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00:00I'm on the rugged edge of Europe, visiting five Nordic countries.
00:10Incredible, incredible.
00:12Travelling through glorious forests and spectacular fjords.
00:16I think Norway has a solid claim to be the most beautiful country in the world.
00:22I mean, look at it.
00:24Wow, a dog's pulling a car.
00:27It's more than half a million square miles of extremes.
00:31This is low, man, this is low.
00:33This is my life.
00:35Somebody's holding on to it, yeah?
00:40Breathe, breathe.
00:42Off we go.
00:43I'm hoping to understand how they've built some of the happiest societies on the planet.
00:47Hey, guys. Good morning.
00:50And who have we got here?
00:53Hello.
00:55Welcome, welcome.
00:57This is the most traditional Danish lunch I have seen.
01:01Yes.
01:02And why they now feel they're in the firing line.
01:04Santa Park is also a nuclear bunker.
01:07Yes, very much so.
01:09They are preparing to defend Finland.
01:16Bloody hell.
01:18You're wearing these in urban Sweden?
01:21Yes.
01:23There's another side to Scandinavia.
01:25Ready to fire?
01:47On this second leg of my Scandinavian journey,
01:50I'm travelling from the west coast of Norway,
01:53across the North Atlantic to the volcanic island of Iceland.
01:58Norway's shoreline is gouged and carved by spectacular fjords and islands,
02:03almost a quarter of a million islands,
02:06along the longest coast in Europe, second longest in the world.
02:11Rex is checking out the coastline here.
02:14It is fairly astonishing.
02:16It does have an almost excessively rugged, jagged, fragmented coastline.
02:24Since the time of the Vikings,
02:26when they weren't out doing a spot of pillaging,
02:29people here have fished and farmed their sheep.
02:36For Roy and Inge Oxners, this is home.
02:39They're taking me to a small island where they keep their family flock.
02:43Are you ready to go?
02:46I think the dog is going to be doing most of the work.
02:51There they are.
02:55I sense Rex wants to round up the sheep.
02:57Tell us what to do, Roy.
03:16There's a breakaway flock over there.
03:19Another flock over here.
03:21I mean, they do say a flock of sheep comes with a flock of problems.
03:27So, Simon, did you get the screen heating up?
03:30I'm warming up, Roy, I am.
03:32You're warming up.
03:33It gets the blood flowing, that's for sure.
03:35You feel the blood flowing?
03:37You love it, don't you?
03:40Yeah, then we get some exercise out of it.
03:43Mush, mush, mush!
03:45Roy's family have farmed these remote islands for generations.
03:49Each year when summer arrives,
03:51it's shearing time for Roy and his burly lads,
03:54or rather for the sheep.
03:56There we go.
03:59Well done, guys. And they're in.
04:02After Vikings here put down their battle axes,
04:05Norway spent centuries as almost a rural backwater of Scandinavia.
04:09Only around 3% of the land is farmable.
04:12The sea up here is harsh and dangerous.
04:14Many struggled.
04:16What was life like here for your parents, your grandparents?
04:40Do you have a cow or a sheep?
04:43Other Scandis viewed Norwegians as country bumpkins.
04:47They were the butt of jokes.
04:51Then 50 years ago, everything changed
04:54when the Norwegians hit the national equivalent of a Vegas jackpot.
05:05So it's half past nine on a Wednesday
05:08and Roy is off to work.
05:11So this is where you work?
05:13Yes, I work on the other side of the plant.
05:17Look at the size of this.
05:26This tangled eruption of pipes and chimneys is Mongstad.
05:32Home to Norway's biggest oil and gas refinery,
05:35Roy is one of more than 1,000 people working here.
05:40You wear it well. That's the belt, isn't it?
05:44Roy's family farm is now just a sideline.
05:47During the week, he works for Equinor,
05:49Norway's largely state-owned oil and gas company.
05:52He belongs to a lucky generation of Norwegians
05:55gifted one of history's biggest Christmas presents.
05:58You all right?
06:00It was the night before Christmas Eve, 1969.
06:04Norway discovered oil in the North Sea.
06:07It was their last attempt. They were about to give up.
06:10What they found became the largest oil field
06:13ever discovered at sea anywhere in the world.
06:17Oh, my God.
06:20So this is a tanker coming in empty or full?
06:25This is an empty tanker coming in for loading crude.
06:30It's like a four-storey metal wall just moving in front.
06:37It's colossal.
06:39A little bit away from the mooring lines.
06:44Over the last 50 years, this small nation of farmers and fishermen
06:49has sucked out trillions of pounds worth of oil and gas
06:52from under the North Sea.
06:54They pump more of the stuff per head than even Saudi Arabia.
06:58You live quite a double life, Roy.
07:03Yeah.
07:04One moment you're with your sheep, and the next...
07:24I'm going to really mess this up, aren't I?
07:26I don't think so.
07:27Not all these burly, bloody Norwegians.
07:31Good afternoon.
07:33Say when, sir.
07:34Whenever you're ready.
07:35Yeah.
07:38He's got it.
07:39Yep.
07:40Look at that.
07:41The job is done.
07:43So now you can start your work in the oil business.
07:48They're loading this tanker with enough oil
07:50to fuel more than one million cars with petrol,
07:53all of it for export.
07:55But at home, at least,
07:56Norway's enthusiastically adopted green energy.
