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Is it just me or is whole "Is Norway the New East India Company?" a absurdly extrema leap of logic? I mean the East India Company caused (as far as I can tell)

Is it just me or is whole "Is Norway the New East India Company?" a absurdly extrema leap of logic? I mean the East India Company caused (as far as I can tell) a extrema degree of damage of which the echos still noticeable affect all of us today and will so in the future, it might even have lead one of the foundation stones which might start WW3 (if a WW3 starts in the not to long future involving China as a major aggressor). Sure, we can't say what would have happened if things would have gone different, but we can say that the East India Company might have screwed us over big time. In case of Norway I don't see that, like at all.

GuuD 5y ago
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
levzettelin 5y ago
The analogy is not perfect: it doesn't look like Norway is going to start a war to push its product. But I get the comparison: Norway looks pretty hypocritical here to me.
- Arnt 5y ago
  I've heard that before and it's always been a difficult point of view for me to understand. Could you perhaps describe how rich democracy that both uses and produces oil should behave if it were to be ⓐ not at all hypotcritical ⓑ unremarkably average ⓒ very hypocritical? You may assume that the there's a spectrum of opinions among the voters on the relevant issues, and ideally that the country has a tradition of choosing policies that suit most voters rather than 50.01%.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    ⓐ accept and knowledge both problems and find reasonable compromises while keeping the larger/global picture in mind. ⓒ Ramp up Oil production as much as possible to sell as much Oil as possible, covertly use money and influence to make people dependent on Oil but in the country and to the press say that Climate Change needs to be stopped and Oil usage needs to degree and make your country less dependent on Oil usage (so that it has no problem when it runs out and so that you can sell more). ⓒ Some where in between? But I assumed the hypothesis is about countries which produce Oil in a economical relevant amount, so I'm not sure there is a "unremarkable average". As far as I can tell Norway tries to go with ⓐ but not perfectly 100% commitment, but then expected a perfect type ⓐ approach is IMHO unrealistic. For example as far as I can tell their Arctic(1) expeditions are more about being able to keep their Oil output around the current level if necessary then about ramping it up. A country which could be saied to go with type ⓒ is Saudi Arabia I think, but I'm have vastly to little knowledge about it to make that judgement. (1): One note about Arctic Oil mining. There is nothing which makes Arctic Oil mining inherently more climate damaging then non-Artic Oil mining. The reason many see it as a no-go is more related to environmental concerns (which are not the same as climate concerns!). Through there are also arguments about reducing the amount of Oil which can be blasted in our atmosphere by blacklisting Arctic Oil. Either way while there are many reasons to complain about it I also can think about reasons why it might make sense and why I maybe might have done such decision. (Mainly related to increasing geopolitical tensions, increasing influence of China, and the China US conflict.)
    - Arnt 5y ago
      What reasonable compromises do you have in mind? From context you must mean something Norway hasn't done or tried to do (otherwise Norway wouldn't be "pretty hypocritical") and if the word hypocritical is to be meaningful (not "something everyone is all the time"), such compromises must exist. The Kyoto protocol makes me sad. EDIT: No, wait, perhaps I get it. You're not contrasting hypocritical with "not hypocritical" as I thought, but rather with other bad traits, right? So Norway is spending oil income on things like building Tesla's car business and Wärtsilä's electric ship engines, and that's hypocritical, while (name other country) has a large profitable construction business that burns lots of oil on fixed construction sites, and that country is not spending its tax income on subsidising electric companies that take on Komatsu and Caterpillar. The other country is then (in your opinion) somehow bad, but not hypocriticial. And that's the contrast. Is that it?
  - levzettelin 5y ago
    a) Either produce and consume oil or don't. If you do, you have to accept the ecological impact and you can't push a story about how your country is morally superior. Sorry, you have to find something else on the basis of which you can feel superior. b) Just be Norway. c) Just be Norway, but wage war on governments that refuse to buy oil.
- vmception 5y ago
  I think it is important to decouple two issues: 1) Is it hypocritical by definition? Yes or no. 2) Does it bother me? Yes or no. I think it is incredibly juvenile to find their push for sustainable consumption domestically to be a problem. Or, alternatively, incredibly juvenile to consider their nation building and wealth building oil exploration to be more of a problem because they tried to stop consuming it themselves. The oil production won't stop whether they were consumers or not, since that is the constant and their domestic behavior is the variable, then why create an argument based on the presence of the variable?
hjek 5y ago
> I mean the East India Company caused (as far as I can tell) a extrema degree of damage of which the echos still noticeable affect all of us today and will so in the future, That's because you fail to mention the climate catastrophe which causes an extreme degree of damage[0] and will so in the future[1]. [0]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7eyn8/five-million-people-die-every-year-now-due-to-abnormal-temperatures-study-reports https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7eyn8/five-million-people-d... [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-pa...
- dathinab 5y ago
  Not really, Norway reducing Oil production will most likely not affect the climate change, it might even make it worse due to less environmental friendly produced Oil and much less reinvestment of Oil money into trying to reduce the Oil consumption. At least currently there are still enough Oil reserves around the World that Norways reduction of Oil production would be fully compensated by other sources. Maybe this would short term reduce the amount of Oil usage due to hiked prices, but due to now countries less invested into green energy profiting from it instead of Norway it likely would not be better wrt. climate change. Maybe even worse. Furthermore Oil in all of it's forms is currently so widely integrated into our daily live that "just higher Oil prices" won't help. I mean plastic uses Oil for production and is in much more places than many people are aware of and much less nicely recyclable then many people are aware of. E.g. many clothes contain plastic and in turn oil, if we look at a global scale we probably could even say the large majority of clothes contain plastic. Another example is that even if we produce and use electric cars they contain a lot of plastic and in turn Oil, similar you PC, Phone, Couch, Window Frame, Water Pipes, Internet Connection, etc. etc. And even if we would only allow new E-Cars from tomorrow, there are still a lot of non E-Cars which won't go away anytime soon even if Gas prices double... So all in all our demand for Oil will hopefully reduce, but won't go away anytime soon. And IMHO this demand being covered by Norway with some of the money earned being reinvested into alternatives if largely preferable over all (realistic/practical) alternatives.
  - hjek 5y ago
paulddraper 5y ago
It is a bizarre analogy. The commonalities are (1) state capitalism (2) harmful effects. But the analogy kinda stops there.
webmobdev 5y ago
No, you are not alone in rightly assuming that the whole article is bullshit. The whole basis of the article is that East India company did not sell opium in the west, but sold it to the Chinese. And that "similarly" Norway advocates for clean energy but grows wealthy by selling oil and gas. The comparison is illogical because the East India company was the poster boy of imperialism and corporate exploitation. It had its own private army of 250,000+ soldiers that was larger than the British army! It is the only instance I know of a corporate conquering a country (India) and establishing a British colony that it ran for decades. In fact, the exploitation was so perverse that the British government had to step in take control away from them to ensure that India (the jewel of the British crown) did not slip away from their hand because of the greed and cruelty of the East India company. (In the 19th century, they chopped away the hands of Bengal weavers as the clothes they produced were superior in quality, which made it difficult to sell the inferior machine produced British imported garments.) I'd also like to add that oil and gas are not going to fade away anytime soon as we shift towards "clean energy". There are a lot of petrochemical products that are are manufactured from the oil we drill.
- sofixa 5y ago
  The Dutch East India company ( VOC) did plenty of conquering themselves in present day Indonesia and the Caribbean. And in a more indirect way ( funding rebels, lobbying their government to intervene), so did the United Fruit Company in Central America. India wasn't really a country, more akin to the various Italian or German ( if we exclude the whole HRE thing) states pre-unification than a country - a bunch of independent-ish entities ruled by princes that were often in alliance or war with each other, and differed somewhat from each other culturally/language-wise/etc. but had plenty of common ground.
  - known 5y ago
    India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator --Churchill (b. 1874)

