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Ironic that the first country to ditch ICE cars is also a country whose economy is heavily dependent on fossil fuel extraction. If everyone else switches to EV

Ironic that the first country to ditch ICE cars is also a country whose economy is heavily dependent on fossil fuel extraction. If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs?

eptcyka 2y ago
They have the best managed sovereing wealth fund - it exists only to hedge against their oil reserves.
- runsWphotons 2y ago
  What do they invest in?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    The future wellbeing of their populace?
    - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
      ...Oh, the humanity!
  - petecorreia 2y ago
    Essentially everything. On average they own 1.5 percent of all listed companies.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      Imagine if Americans had a national fund like that. USA has 60x the population of Norway. So the American equivalent would be rich enough to own… 90% of all listed companies in the world! That’s just a provocative thought experiment. But it highlights the stark difference between how nations allocate their wealth. Some have centibillionaire oligarchs and airplane carriers and space programs, others have well-managed sovereign wealth funds and universal healthcare.
      - janderson215 2y ago
        Some nations attract the most impactful innovators capable of making humanity multi planetary, some attract people who dream of how great a world it would if the American Public owned 90% of all listed companies in the world implying that somehow that would have a good long term outcome. Have you met people? Have you worked for the US govt or large enterprise? My gut tells me this would be a huge misallocation of funds and destructive to business if it were to be replicated in the US.
        ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        The real impactful innovators seem to be the ones working on making humanity a zero-planetary species.
        janderson215 2y ago
        Then they should change their goals to support humanity. Perhaps they could do some civic service. Maybe something like a Department of Government Efficiency.
        pavlov 2y ago
        Like I said, it's not a serious proposal, just a thought experiment. Indeed America now has "innovators capable of making humanity multi-planetary" (whom some would call egoistic oligarchs) + mostly shit government (and politicians who want to keep it that way). Could it have taken a different path in the past to instead have well-managed national wealth and less dick-shaped chrome rockets? Would that still be possible?
        janderson215 2y ago
        Starship will likely be black because of the heat tiles.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      More like 1.0%, right? This page says thay have about 1.1 Trillion dollars in Equities (after converting from NOK): https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/#/ https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/#/ Which is about 1% of the total global market cap of about 109 Trillion or so. The other investments aren't stocks.
  - Phil_Latio 2y ago
    You can see here: https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/ https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/
cmenge 2y ago
Well, they can afford it... I wonder how long it will take though for oil demand to go down significantly. Most countries don't have access to as much cheap and clean electricity, so it makes less sense both economically and ecologically for them.
redleader55 2y ago
You're getting downvoted and I don't know why. Norway was only doing fishing before they discovered oil in the North Sea, so all their wealth is based on oil. They still drill and export a significant amount of oil. Yes, the energy they use is green, but they export a lot of CO2. I'm not sure if you send your CO2 to some other place you get to call yourself "green", though.
- djxfade 2y ago
  We do pay carbon tax for all our exports. I know that doesn't defend it. But at least we pay our fair share. Even tough I can definetly see why it looks bad from a moral standpoint.
  - slaw 2y ago
    Who do you pay carbon tax to?
- audunw 2y ago
  > Norway was only doing fishing before they discovered oil in the North Sea, so all their wealth is based on oil. That's false, though a common myth. Norway was already a fairly wealthy country before the discovery of oil. Norway was always fairly strong in trade, and after it got hydro-power there were already industry giants like Norsk Hydro, and there was plenty of natural resources other than oil. Norway is surprisingly diversified for an oil nation. Just look at a breakdown of exports of Norway vs other countries where oil/gas dominate. Qatar: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qatar_Product_Exports_%282019%29.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qatar_Product_Export... Norway: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Product_Exports_%282019%29.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Product_Expor... While oil/gas is a huge share of exports, since there's hundreds of various industries that's already well-established, it's not gonna be too hard for those industries to absorb the capital and labor which is freed up when the oil/gas industry winds down. My experience with an industry outside of oil and gas in Norway, is that the industry has a growth which has been severely hampered by lack of capital and lack of labor. We could easily double in size over the span of a decade, if the capital and labor pool doubled.