07:59They have the highest number of electric cars per head in the world,
08:03and most of them have ditched their gas boilers for electric heat pumps.
08:07Just a little bit of a contradiction.
08:09Hardly any of this oil is actually used here in Norway.
08:16Norway sources almost all of its electricity
08:20from cleaner, greener hydroelectric power,
08:24thus absolving itself of any direct consumer guilt.
08:30They're a little bit like a drug pusher, really,
08:35who refuses to use their own product.
08:38But they will very happily sell it to almost anyone else.
08:44With sanctions on Russia,
08:46Norway is now the biggest supplier of gas to the UK and Germany.
08:50It's a trade that has helped to make the 5.5 million Norwegians
08:53among the richest people on the planet.
08:59An hour down the coast is Bergen, an oil boom town,
09:03but not like any I've ever seen.
09:13It really looks like Diagon Alley from Harry Potter.
09:17If you were expecting oil bling like Abu Dhabi or Houston
09:22or somewhere like that, think again.
09:24Here, they spend a lot of their oil money restoring old Bergen,
09:28lovingly restoring it.
09:30It's all very understated Scandinavian.
09:35Of course, in many countries,
09:37discovering oil doesn't always bring benefits for the people, the masses.
09:41Often it fuels corruption and even war,
09:44or a pampered elite just fritter away the oil billions.
09:48But to their credit, at least here,
09:50the Norwegians have shared in the oil bonanza.
09:53Alf? Yes? Hello, Alf. Oh, yeah, hello.
09:56I'm Simon. Hello, Simon. I just love you to see...
09:58I've got a slightly fractured finger, so I'll go with that one.
10:01Hello. Welcome, yeah. Thank you very much.
10:03Carolina? Hello, Simon. Hi, Carolina.
10:05Simon, yes, hello. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.
10:08Welcome on board. Yes. All right, thank you.
10:11Alf Rold Satre and Carolina Satre are local entrepreneurs.
10:15Oh, straight into the cabin. Yeah, straight in.
10:18I definitely should not be here.
10:22The lives of Norwegians, all of them, have been transformed by oil.
10:28Alf comes from a humble background.
10:30His family were oyster farmers, and he's still obsessed with seafood.
10:34Locals have given him a nickname.
10:36Oyster Dundee, named after Crocodile Dundee.
10:40Yeah, but I've been working with oyster.
10:42I still have a big eye for it, though.
10:44You have a big eye? I'm sure you do. Yeah.
10:49Back in the 1970s, Alf started working on some of the first oil rigs
10:53out on the Norwegian side of the North Sea.
10:58So you were a trained submarine pilot.
11:02Yes. Trained in Edinburgh,
11:04and that was to pilot the submersibles that were servicing...
11:08Servicing and bringing divers down in the lockout submarines.
11:13Right. They did various jobs for the oil industry.
11:17So you were there really during the birth of Norway's oil industry.
11:22Yes, we were pioneers.
11:24It was a great time, actually.
11:26Yeah. I really loved it.
11:31What's the coldest temperature you would dive in?
11:34Around four degrees, yeah.
11:36That's pretty damn chilly.
11:38It is neoprene, isolated quite a lot.
11:41Yeah. And good blood as well?
11:44Good Viking spirit. Yeah, good Viking blood, you know.
11:48Now aged 72, these days Oyster Dundee dives down for shellfish.
11:56OK. Well, good luck and stay safe.
12:00Yeah.
12:07Are you happy with him diving?
12:09Yeah. Oh, you're making a face.
12:12Makes me nervous a little bit.
12:19Hello. Hey. How was that?
12:22It was very nice. Very nice. Good.
12:25You can pull it up.
12:28I pull it up? All right. Yeah. See what we got.
12:31All right. Quite a catch.
12:34Wow.
12:36There we are. There we are, back.
12:38Really nice. Excellent.
12:40See here, I got some really big ones.
12:44So I go in with a knife and cut it.
12:47And...
12:49It just pops open. Yeah.
12:51Normally they throw the gills away,
12:53but actually there's a lot of taste in it,
12:56so you can eat it, yeah.
13:00And it's so good to eat, you know.
13:02But this bit of the scallop is the best, no?
13:05Yeah. Thank you.
13:06When you eat the scallop, this is the muscle itself.
13:10Mmm. You can feel it works.
13:13Well, I'm admiring what it does for you.
13:16Yeah. This is very healthy food.
13:19And my father, he ate this all his life, every day.
13:23And he got so old that we had to kill him.
13:28I'm telling you. Why am I laughing at that?
13:31What a shocking story.
13:33So it's so very, very, very healthy.
13:36This is the other problem in the sea now, isn't it?
13:39Yeah.
13:40Little bits of plastic floating around.
13:42Plastic in the water.
13:43Oh, you're going in?
13:44Oui!
13:48Well done, Alf! Well done!
13:50That is how people should respond to it.
13:53Well done.
13:56Like many other Norwegians,
13:58Alf earned decent money in the oil industry.
14:01He invested his earnings and became a successful businessman.
14:05Where are we going now, Alf?
14:07We are heading towards the little tiny island that nobody lives on.
14:12It's only a restaurant, Cornelius Restaurant.
14:15And this is your restaurant?
14:17Yes, it's my restaurant, yes.
14:20OK.
14:22Alf named his restaurant Cornelius after his oyster-farming grandfather.
