6 ms·

i like how it's there not a single mention what it's financing their electric car or planes revolution - it's their oil resources - exporting them, effectively

i like how it's there not a single mention what it's financing their electric car or planes revolution - it's their oil resources - exporting them, effectively exporting pollution to countries not rich in oil, which can't afford subsidized switch to electric if they would be really ecological and not hypocrites they would stop making money from oil resources

A2017U1 8y ago
Norway's energy generation is 100% renewable, other countries are more than welcome to stop buying their oil and gas.
Yetanfou 8y ago
...in which case there would be no market for short-haul electric airplanes which would mean that not only those Norse 'hypocrites' but also all those other, less wealthy countries would continue to use B737 and A319/320 for flights which could have been flown on those machines.
clay_the_ripper 8y ago
Well, they could be exporting oil AND not giving a crap about emissions which would be worse. At some level every entity, person and organization is a hypocrite in some way or another. So instead of pointing fingers, we should celebrate wins when we can.
_ph_ 8y ago
If Norway wouldn't sell the oil, someone else would do so. Currently, we need the oil to keep the economy and society working. But Norway uses the oil revenue to build a better future. Which everyone will benefit from. Like solar and wind are now available for everyone at economic prices, as an industrial scale market which allows for those low prices was created by many years of subsidies, when it didn't exist yet.
- adventured 8y ago
  > But Norway uses the oil revenue to build a better future. Which everyone will benefit from. How do you get to that? Norway has extremely tight immigration policies. They hardly let anybody in. Their multi trillion dollar bounty will primarily benefit a few million people, while they export extreme per capita pollution; their per capita oil production is consistently among the top five or six globally. What spectacular technological breakthroughs and exports has Norway produced from their oil riches (in clean energy or otherwise)? I'm not aware of any. Contrast them with neighboring Sweden for example when it comes to technological innovation. Norway isn't that type of culture, they're much more akin to the insular, small kingdom petro states of the Middle East. You don't have to take my word for it, you can look at their primary industries, their nobel production, their scientific output and their technology invention.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    They build the better future by just investing into clean technologies. In Norway, over 40% of all new cars are electric. They are switching to electric ferries. Now, as the article reports, they start investing in electric airplanes. They might not build these things, but by spending their money on electric mobility, they create a market. As I wrote before, what enabled us to have cheap solar now, was all the subsidized buying of solar cells, when they were expensive, creating the engineering and production capacity required to have cheap solar cells.
  - audunw 8y ago
    > Contrast them with neighboring Sweden for example when it comes to technological innovation. Well, all the scandinavian countries are very innovative compared to their population, so that's not a very fair comparison. Anyway, Norway is still extremely innovative. Maybe not in consumer facing and software related industries, which is what gets visibility in Hacker News. Norway doesn't have Spotify or IKEA. But Norway has the worlds cleanest production of aluminum. It has been innovative in fertilizer production. It has a very strong microelectronics design industry. ARM's GPUs are designed here, most of the worlds Bluetooth Low Energy microcontrollers and other RF microcontrollers. It has the worlds leading automotive CMOS imaging sensor design center. Etc. Tomra is a world leader in recycling technology. And lets not forget all the non-petroleum marine innovation. Yes, the oil industry is dominating. It's very difficult to get investments outside of petroleum (although that is improving as the desire to diversify is growing). But seriously, Norway is doing about as well as can be expected of an oil producing nation. And if you think it's realistic to expect oil production to be cut on the supply side, you're hopelessly naive.
rdl 8y ago
Cheap and safe to recover oil (like Saudi, Norway, etc) is way better for the environment than expensive (tar sands) or dangerous (badly run deep water operations.). Also, I would sure rather have the government and people of Norway get money than a lot of the other places selling oil...
- arethuza 8y ago
  Norway's oil isn't nearly as cheap as Saudi oil to extract - ~$21 a barrel for Norway and ~$9 for Saudi oil. In fact it's roughly the same cost to extract as US oil. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/19/you-wont-believe-what-saudi-arabias-oil-production.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/19/you-wont-believe-w... Also, Norway's oil comes from the North Sea - which I'm not sure counts as "easy".
  - rdl 8y ago
    Norway’s oil is inherently difficult compared to Saudi oil, but they already have a lot of infrastructure and skill and are incredibly competent. It would be different if we had just discovered the North Sea oil and had to decide between that and Saudi land based reserves.
barking 8y ago
I agree with you. They are raping the planet with the best of them. If they truly wanted to make a difference they'd leave the oil where it is. This is nothing better than a gangster putting a little on the plate on a sunday.
pgtan 8y ago
I completely agree with you. There is a screaming hypocrisy here.
gonvaled 8y ago
Unfortunately progress can only happen using the resources we have at our disposal. Currently we have an economy heavily based on hydrocarbons. There is a wide consensus (unfortunately, not wide enough) that this is neither sustainable not desirable, so we are trying to come up with alternatives. Those alternatives are not going to appear from thin air: we need to transition, as fast as we can can, to the next paradigm. I think you underestimate how difficult is to change a country-wide economy. The huge challenges involved is what underpins the whole peak-oil movement [1] - irrespective of whether the theory is correct or not, the challenges posed by a big scale energy source transition are very well described. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
- provolone 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus Historical analysis tends to disagree with the underlying philosophy of peak oil.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    I am not claiming anything in favor or against the theory of peak oil. I am just saying that the challenges posed by a technological overhaul are very well described in the Peak Oil literature.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Malthus's ideas was something different - that people will breed till they run out of food which basically hasn't happened. People think of different things with peak oil. At the basic level production will peak - with a finite resource you can't keep increasing extraction for ever. On the other hand people sometimes link it to running out of oil which probably won't happen - instead we'll move to renewables because they will be cheaper and greener.
    - provolone 8y ago
      Just as Malthus observed that the land in the British Isles was a finite resource. Malthusianism is a trope in macroeconomics.

