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I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and

I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away. In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging. For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. But ok, a solution to fossil fuels had to be found and that's it. For two, the mobile carriers in Norway are heavily promoting phone contracts in which every year you send in your phone and get the latest model phone in exchange. This has to be one of the least environmentally friendly ideas of this century. Every 12 months you exchange a phone that contains plastics and metals and is shipped from another continent just to have the latest piece of bling. Yet no-one seems to care. Another examples is that the speed limit on the motorways was raised a couple of years ago from 100 kph max to 110. So we're all burning too much fuel but now we're being told it's ok to burn more and faster. It doesn't add up. I am meant to care about the environment or not? Or does the environment only count when people can profit from it? The radio swap over is the same. It looks to a conspiracy theorist like an attempt to shame people in "old" cars into replacing them with a "see, I'm not poor!" model. There have been reports in the news here over the years about there being so many old cars on the roads and that it is a problem (it is presented as a safety and environmental problem by the govt. and media). The reason I think there are so many older cars is because new cars cost a lot mostly because tax on a new car is so high, and this leads to owners actually following service intervals and keeping cars in good condition. Finding a car with a near complete service history in Norway is common. Maybe there would be less old cars if the govt. wasn't taxing them so high. An electric car is still out my price range, even with the (now vulgar) tax breaks given to Tesla owners.