14:29Hello! Hello, hello!
14:31Come along and have a look. All right.
14:36Here you see the running water.
14:38Yeah.
14:39So I keep my scallops and stuff.
14:41Nice and fresh.
14:42So, nice, huh?
14:44Yeah.
14:45This is where you can see how well-off Norwegians are.
14:48Private ferries often bring more than 200 guests a night.
14:51So you heard about me?
14:52Go, Alf!
14:53OK.
14:54Very sexy guy out there.
14:59Diners can pay more than £150 a head,
15:02and that's without wine from Alf's walk-in cellar.
15:05What's the most expensive bottle of wine you've got here?
15:07This is the most expensive one.
15:09It's actually £8,000.
15:11£8,000 bottle of wine.
15:15There's few signs here of a cost-of-living crisis in Norway.
15:20Oh, boy!
15:21What is this? Thank you.
15:22This is our beach crab soup.
15:24Yeah.
15:25And this is the smoked salmon.
15:27Oh, that looks very special.
15:29Enjoy. Thank you.
15:33When you were a lad growing up,
15:36this was not the Norwegian reality, was it?
15:40No.
15:41My mother, she knitted my clothes,
15:46so we didn't have any money to spend on luxury things.
15:52And now, look.
15:53And now, look, it's quite a change.
15:56So I think about it more or less every day, actually.
15:58What, your good luck?
16:00Yes, how lucky we are that we have been born here.
16:05To be born Norwegian.
16:08That's winning a lottery, really, isn't it?
16:10It feels like it.
16:21We're just in time.
16:25Hiya.
16:27I think this is right.
16:31I was taking the overnight train to Norway's capital city, Oslo.
16:37So, let's have a look at this.
16:45It's a bit sort of prison cell chic, but not bad.
17:01I didn't sleep too badly.
17:03It's a little bit like being rocked in a cradle.
17:12For many years,
17:14Norway had the second highest GDP per capita in Europe,
17:18after tiny Luxembourg.
17:20And all that money wasn't splashed out on Lamborghinis and Prada handbags.
17:24It went on wages, state spending,
17:27and into just about the biggest pot of dosh on the planet.
17:33In the 1990s, Norway took the decision to save and invest
17:36a huge chunk of their earnings from oil and gas for the future.
17:40They set up a giant national savings account,
17:43a sovereign wealth fund, as they're called.
17:45It's now the single largest in the world.
17:48So here we are.
17:50This looks just like any other corporate office, doesn't it?
17:54This is definitely not some paper wholesalers in Slough.
17:58What goes on in here affects the lives of millions of people around the world.
18:03This is the headquarters of Norway's sovereign wealth fund.
18:09The fund is a financial colossus.
18:12It's one of the largest single stores of wealth ever assembled.
18:16Maybe the biggest.
18:18The fund owns global infrastructure,
18:20ports, airports, chunks of major world cities,
18:23and roughly 1.5% of all the stocks and shares listed in the entire world.
18:30The fund is worth the equivalent of nearly 25,000 tonnes of gold.
18:35Look, online, there's a website which shows
18:38the actual market value of the fund in real time.
18:42It is a staggering sum.
18:45So this is in Norwegian kroner,
18:47but in pounds, it's more than 1.2 trillion pounds.
18:53That is an almost unimaginable figure.
18:57For me, the best way of understanding how much a trillion is
19:01is to convert it into seconds.
19:04So rather than thinking of it in pounds,
19:07think of it in seconds.
19:09A million seconds is a trillionth of a second.
19:13A million seconds is almost 12 days ago.
19:17A billion seconds is more than 31 years ago.
19:21But a trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years ago.
19:27A trillion is a huge figure.
19:31All right, thank you.
19:33I'd come to see the fund's chief of staff, Trond Grande.
19:37Trond, hello. Simon Reid, nice to see you.
19:40Nice to meet you.
19:41I know you're very busy.
19:42Absolutely.
19:43Can we come in?
19:44Of course.
19:45Oh, fantastic.
19:46And you've got a book here.
19:48What is this?
19:49Pressure.
19:50Pressure.
19:51Lessons from the psychology of penalty shoots.
19:54You're a man who deals with pressure that most of us cannot comprehend.
19:58Yes, but I think we all do, right?
20:00And the points he tried to make was, you know,
20:03how can you prepare for the pressure?
20:05This is a colossal store of wealth.
20:07Of course, it's just a staggering amount of money.
20:09But, I mean, honestly, for us, it's just another kind of three more zeros
20:14or six more zeros or nine more zeros, right?
20:16You become slightly kind of blind to the size of it.
20:22The Norwegians spend less from the fund each year than the amount it's increased by.
20:27So it's just grown and grown.
20:29So sensible and Scandinavian.
20:31Can you imagine how good you have to be at delaying gratification
20:35and thinking long term when you've got an ice cream store right outside your office?
20:41How on earth do you cope with that?
20:44That is a source of temptation.
20:46It is.
20:47I think this says a lot about you.
20:49About restraint?
20:50Yes.
20:51Well, we have to fill it quite often, right?
20:53So people tend, especially now during summer, late afternoon, grab an ice cream and stay outside.
21:00Yeah, but look at your washboard stomach there.
21:02You're clearly not eating all of these, are you?
21:05No, I'm leaving it to everybody else to eat.
