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Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

greenpeace.org

101–110 of 191 posts

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#101

Are there now grounds to start shutting down existing oil fields? Something like 20% of the government budget comes from oil revenue, and the entire pension system (to my understanding) comes from oil funds.

I can’t speak intelligently about the relationship between the pension fund and the wealth fund (it is complicated), but I think you overestimate the share of upcoming revenue from oil over the on-going benefit from operating a fund that is betting on sustainable solutions. Someone smarter than me should correct the record here.

However, the key information here is neither side of that contradiction, but that Norway has found a very large deposit of Phosphorous. Until now, Marocco has the largest reserves (by so much it’s actually daunting, confusing really, how they didn’t end up like the Saudi Arabia of bird poop, which is essential for growing food, so a tad more essential than burning donuts).

Norway seem keen to leverage that the way they leveraged fossil fuels, so I’d expect that fund to grow bigger, faster, and without the discomfort of selling something that could, and most likely will, end up drowning Norwegian towns.

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#102

Putin approves. Emissions will stay the same, but you'll by the oil from Russia.

Correct. Demand is all that matters. This BS is just supply side economics for liberals.

Decreasing the supply increases the price, so demand will decrease. Although it's hard to apply classical economics to the oil market when it's so far from a free market (OPEC etc.)

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#103

I would strongly support focusing on getting rid of wood / coal burning first instead of going for much more efficient gas. An import tax on coal burning countries (especially China) would push the incentives in the right direction instead of outsourcing the climate externalities to them.

You're in a thread about climate change. How is burning wood contributing to climate change? It's a renewable energy source on the scale of ~20 years, in contrast to digging up million year old fossil fuels. Many people around the world use local fallen trees on their property as their energy source, rather than decompose into the same carbon cycle. Would you rather them import fossil fuel natural gas right now? Areas have to do controlled burns of wood anyway to manage forest fires. You only want to prevent the cases where masses of forest is razed with no plan to regrow.

I feel like this is a case where urbanites with no idea how rural life works attempt to legislate their naivety onto others for the worse, like the rural firefighter responsibly managing their property and the forests of their state.

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't if you aren't a scientist in that field. As you're not qualified to do otherwise. As a physicist in quantum sensing. I follow the science (opinion) of climate scientists as they're the experts of that field. And that opinion is constantly evolving, but I follow that. Anything else is just being an armchair scientist.

That's called gatekeeping. Wonderful opinions can come for anyone. A scientist is someone who found someone to pay them. Nothing more, nothing less. Ignoring ideas unless they came from a brand is the opposite of science. Then you drop your brand (physicist) and expect others to judge your opinion as more important. It didn't work. As a senior physicist in quantum sensing I'm invalidating your brand.

Wonderful opinions can come from anyone.

Are these scientifically founded opinions. Not necessarily, hence why "following the science" is valid if you are following experts in their field.

If you're a software consultant, would you take on the opinions from a marketing client on the best algorithm to implement for their solution? Probably not.

If someone put in the effort and time to throughly research the topic and draw an opinion from that. Regardless of their title or their funding, then why would you discount it?

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#105
post #71
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles my mind that we allow GDP to not account for externalities to the environment. Like burning a wick, we cheer the flame with no consideration for the dynamite at the other end.

If we're going to include negative externalities then someone has to figure out all the positive ones too. The economic upside of cheap energy isn't being accounted for in the price either, because low prices tautologically can't capture high value per unit and flows on to people further down the value chain. The challenge of doing so is insurmountable, that way is the madness of centralised planning.

> economic upside of cheap energy isn't being accounted for

It is: we anticipate companies to operate “indefinitely,” which turns to a high market value. Banks sell that stock, pension funds store it, and their activity is accounted for.

What we don’t consider (in the GDP, company valuations, bank transactions, or any metric) is how the millions of people who will survive the first mass wet-bulb death event will react.

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being against Carbon Capture and geo-engineering is just following the science. Carbon capture has constantly been shown to just not work at any scale. and geo-engineering causes so many extra problems and will absolutely lead to termination shock at some point.

Carbon capture is being successfully used all around the world. It’s in its infancy, but so were solar panels decades ago, and we didn’t give up on them. We don’t have enough data on geoengineering to judge yet, there is no real science to follow. Also I don’t understand this attitude of rejecting potential solutions outright. Science doesn’t “prove” things, we can’t ‘follow’ it due to the problem of induction. So we…

> Carbon capture is being successfully used all around the world.

[Citation needed]

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#107

I would strongly support focusing on getting rid of wood / coal burning first instead of going for much more efficient gas. An import tax on coal burning countries (especially China) would push the incentives in the right direction instead of outsourcing the climate externalities to them.

"China is the world's leader in electricity production from renewable energy sources, with over triple the generation of the second-ranking country, the United States. China's renewable energy sector is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China There are many things you can say about china, but they do take climate change serious (maybe…

How can you say that when they are simultaneously radically increasing coal power generation, as highlighted in the article? It appears to me they have an "all of the above" strategy driven by their desire for prosperity.

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#108
post #94

Title is a little misleading (for me at least), this is not one of the many cases where a group of young people sued their government for a broad violation of their rights. This is a more narrow case where the plaintiffs said the government is supposed to consider emissions impact when approving oil and gas projects, and did not. There aren't really any youth directly involved. The court didn't say Norway can't drill…

> new oil field I was surprised because I assumed Norway wouldn’t open new oil fields. I’d say it’s “interesting,” but what I actually mean isn’t publishable.

Hot take, but I feel like Norway gets greenwashed a lot as better than everywhere else, when they are basically a northern Saudi Arabia in terms of exports with over 70% of their exports being oil and gas.

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#109

Is this really a win? You need a strong economy to shift to a Green future. Norway was a small country before oil and gas, now they've made the best use of it out of any country in the world. Shouldnt they keep their foot on the pedal a little longer? Making new battery technology isn't cheap.

We already have a massive sovereign wealth fund built from investments seeded by oil income.

Last year, large phosphate deposits were found in Norway, effectively doubling the known world supply. Given a similar taxation model, we could keep growing the wealth fund even as we phase out the oil industry over time.

Though oil industry phase-out is not something with a political consensus behind it right now anyway. Labour and the conservatives tend to reach across the aisle on that topic.

Re: Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> geo-engineering causes so many extra problems and will absolutely lead to termination shock at some point. This doesn't sound like a terribly scientific assessment. Climate change is either an environmental disaster and geoengineering would be a huge risk - or climate change is an existential threat to humanity in which case we have nothing to lose. Which is it?

Climate change can be an existential threat to humanity and Geo-Engineering can make it worse at the same time.

How can something be worse than an existential threat?

If you knew you were going to die next week, what's to stop you from picking up smoking right now?

The truth is we don't need geoengineering because the truth is that it's not an existential threat for humanity, it's just the future is going to suck really hard for a lot of people if we don't get off our our collective asses.

Going around moaning "we're all doomed and there's no use trying" is exactly the opposite of what we need right now.

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