago, when I was in Kyiv – you know, when you go to Kyiv, you fly to Poland, and you take a train from about here (see the map), to about here, that is about a 10 hours train ride – I met president Zelenskyj on the Day of Independence of Ukraine. And what he tells me is that he appreciates Norway’s help. Per capita it is a high number, but Norway is still a small country, now what he says, is – Prime Minister, the most important thing is not necessarily the amount, it is the five years pledge, that you will stand by us. And this is important for me, as a President, but equally important for the men and women in the trenches, that there are such friends outside.

The US has been leading on this. President Biden has been, I think, a very effective leader, in bringing along countries to work together. We have to do this without creating bottlenecks and duplication and that, I think, has succeeded.

The transatlantic alliance, NATO, which is so important for Norway – that we have allies – and that we are there together; we have this principle of one being attacked, then all will come to support, that is key to Nordic security. So, now with Sweden and Finland, our neighbours coming to NATO, you will have a very strong link between the US and Canada across the Atlantic, with Norway, Sweden and Finland (and all the Nordics), working together and deepening our cooperation.

This is a very dramatic agenda and it is a dangerous agenda that we have ahead of us, with war in Europe, with ramifications that go into the international system, between the north and the south. And the suffering coming from the war in Ukraine is not only in Ukraine – there are circles here; more expensive food, more expensive all kinds of products that will hit North-Afrika, Middle-East and go beyond.

So, dear friends, there are a lot of things to deal with, and that you will have to deal with. And we will deal with it together, and I am happy that we have this Norwegian-American friendship and partnership, exemplified by this fine college and we should all find inspiration in that.

Your character

So, I wish you good luck in your studies and let me say – a few inputs to what lies ahead of you:

Do your studies well, but do not get lost in the studies. These years here are more important than only to observe in books and on the screens. Have some time to do something beyond the studies.

You know I am fascinated by this split of the notion – what is a character. On your CV you will have the grades from your studies, and that will tell something about you, but your character, as a person, is something different, and it comes from – if you imagine somebody giving a speech at your birthday – they will not run to quote the grades you had at your exams; there are other qualities, so take care of those qualities and cherish them.

And when you are a student, be there also for your friends and partners, because being alone as a student is not fun.

We need to fight a polarized world, polarized society, in each country, and that has to start at home, with each of us. So, when you are students, you should really try to build on that community that is the university, a college, a class, a small unit, and then we can do great things together. Thank you for your attention.

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For more information, video and photos of the event, see:

• St. Olaf College — Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (stolaf.edu)
• Prime Minister of Norway visits St. Olaf – St. Olaf College (stolaf.edu)