21:07Yeah.
21:08Look, this cannot…
21:09John, I'm sorry.
21:10Yeah.
21:11I've just seen another…
21:12This is brilliant.
21:13This is, yeah.
21:14Is this how decisions are taken?
21:16Yes.
21:17Look at this.
21:18Yeah.
21:19So it has buy, sell, hold, or panic.
21:26This is a decision-making cube.
21:29Absolutely essential to what we do, yeah.
21:31Anyone who trades in stocks and shares, what's it going to come up as?
21:34Panic.
21:35Panic?
21:36Panic.
21:37Thank you very much.
21:39So who's actually rolling the dice here?
21:43Where are we going now?
21:44Now we're going to the trading floor.
21:45Oh, sorry.
21:46Okay.
21:47Please.
21:48So this is essentially where the action happens.
21:51What's going on here?
21:52Can you tell us anything?
21:53What are you doing?
21:55Today is month end, so then we always have fundings or defundings.
22:01Which means buying and selling?
22:02Yes.
22:03A lot.
22:04A lot?
22:05Yes.
22:06Define a lot.
22:07Yeah, right now it's $2.5 billion.
22:13You look remarkably calm for somebody involved in such activity, fueled by Coca-Cola.
22:20I've done it many times before.
22:22Of course you have.
22:23We have good systems, so I know it's taken care of.
22:26Most Norwegian oil and gas world goes to the state.
22:30Their fund is now large enough to support Norway's schools, welfare and hospitals for
22:34generations to come.
22:36Historically, Britain extracted more oil and gas from its North Sea drilling area, but
22:41much of the revenue went to companies.
22:43Some argue it boosted our economy, others that we squandered it.
22:47Either way, we never set money aside like the Norwegians.
22:51As a Brit, I am left thinking what might have been.
22:57It's lunchtime.
22:58Yeah.
22:59Need to grab something to eat.
23:00Yeah.
23:02I feel a bit weird being out here with you.
23:05I feel like this is Trond.
23:07This is Trond.
23:10I'm not famous.
23:11But almost why not?
23:14Because you hold, through the fund, you hold the future of everybody here.
23:21It is true.
23:22Yeah.
23:23The billions they've earned from oil and gas has given Norwegians one of the world's highest
23:28standards of living.
23:29Off to you.
23:30But of course, pumping out all those fossil fuels has contributed hugely to climate change.
23:35What are you going to have?
23:36I would love the prawn shrimp sandwich, please.
23:40So do they make up for that with their wealth fund?
23:43They do follow some ethical rules, avoiding dodgy regimes and big tobacco.
23:48But mostly it's run for pure profit.
23:50Ultimately, the Norwegian government controls the fund and has instructed Trond to invest
23:56up to just 2% in renewable energy.
23:59Why so small?
24:00Well, it could be up to 2%.
24:03And we are now at 0.2%, something like that.
24:07So there's a long way to go.
24:10So you've got a tiny percentage of the fund at the moment invested in...
24:14At the moment.
24:15Renewables and sustainables.
24:16Yeah.
24:17So my worry as an outsider, looking at this incredible fund that you've built, is still
24:22its investments...
24:24I don't feel like it's aggressive enough as a national fund, aggressively investing in
24:31the future, in renewables, in green cement, in developing green steel, for example, which
24:38Norway could create.
24:40There must be people saying Trond and the fund should be investing more in such and
24:45such.
24:46Absolutely.
24:47All the time.
24:48A lot of pressure.
24:49Yeah.
24:50We're trying to keep this fund as apolitical as possible in Norway.
24:54So all we do is with a financial return in mind.
24:59Not for ethical reasons?
25:01No.
25:02But it wouldn't be right for us as the managers of the fund, under the mandate that we're
25:07given, to do anything else than what we're told to do.
25:10So that aggressiveness or change of direction or pressure needs to come from the ultimate
25:17owners of the fund.
25:19Norway.
25:20Norway.
25:21The people.
25:22Yeah?
25:23No, absolutely.
25:24Absolutely.
25:25And there's not overwhelming pressure here to change direction.
25:28Norwegian politicians say they extract oil more cleanly than other countries, and their
25:33fossil fuels allow Europe to reduce reliance on states like Russia and Saudi Arabia.
25:38Critics say Norway is too dependent on the fossil fuel economy.
25:42That Norwegians are sitting rather too happily on their pile of oil money, are becoming less
25:47entrepreneurial than other Scandis, and aren't really facing up to their national role in
25:52climate change.
25:53So not everyone here supports the oil economy and the policies behind it.
25:58I met up with musician and campaigner Bente Lorentzen.
26:02I think the oil industry has done a very, very good job in sort of selling a story to
26:10the Norwegian people about the oil adventure and how it suddenly turned our entire society
26:18into a very wealthy one.
26:20But there's a huge part of the story that's left out.
26:25Which is?
26:26Obviously, a big part of the story that's left out is the environmental impact.
26:31Bente was taking me to her home village in northern Norway, where she's been fighting
26:36a battle against the oil industry.
26:41It was a journey of around 700 miles by rail and sea, into the Arctic Circle, and up to
26:48a remote corner of the country.
26:52Bente grew up here, in the idyllic fishing village of Henningsvard.
26:57Permission to come on?
26:58Hi!
26:59She arranged for her old friend, Captain Hovard, to take us out in his fishing boat.
