161–170 of 172 posts
> what type of arguments do they plan to use to convince Mexico, Gabon, Nigeria, Russia to reduce production of gas and oil? They cannot convince anyone to reduce production. And you don't fight climate change reducing production. What needs to be reduced is consumption, and Norway doing just like that.
We got click-baited by an interesting headline, friends. Instead of trying to tackle all the problems with this piece, I will just address the most glaring ones: 1) Norway is a nation, not a company. It does not have maximization of shareholder value as it's primary driving force. Yes, there is the sovereign wealth fund. But, that is about managing the assets that have been collected. It has nothing to say about wher…
> 2) Speaking of Norway being a country -- it has 5 million people and dozens of political parties. Most of those people and political parties do not actually support further north sea exploration [2]. Your citation is about political parties, and the majority of political parties would not translate to the majority of actual voters. > Much like in the US and most other countries I suppose, the actions of the governm…
The views of the parties express anywhere from complete support to complete opposition to further drilling, with some compromise positions as well. If you compare that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_N... how much each party has representation in parliament at the moment, you will see that a large swath of the population is opposed to it.
However, because of the way that the parliament system works here, this issue is not correctly represented in current policy.
There are so many logical flaws (and bad English) here that it’s hard to know where to begin. The analogy with opium is perhaps the only sensible one. Norway, however, is the world’s cleanest and most ethical producer of opium (oil). Given relatively fixed demand, who do you want as a producer?
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> 2) Speaking of Norway being a country -- it has 5 million people and dozens of political parties. Most of those people and political parties do not actually support further north sea exploration [2]. Your citation is about political parties, and the majority of political parties would not translate to the majority of actual voters. > Much like in the US and most other countries I suppose, the actions of the governm…
The source is a summary of the position of the 9 major political parties on further oil exploration. There are dozens of parties here, yes, but the 9 listed there account for about 92% of the population. They are all the ones that have representation in parliament at the moment. The views of the parties express anywhere from complete support to complete opposition to further drilling, with some compromise positions a…
The only way to show actual public support/opposition for the issue is to do just that, everything else is not really a valid substitute. You may be right about the actual public support, but without actually showing the data for it, it remains speculation.
> However, because of the way that the parliament system works here, this issue is not correctly represented in current policy.
How would you change the system to avoid such a misrepresentation of public opinion in actual policy/legislation? If there is such massive public support, what would be the fallout from just not approving north sea exploration?
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Is per-capita data on oil income available for both Nigeria and Norway?
In Norway for 2021, the oil sector accounts for about 14% of the state's total income (154 billion/milliard NOK) [1]. That's about $3500 per capita For Nigeria 2018, it seems to be about $160 (USD 32.6 billion [2], 201 million people) [1] https://www.norskpetroleum.no/okonomi/statens-inntekter/ [2] https://eiti.org/es/implementing_country/32
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I'm not sure it's that easy: if you just reduce consumption but don't touch production, someone with less scruples than you can buy (slightly) cheaper oil and use it. I guess the big deal is to come up with alternatives that can compete on cost with oil?
It will definitely have to match or exceed performance based on cost. Right now, I think there is no truly viable alternative for electricity generation in most low income countries. Not enough money for renewables + battery storage. Not enough money for nuclear or hydro. We can only hope that more advanced countries can create the battery technology we desperately need for the whole world.
Do you mean those alternatives are more expensive per Joule, or do you mean that the alternative have higher up front capital costs?
For the later, the global financial system can help: capital from rich country is more than happy to invest in poor countries as long as the risk-adjusted returns are there.
(Thus driving down the risks is important!)
There's also still the replacement of kerosene lamps by eg electric lights that going on.
Norway is perhaps the best run petro state in the history of the world. To avoid Dutch Disease, whereby an economy becomes dependent on a particular commodity, Norway long ago decided to invest its considerable oil wealth in assets located outside of Norway, building a massive sovereign wealth fund that will provide income to Norwegians long after the oil is all gone. Compare this situation to Nigeria, whose similarl…
> Compare this situation to Nigeria Not really comparable. Nigeria is in this case more like China during the opium wars - the western companies are taking away their oil from them with bribery, political and economic threats. Just read a bit about how Shell operates there, they have more power than the government.
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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 choo…
ⓐ 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…
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?
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 ag…
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 choo…
b) Just be Norway.
c) Just be Norway, but wage war on governments that refuse to buy oil.