GuuD 5y ago

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

levzettelin 5y ago

The analogy is not perfect: it doesn't look like Norway is going to start a war to push its product. But I get the comparison: Norway looks pretty hypocritical here to me.

Arnt 5y ago
I've heard that before and it's always been a difficult point of view for me to understand. Could you perhaps describe how rich democracy that both uses and produces oil should behave if it were to be ⓐ not at all hypotcritical ⓑ unremarkably average ⓒ very hypocritical? You may assume that the there's a spectrum of opinions among the voters on the relevant issues, and ideally that the country has a tradition of choosing policies that suit most voters rather than 50.01%.
- dathinab 5y ago
  ⓐ accept and knowledge both problems and find reasonable compromises while keeping the larger/global picture in mind. ⓒ Ramp up Oil production as much as possible to sell as much Oil as possible, covertly use money and influence to make people dependent on Oil but in the country and to the press say that Climate Change needs to be stopped and Oil usage needs to degree and make your country less dependent on Oil usage (so that it has no problem when it runs out and so that you can sell more). ⓒ Some where in between? But I assumed the hypothesis is about countries which produce Oil in a economical relevant amount, so I'm not sure there is a "unremarkable average". As far as I can tell Norway tries to go with ⓐ but not perfectly 100% commitment, but then expected a perfect type ⓐ approach is IMHO unrealistic. For example as far as I can tell their Arctic(1) expeditions are more about being able to keep their Oil output around the current level if necessary then about ramping it up. A country which could be saied to go with type ⓒ is Saudi Arabia I think, but I'm have vastly to little knowledge about it to make that judgement. (1): One note about Arctic Oil mining. There is nothing which makes Arctic Oil mining inherently more climate damaging then non-Artic Oil mining. The reason many see it as a no-go is more related to environmental concerns (which are not the same as climate concerns!). Through there are also arguments about reducing the amount of Oil which can be blasted in our atmosphere by blacklisting Arctic Oil. Either way while there are many reasons to complain about it I also can think about reasons why it might make sense and why I maybe might have done such decision. (Mainly related to increasing geopolitical tensions, increasing influence of China, and the China US conflict.)
  - Arnt 5y ago
    What reasonable compromises do you have in mind? From context you must mean something Norway hasn't done or tried to do (otherwise Norway wouldn't be "pretty hypocritical") and if the word hypocritical is to be meaningful (not "something everyone is all the time"), such compromises must exist. The Kyoto protocol makes me sad. EDIT: No, wait, perhaps I get it. You're not contrasting hypocritical with "not hypocritical" as I thought, but rather with other bad traits, right? So Norway is spending oil income on things like building Tesla's car business and Wärtsilä's electric ship engines, and that's hypocritical, while (name other country) has a large profitable construction business that burns lots of oil on fixed construction sites, and that country is not spending its tax income on subsidising electric companies that take on Komatsu and Caterpillar. The other country is then (in your opinion) somehow bad, but not hypocriticial. And that's the contrast. Is that it?
- levzettelin 5y ago
  a) Either produce and consume oil or don't. If you do, you have to accept the ecological impact and you can't push a story about how your country is morally superior. Sorry, you have to find something else on the basis of which you can feel superior. b) Just be Norway. c) Just be Norway, but wage war on governments that refuse to buy oil.
vmception 5y ago
I think it is important to decouple two issues: 1) Is it hypocritical by definition? Yes or no. 2) Does it bother me? Yes or no. I think it is incredibly juvenile to find their push for sustainable consumption domestically to be a problem. Or, alternatively, incredibly juvenile to consider their nation building and wealth building oil exploration to be more of a problem because they tried to stop consuming it themselves. The oil production won't stop whether they were consumers or not, since that is the constant and their domestic behavior is the variable, then why create an argument based on the presence of the variable?