27:07Okay.
27:10Looking forward to this!
27:16Oh, come on!
27:20I think Norway has a solid claim to be the most beautiful country in the world.
27:26I mean, look at it!
27:28I do not say that lightly, but this really does it for me.
27:33Everywhere I'm looking in the distance, there are the misty mountains.
27:37Gets me here.
27:43On the edge of the Arctic Ocean, this is one of the world's most important fish spawning areas.
27:50The Lofoten Islands attract spectacular wildlife, including orcas, sperm whales, seals, otters,
27:57mighty wakes and puffins.
27:59Hovard decided introductions were in order with some of the locals.
28:15Ah, it's coming!
28:16It's coming!
28:18No!
28:20Wow!
28:21What?
28:25Ain't coming?
28:27Oh, my gosh!
28:33I really felt that in my heart.
28:38Boom!
28:39And it's off.
28:40Yeah.
28:41To feed the kids.
28:43To feed the kids.
28:44Yeah.
28:49They call this a particularly vulnerable and valuable area.
28:55Because if you look at the Lofoten Islands as a whole, it's kind of like a small arm sticking into the deep ocean.
29:04And it creates this magnificent gathering of plankton and food for the seabirds and the fish, which again attracts whales.
29:17Some of the whales that we have here, they swim from the west coast of Africa to come right here to get their favourite food.
29:26That's quite a privilege and responsibility, isn't it?
29:31Yeah.
29:32Given that the Norwegians have already earned a few bob from the fossil fuel industry,
29:36you might think they'd try to keep the Lofotens home to some of Europe's largest seabird colonies, pristine.
29:43But no.
29:44For years and years and years, they tried to open this area for exploration on oil and gas activity.
29:53This area in particular, we're talking of a concentration of wildlife that's unique in the world.
30:01If an oil spill would happen in this area, it would take less than 24 hours for the oil to reach shore.
30:11So you're talking about the risk of disruption as they explore for oil and potentially destruction if something goes wrong.
30:20Yeah.
30:21Which of course it has done numerous times around the world.
30:24Yeah.
30:26There could be up to three billion barrels of oil under the seabed here.
30:30And of course, oil-dependent economies want to buy that to run cars and generate electricity.
30:36But a group of locals said no.
30:39Bente helped found the People's Action for an Oil-Free Lofoten, a grassroots group.
30:44More than 7,000 people joined.
30:47Bente was one of the leaders of a campaign to stop the oil and gas industry coming to these islands.
30:54And what's incredible is they won.
31:00Drilling's been stopped here, but Norway's still one of the top global oil and gas producers,
31:05pumping out almost two million barrels of oil every day.
31:10Well, campaigners here won that battle.
31:13But Norway has been described as the most aggressive explorer for new oil and gas fields in Europe.
31:20It's awarded hundreds of exploration licenses over the last decade.
31:25And just earlier this year, Norway became the first country in the world to allow commercial mining of the seabed.
31:34Even though campaigners and experts have warned that could be catastrophic for marine life.
31:50One day, Norway's oil will run out.
31:53But they do have another great resource.
31:56The sea.
31:59Orca.
32:03Oh, my God.
32:06Right in front of us.
32:10I have never been so close.
32:12One, two, three, four, five, six, maybe, seven.
32:20They came up, they had a play, and they went back down.
32:25Norway is second only to Canada for the longest coastline on the planet.
32:30So for centuries, the Norwegians have used the bounty of the ocean.
32:34The deep, cold waters off the coast of Norway have always offered amazing fishing.
32:40But the small communities along the coast, over decades,
32:44transformed themselves from fishermen to fish farmers.
32:48Dotted along Norway's coast and through many of its fjords are now huge fish pens.
32:53Collectively holding, in particular, hundreds of millions of farmed Atlantic salmon.
32:58Norway now produces half of all the world's farmed salmon.
33:02It's a huge business, worth almost £10 billion a year.
33:06The industry is coming for serious criticism, especially about pollution.
33:11In places the cost of living is so high,
33:14In places the concentration of fish poo and chemicals used to treat the salmon
33:19have been devastating for the environment.
33:22It's a type of factory farming.
33:24And now they've supersized their operations.
33:29This is Havfarm 1.
33:35The world's largest offshore fish farm.
33:41Oh, my goodness.
33:44Hang on, it's absolutely huge.
33:47It's the world's largest offshore fish farm.
33:51It's the world's largest offshore fish farm.
33:55Oh, my goodness.
33:57Hang on, it's absolutely enormous.
34:00Yes, it's...
34:01Look at the length of this.
34:02It's 385 metres.
34:05It's 35,000 tonnes of steel.
34:09And the depth is 50 metres depth.
34:13Nearly as long as an aircraft carrier.
34:16I think it's 50, 60 metres longer than the biggest aircraft carrier, actually.
34:22Inger Berg is a billionaire.
34:25One of the godfathers of Norwegian fish farming.
34:29He had this built in China.
34:31It's thought to be the largest structure ever transported on a heavy lift vessel.
34:35Inger claims it's improved or resolved many of the problems with the fish farm industry.
34:40When it's bad weather, it's not so easy like this today.
34:44Yeah, I can imagine.
34:47It's six cages like this.
34:50And I can see some of the fish jumping here.
34:54How many fish have you got here?
34:56Today, I think we have 2.2 million in total.