A2017U1 8y ago

Norway's energy generation is 100% renewable, other countries are more than welcome to stop buying their oil and gas.

Yetanfou 8y ago

...in which case there would be no market for short-haul electric airplanes which would mean that not only those Norse 'hypocrites' but also all those other, less wealthy countries would continue to use B737 and A319/320 for flights which could have been flown on those machines.

clay_the_ripper 8y ago

Well, they could be exporting oil AND not giving a crap about emissions which would be worse. At some level every entity, person and organization is a hypocrite in some way or another. So instead of pointing fingers, we should celebrate wins when we can.

_ph_ 8y ago

If Norway wouldn't sell the oil, someone else would do so. Currently, we need the oil to keep the economy and society working. But Norway uses the oil revenue to build a better future. Which everyone will benefit from. Like solar and wind are now available for everyone at economic prices, as an industrial scale market which allows for those low prices was created by many years of subsidies, when it didn't exist yet.

adventured 8y ago
> But Norway uses the oil revenue to build a better future. Which everyone will benefit from. How do you get to that? Norway has extremely tight immigration policies. They hardly let anybody in. Their multi trillion dollar bounty will primarily benefit a few million people, while they export extreme per capita pollution; their per capita oil production is consistently among the top five or six globally. What spectacular technological breakthroughs and exports has Norway produced from their oil riches (in clean energy or otherwise)? I'm not aware of any. Contrast them with neighboring Sweden for example when it comes to technological innovation. Norway isn't that type of culture, they're much more akin to the insular, small kingdom petro states of the Middle East. You don't have to take my word for it, you can look at their primary industries, their nobel production, their scientific output and their technology invention.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  They build the better future by just investing into clean technologies. In Norway, over 40% of all new cars are electric. They are switching to electric ferries. Now, as the article reports, they start investing in electric airplanes. They might not build these things, but by spending their money on electric mobility, they create a market. As I wrote before, what enabled us to have cheap solar now, was all the subsidized buying of solar cells, when they were expensive, creating the engineering and production capacity required to have cheap solar cells.
- audunw 8y ago
  > Contrast them with neighboring Sweden for example when it comes to technological innovation. Well, all the scandinavian countries are very innovative compared to their population, so that's not a very fair comparison. Anyway, Norway is still extremely innovative. Maybe not in consumer facing and software related industries, which is what gets visibility in Hacker News. Norway doesn't have Spotify or IKEA. But Norway has the worlds cleanest production of aluminum. It has been innovative in fertilizer production. It has a very strong microelectronics design industry. ARM's GPUs are designed here, most of the worlds Bluetooth Low Energy microcontrollers and other RF microcontrollers. It has the worlds leading automotive CMOS imaging sensor design center. Etc. Tomra is a world leader in recycling technology. And lets not forget all the non-petroleum marine innovation. Yes, the oil industry is dominating. It's very difficult to get investments outside of petroleum (although that is improving as the desire to diversify is growing). But seriously, Norway is doing about as well as can be expected of an oil producing nation. And if you think it's realistic to expect oil production to be cut on the supply side, you're hopelessly naive.

rdl 8y ago

Cheap and safe to recover oil (like Saudi, Norway, etc) is way better for the environment than expensive (tar sands) or dangerous (badly run deep water operations.). Also, I would sure rather have the government and people of Norway get money than a lot of the other places selling oil...

arethuza 8y ago
Norway's oil isn't nearly as cheap as Saudi oil to extract - ~$21 a barrel for Norway and ~$9 for Saudi oil. In fact it's roughly the same cost to extract as US oil. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/19/you-wont-believe-what-saudi-arabias-oil-production.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/19/you-wont-believe-w... Also, Norway's oil comes from the North Sea - which I'm not sure counts as "easy".
- rdl 8y ago
  Norway’s oil is inherently difficult compared to Saudi oil, but they already have a lot of infrastructure and skill and are incredibly competent. It would be different if we had just discovered the North Sea oil and had to decide between that and Saudi land based reserves.

barking 8y ago

I agree with you. They are raping the planet with the best of them. If they truly wanted to make a difference they'd leave the oil where it is. This is nothing better than a gangster putting a little on the plate on a sunday.

pgtan 8y ago

I completely agree with you. There is a screaming hypocrisy here.

gonvaled 8y ago

Unfortunately progress can only happen using the resources we have at our disposal. Currently we have an economy heavily based on hydrocarbons. There is a wide consensus (unfortunately, not wide enough) that this is neither sustainable not desirable, so we are trying to come up with alternatives. Those alternatives are not going to appear from thin air: we need to transition, as fast as we can can, to the next paradigm. I think you underestimate how difficult is to change a country-wide economy. The huge challenges involved is what underpins the whole peak-oil movement [1] - irrespective of whether the theory is correct or not, the challenges posed by a big scale energy source transition are very well described. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

provolone 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus Historical analysis tends to disagree with the underlying philosophy of peak oil.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  I am not claiming anything in favor or against the theory of peak oil. I am just saying that the challenges posed by a technological overhaul are very well described in the Peak Oil literature.
- tim333 8y ago
  Malthus's ideas was something different - that people will breed till they run out of food which basically hasn't happened. People think of different things with peak oil. At the basic level production will peak - with a finite resource you can't keep increasing extraction for ever. On the other hand people sometimes link it to running out of oil which probably won't happen - instead we'll move to renewables because they will be cheaper and greener.
  - provolone 8y ago
    Just as Malthus observed that the land in the British Isles was a finite resource. Malthusianism is a trope in macroeconomics.