The coverage of Nord Stream in Sweden is absolutely fascinating. Obviously, there's no coverage of any kind of the real situation, like the one Jerome presents above.

Instead, the media view is that the notorious Russians are up to something evil, though there is no clear idea exactly what this might be. Everything from spying (the compressor tower off Gotland should allegedly be used, and the poor flailing Gazprom people panickly promised that it would be crewed only by Germans, and that we could inspect it whenever we liked, total farce!), preparing an invasion of Sweden (Gazprom is upgrading a harbour on Gotland to support the pipe laying, clearly a ruse for making it able to accept roro ships full of tanks...) to undermining the independence of the Baltic nations or the democratic (TM) Ukraine is proposed, and not only by crackpots but in official reports from the military, government institutions to green NGO's who think the pipeline will disturb WWII vintage chemical weapons on the sea floor (unlike all those telecommunication lines, or the gaspipes and powerlines in the Western Baltic?) etc etc.

It's all fantastically stupid, and the media people are so bloody incompetent that they can't see they are being played by a number of domestic special interests, like the military (the pipe is just a cover for increasing the Russian naval presence in the Baltic!), the pro-Baltic hawks, the biofuel industry and the power industry.

And the scary thing is that everyone believes these things, even smart and politically very aware people. I don't know about the senior politicians, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also believe the above.

The actions of the current and former Swedish governments speaks for themselves on this issue: while they have not formally opposed it on geostrategic grounds or anything like that, they have slowed it and obstructed as much as they can by showering the poor Russians with environmental reviews, planning permissions, demanding they cinsider alternate routes (like through the Ukraine and Poleand!), returning the papers saying they weren't good enough because of all kinds of formal bureaucratic resaons, and to top it off the government has repeatedly said that this is not a political issue but a strictly legal one, blah blah blah.

Bleh.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.