35:032.2 million fish.
35:06In total, yeah. In the whole, yeah.
35:09That is staggering.
35:13Why didn't you want to be in a fjord?
35:16Why did you want to be offshore?
35:18In the fjord, it's become more controversial to be there.
35:23Here, you see, there is nothing around us.
35:26So we don't see any environmental footprint of this production so far.
35:33Inger says by positioning this out at sea,
35:36the tonnes of poo from the fish will be diluted and washed away.
35:40Rather than settling on the floor of a fjord,
35:43damaging the marine environment and wild salmon populations.
35:47Apparently, it's time for feeding.
35:50Just a handful of people work here.
35:52Feeding and pretty much everything else is automated and high-tech.
35:56Instead of using chemicals to tackle another problem with farmed salmon,
36:00they use lasers.
36:03So this is called a stingray.
36:06And this is to combat a major problem that farmed salmon have, isn't it?
36:12Which is they get lice, salmon lice on them.
36:16Yeah, we are using this to remove the salmon lice.
36:20How much does a laser unit to zap salmon lice cost?
36:24Very expensive.
36:28Yeah, I can imagine.
36:31It's thought 90% of the planet's wild fish stocks are overfished.
36:36Over the last century, life in our oceans has taken an absolute hammering.
36:41The fish farm industry claims it's better for our oceans
36:44if we eat farmed fish rather than wild fish.
36:47The industry has grown dramatically, massively.
36:50More than half of all fish and shellfish consumed by humans is now farmed.
36:57We headed back to land to see where they zap salmon lice with lasers.
37:02So here we have the operation central.
37:08Goodness me.
37:10We are measuring everything and we are having control of the water quality
37:15and temperature and everything.
37:17I can see on the screen here, there's a zap.
37:21The red one is the pulses.
37:24It's detecting the lice on the fish, shooting it.
37:27Does it dislodge the lice or it kills the lice?
37:30It kills it, grills it.
37:32Grills it?
37:33Yes.
37:34Inge claims this is one of the most efficient methods of meat production
37:38with low inputs of feed.
37:40How does the conversion of feed to fish compare with other farm products?
37:46Yeah, you can see here we are one kilo feed to produce one kilo fish.
37:51When you see chicken, it's close to two kilo feed to produce one kilo chicken.
37:56And I think pork is close to three kilo feed to produce one kilo pork.
38:03To balance sustainability with feeding all of the people
38:06who want to eat animal protein, that ratio matters.
38:10All right, ready to go in.
38:12The salmon are killed by electrocution and then processed.
38:43It's definitely a better form of industrial fish production
38:49than in many other fish farms.
38:52I find it quite hard to witness this sort of industrialisation of farming and fishing.
38:59It's hard to stomach.
39:01The industry argues that done as cleanly and humanely as possible,
39:05fish farming can help protect wild stocks of fish from being further decimated.
39:11But all forms of fish farming are controversial for welfare and environmental reasons.
39:16The long-term impact of this new factory is not yet known.
39:32In midsummer, in the far north of Scandinavia, the days are endless.
39:38Oh, this is weird.
39:40So it's now nearly 20 past 11 on a Sunday night.
39:47And the sun is out.
39:49Because this is the land of the midnight sun.
39:54And I've got to tell you, it's a bit odd.
39:58It's doing my head in.
40:01Even with the sun up at night, Scandinavia still feels familiar for a Brit.
40:07I was driving into a small town, heading towards a bed for the night,
40:11when I spotted something that I think illustrates a key difference.
40:14Oh, my goodness.
40:16Oh, we've got to see this.
40:18Look at this.
40:20All of these flowers have been left out here overnight.
40:25It's actually even more astonishing.
40:29So this is...
40:31This is like an honesty shop.
40:34They've just left all of this open
40:38and are trusting people to pay using a QR code here,
40:43or you can give this code on an app,
40:47to buy what's here.
40:49They've just left this.
40:51Flowers, chocolates, vases.
40:57Alcohol-free, but still.
41:00As a Brit, I was immediately thinking how in most towns elsewhere
41:05this place would be robbed or vandalised.
41:08But Scandinavia is special.
41:10There's stock out here and in there worth thousands of pounds.
41:15This, for me, I think is one of the greatest, clearest examples I've seen
41:21of something that is central to the success of modern Scandinavia,
41:26and that is trust.
41:28They have trust in their community,
41:31in their government, to a large extent, and in each other.
41:34But they've got it, and I think we've lost it.
41:42It was time for me to leave Norway and its spectacular Lofoten Islands.
41:58I travelled across the North Atlantic
42:01to visit another branch of the Scandi family.
42:13Iceland is a volcanic outcrop of fire and ice,
42:17not even the size of England,
42:19and with a tiny population, about the same as Leicester.
42:23Geographically, this isn't strictly part of Scandinavia,
42:27but the links are strong.
42:30Genetically speaking, Iceland is definitely Scandinavian.
42:35It was largely created by, let's be honest, outlaws from Western Norway,
42:41and they still speak a version of Old Norse.
42:44So I'm an outlaw now?
42:46Yeah, are people going to take offence at that?
42:49No. Or partially insane.
42:52Cross the Atlantic and then live on a volcanic island with no food.
42:59Yeah, it doesn't sound like the wisest move by your ancestors.