kfk 10y ago
I lived in DK, it's similar there (+ car tax is higher there). I think this new shiny culture is great in some regards: almost cashless society, very good tech in schools and Universities, very good IT in all companies, etc.. However, they also have the biggest contradictions I have seen so far: super old car fleet - but everybody in DK is an environmentalist; immigrants "ghetto" all over - but everybody in DK is supposed to be nice and welcoming; 80% of what they eat is junk cheap food from fast foods, but everybody in DK only buys bio products at the supermarkets. I think you just have to accept the fact that many people don't see those contradictions, our brains are made for patterns, they have a bit of a loser concept of internal coherency.
sundvor 10y ago
New cars were still going to be built though so it's better that they are electrical, especially when you have 100% clean energy to source it (dam hydro). The 24 month upgrade cycle is hardly unique to Norway; Australia being another where everyone and his dog gets a new phone biannually.
- kagamine 10y ago
  1. Tax breaks and other incentives boost new sales, so the number of new cars is higher than if the market had continued as before. There is an argument for that having an impact. 2. Not 24 months, 12. And it encourages people who would not have upgraded for years to upgrade every year, year on year.Do you really need a new phone every 12 months?
  - sundvor 10y ago
    1. As it's only the electric cars that receive your incentives, it's a very worthwhile push to clean energy. Also the first generation of these cars will make it to the 2nd hand market about now, further increasing the penetration. Number of new cars might have been lower without, but the percentage of electric cars would have been a mere fraction. (Edit: And filthy diesel cars would likely be the ersatz). 2. Oh, right, 12 months - me bad. Yep that is pretty awful. I'm coming up on 24 months on my own but could really stretch it longer with my S6 Edge being a great phone. (As a PS my Rotel / Infinity hi-fi system is 21 years old now, and going strong.)
varjag 10y ago
> For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. This is the kind of made up on spot arguments you hear from ICE vehicle owners. Until they switch to EV :) "Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle." http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions#.WG9fXZ7NRkp http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-... 15pct is not anywhere enough to offset the lifetime footprint of a fossils-driven vehicle, especially in case of Norway where effectively all electricity is hydro.
- kagamine 10y ago
  Sort of just what I said. I did state "reportedly" and not provide any sources. I don't think I was being unfair to the EV market. However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. Public transport is something I could have mentioned in my original post as it is not prioritized enough here in Norway and car culture is. If the govt were serious, really serious about the environment then public transport would be much better than it is currently. Edit: I just remembered another reason why I think EV is about money and not only about the environment: diesel engines could easily(ish) be adapted to run on renewable plant based fuel[1], but no govt is interested in promoting this. In fact they do the opposite, they tax the end user quite highly for pouring vegetable oil into cars even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free. The conversions wouldn't be very much more than when leaded fuel was phased out and we all put new heads on our petrol engines (in the Land Rover community at least we did this). New diesel motors could be manufactured to specs able to cope with plant based fuel (especially with a bit of engineering enterprise). If some one can give a good answer as to why this has never been a viable option except for hobbyists I would be interested to read it. edit 2: without govt. or trade backing this company doing said conversions folded 3 years ago. But what a future we might have seen. http://www.dieselveg.com/ http://www.dieselveg.com/ 1. http://www.reedx.net/landrover/mods/vegoil/p2.php http://www.reedx.net/landrover/mods/vegoil/p2.php
Retric 10y ago
When you hand in an old cellphone they just resell it the same for used cars, so lease programs don't result wast the way you are thinking.
- kagamine 10y ago
  Then why have I read news reports over the last few years about the used-mobile mountain piling up and how hard they are to recycle?
  - Retric 10y ago
    For a 1 year old phones it's Reused not recycled. When you hand in a six year old phone that's when they need to be recycled and that costs a little money. So, old phones do end up in piles as actually recycling is more expensive than saying they will some day be recycled.
digi_owl 10y ago
> I also believe this is primarily driven by money Quite likely. I am not sure exactly when it came to be, but at some point the national broadcaster, NRK, transferred maintenance and such of the broadcast network to Telenor. While Telenor is on paper the national telecom company, it has since the late 90s operated as a publically traded company with the government as a major share holder. So what is likely going on is that Telenor has found the older FM equipment expensive to maintain, and thus want to replace it with DAB. Quite likely because they can then extract rent from all the extra channels being broadcast. We had a similar transition to digital TV a few years back, and as best i can tell the analog channels were barely turned off before Telenor started lobbying for the frequency space to be put up for auction aimed towards mobile phone networks. Damn it, Telenor was making noise about replacing the landlines with mobile phones for a while. This because their switches in and around the major cities were getting old. They seem to have dropped the idea though, likely because they noticed they would have to put up a whole lot of new mobile cells to cover all those villages tucked away in narrow valleys. Frankly big business in Norway has gotten very brazen about their milking of the population for all sorts of rents.
- kagamine 10y ago
  They seem to have gotten around the problem of switching landlines to mobile by simply increasing the cost of a landline so that consumers willingly give it up. I remember our package cost of mobile, net and landline made keeping the landline viable, until it was no longer included in the package and then it increased in cost until we retired it. Iirc the cost of the landline doubled over ~5 years.

kfk 10y ago

I lived in DK, it's similar there (+ car tax is higher there). I think this new shiny culture is great in some regards: almost cashless society, very good tech in schools and Universities, very good IT in all companies, etc.. However, they also have the biggest contradictions I have seen so far: super old car fleet - but everybody in DK is an environmentalist; immigrants "ghetto" all over - but everybody in DK is supposed to be nice and welcoming; 80% of what they eat is junk cheap food from fast foods, but everybody in DK only buys bio products at the supermarkets. I think you just have to accept the fact that many people don't see those contradictions, our brains are made for patterns, they have a bit of a loser concept of internal coherency.

sundvor 10y ago

New cars were still going to be built though so it's better that they are electrical, especially when you have 100% clean energy to source it (dam hydro). The 24 month upgrade cycle is hardly unique to Norway; Australia being another where everyone and his dog gets a new phone biannually.

