Laurie David has a post up on the polar bears that found their way to Iceland, but before she gets to the polar bears, she has some thoughts on Iceland in general:

The most impressive fact about Iceland is that they went from a completely fossil fuel dependent nation to a completely coal independent nation. Not a single chunk of coal is burned for electricity there. Instead, they power their booming economy with renewable geothermal and hydropower (and they heat around 90% of their buildings with geothermal too). (Iceland has no nuclear plants either.) It can be done. They proved it!

Well, for one, not everyone thinks Iceland’s economy is “booming.” From the Financial Times:

In the second half of last year, as the subprime crisis gathered strength in the US, articles appeared in the international press about Iceland as the “canary in the mine”. They suggested tiny Iceland (population: 315,000) was a leading indicator of how the crisis was mutating into something much bigger, affecting many countries beyond the US.
Since then Iceland’s economy has continued to decline. Gross domestic product shrank by almost 4 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the final quarter of last year, when growth was barely positive. The stock market and the currency have both fallen by about a third since the start of this year.
The size of the accumulated macroeconomic imbalances beggars belief. The external deficit was 25 per cent of GDP in 2006 and 17 per cent in 2007. Gross short-term foreign debt amounted to 15 times the value of the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves at the end of 2007, or roughly 200 per cent of GDP. Gross long-term foreign debt amounted to another 350 per cent of GDP. Bank assets swelled to 10 times GDP by the end of 2007. These imbalances are the other side of the Icelandic purchases of companies in Britain, Denmark and elsewhere.

Two, it’s quite easy to use geothermal power to generate electricity when you live on top of a giant volcano.

And three, do you know what else Iceland uses its “green” power for? Smelters. Polluting, global-warming causing, polar-bear killing smelters Anyone who knows anything about Iceland knows that the smelter issue is one that divides the nation:

Minister of the Environment Thórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir called her fellow party members in the Social Democrats to a meeting yesterday to discuss their declarations of support for aluminum smelters, which are not compatible with the party’s policy on climate issues.
Before the elections in May 2007, the Social Democrats claimed there was only room for one small aluminum smelter in addition to the others within the Icelandic provision on greenhouse gas emissions, 24 Stundir reports.
Yet some ministers from the Social Democrats, including Minister of Transport Kristján Möller, have declared their support for planned aluminum smelters in Bakki near Húsavík in northeast Iceland and in Helguvík on Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland.

Laurie David conveniently leaves this out. But back to the polar bears:

I heard about this rare occurrence of polar bears drifting to Iceland from the fly fishing guide Hallur Lund (a mechanical engineer during the off season) who thinks global warming is the reason the polar bears ended up in the wrong place. “They would never swim from Greenland to Iceland. No way,” Hallur said. If two polar bears hit this tiny little island I wonder how many end up floating past, never bumping into a shore and end up drowning. You could say the two who landed were the lucky ones; at least they found land.

As we’ve reported, the above statement isn’t true. Polar bears find their way to Iceland all the time, especially in years when it’s extremely icy.