43:07Helga Torfadóttir is going to be my guide in Iceland,
43:11a place quite unlike anywhere I've ever been.
43:16So what is this?
43:18This is the newest addition to Iceland.
43:22This is all new lava flow around us?
43:25Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
43:28It's been raining, but the lava's still hot,
43:31so when the water hits the lava flow, it just turns into steam.
43:36Can we stop just up here? Is that possible?
43:42That is an astonishing sight.
43:45As well as being one of those partially insane Icelanders,
43:49Helga's a volcanologist.
43:51So this is your world?
43:53This is my world.
43:55And my playground, actually.
43:57My office.
43:59I think for most of us on the planet,
44:02we take stability really for granted,
44:08but not here.
44:10Well, we have to live with it and work with it somehow.
44:13Like, nature is in charge, and we just learn as we go, I guess.
44:29This cooling lava is from the Sanuka volcano,
44:32a fissure eruption destroying everything in its path.
44:37We're going to go into the town of GrÃntavik.
44:40Is it safe here?
44:42Is it safe to go in there?
44:44Well, not really.
44:48The future of GrÃntavik is a bit unsure.
44:54More than 3,000 people living in GrÃntavik
44:57were evacuated before the volcano erupted.
45:01Oh, do not want to drive here.
45:06Earthquakes from the eruption opened up deep chasms beneath the town.
45:11The town is sort of, like, masking a little bit
45:14what we should be seeing naturally below.
45:17Right.
45:19It's not just GrÃntavik.
45:22Even the area around the capital city, Reykjavik,
45:25is under threat from nearby volcanoes and earthquakes.
45:30The whole island is a volcanic island,
45:33and there's threats everywhere, depending on how you look at it.
45:37Our kind of motto in life here in Iceland is þættarættast,
45:40which means it will work itself out somehow.
45:44But people also think, well, not in my lifetime.
45:49Of course we're not going to have a catastrophe in my lifetime,
45:53but it has to land on someone's lifetime,
45:56and we are that lifetime.
46:01Iceland's volcanoes aren't just a threat to people who live here.
46:05In 2010, you might remember,
46:07a large cloud from an eruption drifted across Europe,
46:10shut down airspace and grounded thousands of flights,
46:13the largest air traffic shutdown since World War II.
46:17Yet in historical terms, that was just a baby.
46:20So we've just stopped by the side of this track
46:22to have a look at this colossal lava field here.
46:27So this is the lava from one of the largest eruptions
46:32in recorded history,
46:34the Laki eruption of the early 1780s.
46:38So under here there is stone from lava, basically,
46:43and then on top of that has grown quite a delicate moss.
46:47That was an eruption that had enormous consequences for Iceland,
46:53but also for the world as well.
46:56So much debris was spewed out during the eruption
47:01to create an atmosphere that there was a haze
47:04that could be seen in the sky from Europe to China and Japan.
47:10It affected crop harvests.
47:13It caused changes to weather systems.
47:16It's even thought to have created poor harvests in Europe,
47:21which led quite directly to the hunger and the famine,
47:26which was one of the main drivers behind the French Revolution.
47:30So don't imagine that events that happen far away
47:34can't have extraordinary consequences.
47:39So big questions for volcanologists like Helga
47:42are which one's next and how bad could it be?
47:47To find out, she took me off-road.
47:50We headed up onto Mörðisjökull, one of Iceland's 269 glaciers.
47:59It is so stark up here.
48:02Life is reduced down to such basic elements,
48:07black and white.
48:10Glaciers cover around 10% of Iceland.
48:14Due to climate change,
48:16many glaciers have retreated exceptionally fast over the last two decades.
48:20It's feared they could lose half their volume by the end of the century.
48:25We're taking it pretty slowly
48:28just because this is a fragile surface.
48:33There are crevasses and we do not want to fall into one.
48:39We're now really up on top of the glacier.
48:43You feel quite exposed up here.
48:54No, I did not see a crevasse.
49:00We're now up on top of the glacier.
49:04No, I did not see a crevasse.
49:09This glacier ice cap is enormous, 200 square miles,
49:14with an average depth of 200 metres thick.
49:19But what's happening below the ice is what Helga wanted to show me.
49:29So, just recently here,
49:32they made quite an amazing discovery.
49:36An ice cave.
49:41Continue.
49:42Underneath millions of tonnes of ice,
49:46this cave shows what lies further beneath our feet.
49:50What are you seeing there?
49:54Ash.
49:56Ash.
49:58From a volcanic eruption?
50:02Yes, from a volcanic eruption from Katla volcano,
50:07which is just below us here.
50:10There's a volcano underneath us over there? Where?
50:15Basically underneath us, yes. We're within Katla now.
50:19Which has erupted before?
50:21The last eruption was in 1918.
50:24That was a big explosive eruption, and this is the ash from that.
50:29So this ice contains secrets, then?
50:32A lot of secrets.
50:35Above us, the glacier is like a heavy lid,
50:38sitting on a pressure cooker below us, the whopping Katla volcano.
50:46The rate we're melting the glacier, it will release the pressure off Katla,
50:52and if Katla has a shallow magma storm that technically is ready to erupt,
50:58you just need to set it off by a little pressure.
51:02It's similar to opening a soda bottle. You see the bubble rise.
51:05You're relieving pressure from the soda. That's a very similar thing here.