kagamine 10y ago
1. Tax breaks and other incentives boost new sales, so the number of new cars is higher than if the market had continued as before. There is an argument for that having an impact. 2. Not 24 months, 12. And it encourages people who would not have upgraded for years to upgrade every year, year on year.Do you really need a new phone every 12 months?
- sundvor 10y ago
  1. As it's only the electric cars that receive your incentives, it's a very worthwhile push to clean energy. Also the first generation of these cars will make it to the 2nd hand market about now, further increasing the penetration. Number of new cars might have been lower without, but the percentage of electric cars would have been a mere fraction. (Edit: And filthy diesel cars would likely be the ersatz). 2. Oh, right, 12 months - me bad. Yep that is pretty awful. I'm coming up on 24 months on my own but could really stretch it longer with my S6 Edge being a great phone. (As a PS my Rotel / Infinity hi-fi system is 21 years old now, and going strong.)

varjag 10y ago

> For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. This is the kind of made up on spot arguments you hear from ICE vehicle owners. Until they switch to EV :) "Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle." http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions#.WG9fXZ7NRkp http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-... 15pct is not anywhere enough to offset the lifetime footprint of a fossils-driven vehicle, especially in case of Norway where effectively all electricity is hydro.

kagamine 10y ago
Sort of just what I said. I did state "reportedly" and not provide any sources. I don't think I was being unfair to the EV market. However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. Public transport is something I could have mentioned in my original post as it is not prioritized enough here in Norway and car culture is. If the govt were serious, really serious about the environment then public transport would be much better than it is currently. Edit: I just remembered another reason why I think EV is about money and not only about the environment: diesel engines could easily(ish) be adapted to run on renewable plant based fuel[1], but no govt is interested in promoting this. In fact they do the opposite, they tax the end user quite highly for pouring vegetable oil into cars even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free. The conversions wouldn't be very much more than when leaded fuel was phased out and we all put new heads on our petrol engines (in the Land Rover community at least we did this). New diesel motors could be manufactured to specs able to cope with plant based fuel (especially with a bit of engineering enterprise). If some one can give a good answer as to why this has never been a viable option except for hobbyists I would be interested to read it. edit 2: without govt. or trade backing this company doing said conversions folded 3 years ago. But what a future we might have seen. http://www.dieselveg.com/ http://www.dieselveg.com/ 1. http://www.reedx.net/landrover/mods/vegoil/p2.php http://www.reedx.net/landrover/mods/vegoil/p2.php

Retric 10y ago

When you hand in an old cellphone they just resell it the same for used cars, so lease programs don't result wast the way you are thinking.

kagamine 10y ago
Then why have I read news reports over the last few years about the used-mobile mountain piling up and how hard they are to recycle?
- Retric 10y ago
  For a 1 year old phones it's Reused not recycled. When you hand in a six year old phone that's when they need to be recycled and that costs a little money. So, old phones do end up in piles as actually recycling is more expensive than saying they will some day be recycled.

digi_owl 10y ago

> I also believe this is primarily driven by money Quite likely. I am not sure exactly when it came to be, but at some point the national broadcaster, NRK, transferred maintenance and such of the broadcast network to Telenor. While Telenor is on paper the national telecom company, it has since the late 90s operated as a publically traded company with the government as a major share holder. So what is likely going on is that Telenor has found the older FM equipment expensive to maintain, and thus want to replace it with DAB. Quite likely because they can then extract rent from all the extra channels being broadcast. We had a similar transition to digital TV a few years back, and as best i can tell the analog channels were barely turned off before Telenor started lobbying for the frequency space to be put up for auction aimed towards mobile phone networks. Damn it, Telenor was making noise about replacing the landlines with mobile phones for a while. This because their switches in and around the major cities were getting old. They seem to have dropped the idea though, likely because they noticed they would have to put up a whole lot of new mobile cells to cover all those villages tucked away in narrow valleys. Frankly big business in Norway has gotten very brazen about their milking of the population for all sorts of rents.

kagamine 10y ago
They seem to have gotten around the problem of switching landlines to mobile by simply increasing the cost of a landline so that consumers willingly give it up. I remember our package cost of mobile, net and landline made keeping the landline viable, until it was no longer included in the package and then it increased in cost until we retired it. Iirc the cost of the landline doubled over ~5 years.