- 2y ago
jabl 2y ago
Perhaps they're betting that they will run their oil resources dry before world oil demand crashes? In such a scenario it might make sense to use the oil for export income instead of using it themselves?
paganel 2y ago
It's not ironic, they can only do that based on the lots and lots of money they got out of fuel extraction.
audunw 2y ago
> If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs? This question doesn't even make sense. EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership. There are clear signs that we will soon see EVs that are outright cheaper to buy than ICE, and that replacing a battery will be cheaper than replacing an ICE engine. This whole EV transition isn't something that's costing Norway money. It's an investment which is already paying huge dividends. Norway is now building the worlds largest undersea tunnel, and they found that due to the high share of EVs in Norway, they could save 30 million dollars on the project due to decreased requirement for active ventilation. There are lots of examples like this. The number of car fires in Norway is going down, as EVs are ~10-20 times less likely to catch fire. While each EV fire takes a bit more work to put out, it's not 10-20 more work than an ICE. Norway can already measure significant decreases in air pollution. What impact do you think that has on the public health insurance expenses? You should also know that Norway's economy is surprisingly diversified for an oil nation. Norway was fairly wealthy before oil, and will still be wealthy after oil. There are still huge natural resources (hydropower, fishing, etc), a fair amount of industry and manufacturing (Hydro, Yara, ..), a decent tech sector. And after all, a lot of the profits from the fossil fuel extraction has been put into one of the worlds largest sovereign wealth funds, which could be used to help bootstrap more industry in the transition away from oil.
- virtualmic 2y ago
  > This question doesn't even make sense I think the question makes total sense, as does your reply. :-)
- demosito666 2y ago
  Although you're replying to a weird question indeed, your comment makes a lot of claims that doesn't correlate with my observations. Do you have some stats to support this? > EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership Are you talking about Norway or in general? Because overall I highly doubt that if we're talking about US/EU markets. In Norway EVs are heavily subsidized and ICEs are on the contrary taxed, so this might be true there. But in Europe ICE cars of comparable class are probably cheaper when looking at TCO, especially given abysmal depreciation of EV batteries. From quick googling it seems that EVs are _sometimes_ cheaper when one factors in tax cuts and/or subsidies and only on the horizon of ~4 years +- one year. Given the average lifetime of a car of ~10 years (now closer to 12), EV will be much, much more expensive than ICE when averaged across population. EVs are cheaper than ICE cars in China or if they are imported from China without tariffs. Do we really want to go that way? > save 30 million dollars on the project due to decreased requirement for active ventilation > The number of car fires in Norway is going down, as EVs are ~10-20 times less likely to catch fire These sound like a rounding error when estimating net effects of EV vs ICE. > Norway can already measure significant decreases in air pollution. What impact do you think that has on the public health insurance expenses? Norway always had exceptionally clean air. I think that this impact is not measurable.
rtpg 2y ago
Perhaps by spending the money they have on things to make their society more future-proof, they will be able to prepare for this future. Pollution is not fungible so there could be an argument against digging up more fossil fuels for this preparation, but if you are cynical and think purely in economic terms there is no latent hypocrisy here. If we get to a world where fossil fuels are worthless, then society as a whole will likely be in a world unrecognizable from our own, and problems would likely be thought of in a different way.
lukan 2y ago
"If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs?" That problem seems sadly so far away in the future, that Norway likely would not need to worry about it, even if they wouldn't have meaningful industry otherwise already.
numpad0 2y ago
Fuel for other use cases like ships, aircraft, power plants, petrochemical products, and eventually frozen sterilized salmon exports far far down the road?
lm28469 2y ago
Yeah it gets a bit funny when you dig in and read stuff like this: > Annual emissions from the combustion of exported Norwegian oil and gas are approximately 500 million tons of CO2, which is at least ten times higher than Norway’s annual domestic emissions https://www.nhri.no/en/report/canary-in-the-coal-mine/5-norways-ghg-emissions-and-climate-policies https://www.nhri.no/en/report/canary-in-the-coal-mine/5-norw... They're much smarter than other countries with similar populations and exporting as much oil though (Kuwait, UAE), but clearly it's a cheat code in Europe
the_third_wave 2y ago
Crude oil won't disappear off the market if and when people start driving around using other energy sources. The demand will go down a bit which will lead to fewer new exploration efforts but crude oil and natural gas will still be used as an energy source for shipping, transport, aerospace and some power generation as well as in industry. The latter will probably be the last to go, if ever. The market for crude oil will shrink but it will be a very long time (if ever) before it closes up entirely.