51:10Just so I understand it, this glacier is almost like a giant ice cap
51:16on top of the Katla volcano.
51:21It's enormous weight, trillions of tonnes of frozen water.
51:26That compresses the tectonic plate, no less, underneath it.
51:29The crust.
51:30The crust of planet Earth.
51:32As that melts away, it makes a volcanic eruption more likely and more powerful.
51:39More likely. Not necessarily more powerful.
51:42It's a rapid melting, which then results in a rapid movement of the crust.
51:51I think we shouldn't spend any more time here.
51:53After you.
51:54Thanks.
52:01I need to get out of here.
52:05So, Helga's not happy with us being here because it's sunny outside,
52:13and that can mean there's an increased melt,
52:17and as a result, you can get a flash flood coming through these caves,
52:22and obviously that could be disastrous.
52:31All right, well, we made it out here.
52:34It's a little bit safer here, but still not guaranteed safety.
52:41The Katla volcano beneath us is huge,
52:44with a caldera roughly the size of Paris.
52:49This has really surprised me.
52:52The melting of Earth's glaciers can seem like a very distant story and problem,
52:58but here we have a situation where climate change is melting a glacier
53:02that could then unleash destructive forces that could directly impact
53:07on tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world.
53:14Katla's next eruption could be catastrophic,
53:17pumping out a vast ash cloud high into the atmosphere,
53:21polluting air with volcanic gases, grounding flights
53:24and destroying harvests across Europe and North America.
53:28Scientists expect the heat to flash melt the ice cap above,
53:32discharging floodwaters at a greater flow rate than that of the Amazon River.
53:38Living on a pressure cooker isn't all bad for the people of Iceland.
53:43They've tapped the unstable geology and magma below ground
53:46to help provide masses of heat for homes and power.
53:50Iceland's a renewable energy superpower, generating so much electricity
53:55they've set up aluminium smelters and host data centres,
53:59which probably store some of your photos in those mysterious clouds.
54:04And now they're using renewable power to remove some of the carbon dioxide,
54:09CO2, we've all been pumping into the atmosphere,
54:12a major cause of climate change.
54:14Oh, my goodness. Wow.
54:17Birger Sigforsson is a geologist for a firm called Carbfix.
54:21They're into what's called carbon capture.
54:24So, Birger, what is this?
54:27These are the collector currencies.
54:31These are the collector containers.
54:34They are sucking air into these containers.
54:38Inside them, they have a filter that selectively binds CO2 from the air.
54:45And then what comes out of the filter is just air without CO2.
54:50Since the Industrial Revolution, we've been burning fossil fuels,
54:56coal, cutting down our forests.
54:59We've been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, haven't we?
55:04Yeah, yeah.
55:05What's being done here is essentially sucking the carbon out of the air.
55:10Yes.
55:11What comes out here is essentially air with pre-industrial CO2 concentrations.
55:19So we're breathing some of the purest air on the planet.
55:24Yeah, this is something that the earth hasn't seen for a few hundred years.
55:30I'm feeling my lungs.
55:32Yeah.
55:34But then...
55:35It does taste good.
55:37Doesn't it?
55:38It does.
55:40There's concern about whether carbon capture is remotely viable
55:44or that it might become a convenient excuse to carry on polluting.
55:48But there's a lot of money in it.
55:50Companies and countries are trying to make it work.
55:54Voila.
55:55Voila, yeah.
55:56Here they think they've cracked one of the major problems with carbon capture,
56:00where to safely store the carbon dioxide, or CO2.
56:04What have we got here?
56:07So earlier, the CO2 was captured from air.
56:12The CO2 was then compressed into a column and the CO2 was dissolved in water.
56:18So we have like a machine that creates salt stream, just like the salt stream you drink.
56:24Yeah, so fizzy water.
56:26Fizzy water.
56:27Three times more CO2 than in the fizzy water that you buy in the supermarket.
56:33Right.
56:34And this steel pipe here, it goes all the way down to 350 metres.
56:40And here, for example, you see an example of basalt.
56:44Let's see this.
56:45Can I hold it?
56:46When you look at it, it looks like Swiss cheese, doesn't it?
56:49Yeah.
56:50And then the water goes into these bubbles, into the formation,
56:54and then you end up with something similar to this.
56:57Wow.
56:58So here, these white specks here, this is carbonate.
57:02And this is what will happen with time.
57:05This is the real magic, I think, isn't it?
57:08You're turning fizzy water into rock.
57:13We are doing this in many locations with very good success,
57:17and this is what we want to continue to do, make more white rocks.
57:24By 2030, carbon capture firms hope, optimistically,
57:28to be removing perhaps a few hundred million tonnes of CO2 per year.
57:33It's promising, but let's be realistic.
57:35That's still less than 1% of today's emissions.
57:40I think this is great, I do.
57:42But this is still really small scale.
57:45This is like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
57:54We have to reduce and stop burning fossil fuels
57:58that our lives and industrialised economies have depended on now for generations.
58:04It's tough, but we can do it.
58:13Next time, on the final leg of my journey.
58:17Splashdown.
58:19Off we go.
58:20I'm in Sweden and Denmark.
58:23Oh my goodness, look at that.
58:25Pretty raunchy.
58:27Discovering another side of Scandinavia.
58:30You're wearing these in urban Sweden?
58:33Yes.
58:42Exploring the Fascinating Minds of Octopuses