hjek 5y ago

> I mean the East India Company caused (as far as I can tell) a extrema degree of damage of which the echos still noticeable affect all of us today and will so in the future, That's because you fail to mention the climate catastrophe which causes an extreme degree of damage[0] and will so in the future[1]. [0]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7eyn8/five-million-people-die-every-year-now-due-to-abnormal-temperatures-study-reports https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7eyn8/five-million-people-d... [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-pa...

dathinab 5y ago
Not really, Norway reducing Oil production will most likely not affect the climate change, it might even make it worse due to less environmental friendly produced Oil and much less reinvestment of Oil money into trying to reduce the Oil consumption. At least currently there are still enough Oil reserves around the World that Norways reduction of Oil production would be fully compensated by other sources. Maybe this would short term reduce the amount of Oil usage due to hiked prices, but due to now countries less invested into green energy profiting from it instead of Norway it likely would not be better wrt. climate change. Maybe even worse. Furthermore Oil in all of it's forms is currently so widely integrated into our daily live that "just higher Oil prices" won't help. I mean plastic uses Oil for production and is in much more places than many people are aware of and much less nicely recyclable then many people are aware of. E.g. many clothes contain plastic and in turn oil, if we look at a global scale we probably could even say the large majority of clothes contain plastic. Another example is that even if we produce and use electric cars they contain a lot of plastic and in turn Oil, similar you PC, Phone, Couch, Window Frame, Water Pipes, Internet Connection, etc. etc. And even if we would only allow new E-Cars from tomorrow, there are still a lot of non E-Cars which won't go away anytime soon even if Gas prices double... So all in all our demand for Oil will hopefully reduce, but won't go away anytime soon. And IMHO this demand being covered by Norway with some of the money earned being reinvested into alternatives if largely preferable over all (realistic/practical) alternatives.
- hjek 5y ago

paulddraper 5y ago

It is a bizarre analogy. The commonalities are (1) state capitalism (2) harmful effects. But the analogy kinda stops there.

webmobdev 5y ago

No, you are not alone in rightly assuming that the whole article is bullshit. The whole basis of the article is that East India company did not sell opium in the west, but sold it to the Chinese. And that "similarly" Norway advocates for clean energy but grows wealthy by selling oil and gas. The comparison is illogical because the East India company was the poster boy of imperialism and corporate exploitation. It had its own private army of 250,000+ soldiers that was larger than the British army! It is the only instance I know of a corporate conquering a country (India) and establishing a British colony that it ran for decades. In fact, the exploitation was so perverse that the British government had to step in take control away from them to ensure that India (the jewel of the British crown) did not slip away from their hand because of the greed and cruelty of the East India company. (In the 19th century, they chopped away the hands of Bengal weavers as the clothes they produced were superior in quality, which made it difficult to sell the inferior machine produced British imported garments.) I'd also like to add that oil and gas are not going to fade away anytime soon as we shift towards "clean energy". There are a lot of petrochemical products that are are manufactured from the oil we drill.

sofixa 5y ago
The Dutch East India company ( VOC) did plenty of conquering themselves in present day Indonesia and the Caribbean. And in a more indirect way ( funding rebels, lobbying their government to intervene), so did the United Fruit Company in Central America. India wasn't really a country, more akin to the various Italian or German ( if we exclude the whole HRE thing) states pre-unification than a country - a bunch of independent-ish entities ruled by princes that were often in alliance or war with each other, and differed somewhat from each other culturally/language-wise/etc. but had plenty of common ground.
- known 5y ago
  India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator --Churchill (b. 1874)