eptcyka 2y ago

They have the best managed sovereing wealth fund - it exists only to hedge against their oil reserves.

runsWphotons 2y ago
What do they invest in?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  The future wellbeing of their populace?
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    ...Oh, the humanity!
- petecorreia 2y ago
  Essentially everything. On average they own 1.5 percent of all listed companies.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Imagine if Americans had a national fund like that. USA has 60x the population of Norway. So the American equivalent would be rich enough to own… 90% of all listed companies in the world! That’s just a provocative thought experiment. But it highlights the stark difference between how nations allocate their wealth. Some have centibillionaire oligarchs and airplane carriers and space programs, others have well-managed sovereign wealth funds and universal healthcare.
    - janderson215 2y ago
      Some nations attract the most impactful innovators capable of making humanity multi planetary, some attract people who dream of how great a world it would if the American Public owned 90% of all listed companies in the world implying that somehow that would have a good long term outcome. Have you met people? Have you worked for the US govt or large enterprise? My gut tells me this would be a huge misallocation of funds and destructive to business if it were to be replicated in the US.
      - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        The real impactful innovators seem to be the ones working on making humanity a zero-planetary species.
        janderson215 2y ago
        Then they should change their goals to support humanity. Perhaps they could do some civic service. Maybe something like a Department of Government Efficiency.
      - pavlov 2y ago
        Like I said, it's not a serious proposal, just a thought experiment. Indeed America now has "innovators capable of making humanity multi-planetary" (whom some would call egoistic oligarchs) + mostly shit government (and politicians who want to keep it that way). Could it have taken a different path in the past to instead have well-managed national wealth and less dick-shaped chrome rockets? Would that still be possible?
        janderson215 2y ago
        Starship will likely be black because of the heat tiles.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    More like 1.0%, right? This page says thay have about 1.1 Trillion dollars in Equities (after converting from NOK): https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/#/ https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/#/ Which is about 1% of the total global market cap of about 109 Trillion or so. The other investments aren't stocks.
- Phil_Latio 2y ago
  You can see here: https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/ https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/

cmenge 2y ago

Well, they can afford it... I wonder how long it will take though for oil demand to go down significantly. Most countries don't have access to as much cheap and clean electricity, so it makes less sense both economically and ecologically for them.

redleader55 2y ago

You're getting downvoted and I don't know why. Norway was only doing fishing before they discovered oil in the North Sea, so all their wealth is based on oil. They still drill and export a significant amount of oil. Yes, the energy they use is green, but they export a lot of CO2. I'm not sure if you send your CO2 to some other place you get to call yourself "green", though.

djxfade 2y ago
We do pay carbon tax for all our exports. I know that doesn't defend it. But at least we pay our fair share. Even tough I can definetly see why it looks bad from a moral standpoint.
- slaw 2y ago
  Who do you pay carbon tax to?
audunw 2y ago
> Norway was only doing fishing before they discovered oil in the North Sea, so all their wealth is based on oil. That's false, though a common myth. Norway was already a fairly wealthy country before the discovery of oil. Norway was always fairly strong in trade, and after it got hydro-power there were already industry giants like Norsk Hydro, and there was plenty of natural resources other than oil. Norway is surprisingly diversified for an oil nation. Just look at a breakdown of exports of Norway vs other countries where oil/gas dominate. Qatar: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qatar_Product_Exports_%282019%29.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qatar_Product_Export... Norway: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Product_Exports_%282019%29.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Product_Expor... While oil/gas is a huge share of exports, since there's hundreds of various industries that's already well-established, it's not gonna be too hard for those industries to absorb the capital and labor which is freed up when the oil/gas industry winds down. My experience with an industry outside of oil and gas in Norway, is that the industry has a growth which has been severely hampered by lack of capital and lack of labor. We could easily double in size over the span of a decade, if the capital and labor pool doubled.
2y ago

jabl 2y ago

Perhaps they're betting that they will run their oil resources dry before world oil demand crashes? In such a scenario it might make sense to use the oil for export income instead of using it themselves?

paganel 2y ago

It's not ironic, they can only do that based on the lots and lots of money they got out of fuel extraction.

