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Message: Comparing Responses To Oil Crisis In August 9th’s New York TImes Thomas L. Friedman author of “The World Is Flat” writes about how Denmark faced down the last oil crisis. He then compares how the U.S. responded (and, by extension, how Canada is now responding). Big difference. Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.) What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent. Friedman goes on to argue that regulatory intervention spawned innovation in Denmark not seen in the United States. How does he measure it? Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America. Why should you care? “We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.” For more about the Danish wind power industry, please go here. www.corporateknightsforum.com