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Norwegian cousins battle over oil and climate policy
Cape Argus
|July 31, 2025
AS TEENAGERS in Norway, Andreas Bjelland Eriksen and his younger cousin Vebjorn Bjelland Berg survived a mass shooting together - a trauma that united them.
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Fourteen years on, they now find themselves divided by climate politics: Eriksen is the environment minister in the oil-rich country, while Berg is one of his biggest activist critics.
A militant with the Extinction Rebellion climate group, Berg vowed to start a hunger strike yesterday to press the pro-oil, centre-left government to abandon drilling for the sake of the planet.
The protest will put his cousin on the spot as Norway prepares for a general election on September 8 in which its crucial oil industry will be a key campaign issue.
Berg, 29, and his 33-year-old cousin were at a youth camp on the island of Utoya on July 22, 2011 when far-right sympathiser Anders Behring Breivik went on a gun rampage that killed 69 people.
Breivik also set off a bomb near government headquarters in Oslo that killed another eight.
This story is from the July 31, 2025 edition of Cape Argus.
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