audunw 2y ago

> If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs? This question doesn't even make sense. EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership. There are clear signs that we will soon see EVs that are outright cheaper to buy than ICE, and that replacing a battery will be cheaper than replacing an ICE engine. This whole EV transition isn't something that's costing Norway money. It's an investment which is already paying huge dividends. Norway is now building the worlds largest undersea tunnel, and they found that due to the high share of EVs in Norway, they could save 30 million dollars on the project due to decreased requirement for active ventilation. There are lots of examples like this. The number of car fires in Norway is going down, as EVs are ~10-20 times less likely to catch fire. While each EV fire takes a bit more work to put out, it's not 10-20 more work than an ICE. Norway can already measure significant decreases in air pollution. What impact do you think that has on the public health insurance expenses? You should also know that Norway's economy is surprisingly diversified for an oil nation. Norway was fairly wealthy before oil, and will still be wealthy after oil. There are still huge natural resources (hydropower, fishing, etc), a fair amount of industry and manufacturing (Hydro, Yara, ..), a decent tech sector. And after all, a lot of the profits from the fossil fuel extraction has been put into one of the worlds largest sovereign wealth funds, which could be used to help bootstrap more industry in the transition away from oil.

virtualmic 2y ago
> This question doesn't even make sense I think the question makes total sense, as does your reply. :-)
demosito666 2y ago
Although you're replying to a weird question indeed, your comment makes a lot of claims that doesn't correlate with my observations. Do you have some stats to support this? > EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership Are you talking about Norway or in general? Because overall I highly doubt that if we're talking about US/EU markets. In Norway EVs are heavily subsidized and ICEs are on the contrary taxed, so this might be true there. But in Europe ICE cars of comparable class are probably cheaper when looking at TCO, especially given abysmal depreciation of EV batteries. From quick googling it seems that EVs are _sometimes_ cheaper when one factors in tax cuts and/or subsidies and only on the horizon of ~4 years +- one year. Given the average lifetime of a car of ~10 years (now closer to 12), EV will be much, much more expensive than ICE when averaged across population. EVs are cheaper than ICE cars in China or if they are imported from China without tariffs. Do we really want to go that way? > save 30 million dollars on the project due to decreased requirement for active ventilation > The number of car fires in Norway is going down, as EVs are ~10-20 times less likely to catch fire These sound like a rounding error when estimating net effects of EV vs ICE. > Norway can already measure significant decreases in air pollution. What impact do you think that has on the public health insurance expenses? Norway always had exceptionally clean air. I think that this impact is not measurable.

rtpg 2y ago

Perhaps by spending the money they have on things to make their society more future-proof, they will be able to prepare for this future. Pollution is not fungible so there could be an argument against digging up more fossil fuels for this preparation, but if you are cynical and think purely in economic terms there is no latent hypocrisy here. If we get to a world where fossil fuels are worthless, then society as a whole will likely be in a world unrecognizable from our own, and problems would likely be thought of in a different way.

lukan 2y ago

"If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs?" That problem seems sadly so far away in the future, that Norway likely would not need to worry about it, even if they wouldn't have meaningful industry otherwise already.

numpad0 2y ago

Fuel for other use cases like ships, aircraft, power plants, petrochemical products, and eventually frozen sterilized salmon exports far far down the road?

lm28469 2y ago

Yeah it gets a bit funny when you dig in and read stuff like this: > Annual emissions from the combustion of exported Norwegian oil and gas are approximately 500 million tons of CO2, which is at least ten times higher than Norway’s annual domestic emissions https://www.nhri.no/en/report/canary-in-the-coal-mine/5-norways-ghg-emissions-and-climate-policies https://www.nhri.no/en/report/canary-in-the-coal-mine/5-norw... They're much smarter than other countries with similar populations and exporting as much oil though (Kuwait, UAE), but clearly it's a cheat code in Europe

the_third_wave 2y ago

Crude oil won't disappear off the market if and when people start driving around using other energy sources. The demand will go down a bit which will lead to fewer new exploration efforts but crude oil and natural gas will still be used as an energy source for shipping, transport, aerospace and some power generation as well as in industry. The latter will probably be the last to go, if ever. The market for crude oil will shrink but it will be a very long time (if ever) before it closes up entirely.