Norway's $860B Fund Drops 52 Companies Linked to Coal | Hacker News Reader

Norway's $860B Fund Drops 52 Companies Linked to Coal

bloomberg.com

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The comments here are very negative so I'll share a little background on this Norway fund in case you haven't heard of it. Norway started making money from oil reserves and knew they wouldn't last forever. So they invested all the profits in a fund that bought stocks. Now the value of the fund, if liquidated, would net over $1 million per Norwegian citizen.

It's interesting to compare with the UK, which had less North Sea oil, but still a significant amount.

When North Sea oil was first starting, Tony Benn, Energy Minister at the time, wanted to start a fund exactly as the Norwegians later did. We didn't, and unlike the Norwegians we didn't control production.

As oil revenues peaked through the 80s and 90s, Thatcher used them to pay for pre-election tax cuts, welfare and generally squandered the inheritance. Britoil was one of the early Thatcher privatisations. With the benefit of 40 years hindsight many feel the wrong choice was made. Unsurprisingly perhaps, especially Scots. Though who we would have trusted to invest such a fund is another matter.

To be fair to Thatcher - and as a Labour member, it's not often I feel compelled to be so - it was Callaghan's cabinet that made the call to use it as tax cut fodder first, but that does not mean Thatcherism is blameless.

Good article on this topic (and Thatcher messing it up further) here: http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2014/03/thatcherism-a-complet...

True. Essentially it was so the moment the fund idea was not successful. Benn was a politician I respected enormously. I didn't often agree with him, although on this I did, but he had rare integrity for a politician.

"Even though the U.K. extracted nine per cent more oil and gas by 2011, they collected $156 billion less in petroleum taxes and royalties than the Norwegians"

Interesting link, closing sentence says it all really.

The major difference between how Norwegian citizens have benefited from oil extraction and how British citizens have benefited from it is still less a matter of policy differences and more a matter of oil extraction per capita though

$156 billion sounds huge until you divide it by a population averaging 60 million and make it accrue over 40 years.

Such is national scale finance. We can cut it up to sound worthless, or make it sound like a fair chunk of change. Would have bought a lot of infrastructure or regional development.

Perhaps most relevant to today, it's 1/8 the national debt.

That's quite a lot to just leave on the table. Per capita? That's where the Scots, especially SNP, angle starts. They do have a similar population to Norway after all...

The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of other people's money to buy votes with.

And the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people's money.

That's funny because in my country the right won the elections and they shifted money from welfare programs to tax exemptions for big co and stimulus packages for companies that are still firing people anyway. All that with tax payer's money.

But I admit that slogan is a communication gem of the highest caliber.

And who owns the money from the north sea oil?

Ironic, because socialist powerhouses in Europe have lower debt:gdp ratios than the United States which avoids crafting relevant socialist programs like the plague

Woah, I only moved to the UK in 2001, but it's pretty clear to me that Norway != UK in many fundamental ways

  1) WW1
  2) WW2
  3) Crippling Pension schemes like final salary ( don't know to much about Norways tho )
  4) Crippling strikes in '70s

The U.K. Only finished paying back the USA for WW2 a few years ago. Many died and a lot of infrastructure needed rebuilding. Norway had much less of that trouble.

Your grasp of European history and economics - specifically that of the UK and Norway - is absurdly poor, to the point you should not be trying to make any serious conclusion about either.

There is a reason why Jeremy Corbyn is popular right now (despite what the papers tell you, in polling, he is).

My grasp of European matters is extremely good, though thank you for the insult. You offer no rebuttal beyond ad hominem.

By saying I arrived in the UK in 2001 I wanted to distance myself from the partisan nature of UK debate. That of Labour versus Tory.

You then underscore this partisan straightjacket by mentioning Jeremy Corbyn.

That is demonstrably nonsense, Jeremy Corbyn has among the lowest ratings ever seen for the leader of a large political party, because he is a far-left political extremist.

Read the polls.

Seriously, go read them. Labour is ahead.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk

https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/722110121212526592

It's not as lopsided as you make it appear.

Norway was poor before they found oil. They basically had a fishing industry and that's it.

Britain was an empire that never saw the sun set.

> They basically had a fishing industry and that's it.

While it certainly wasn't a rich nation in the first half of the 1900s, Norway in 1938 was actually the world's 4th biggest shipping nation, and owned 7% of the world's tonnage[1]. The forest industry was also significant (pretty interesting historical overview at [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortraship#Norwegian_merchant_...

[2] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-norway/

This is something people fail to realize. Scandinavia today is associated with wealth and strong social welfare programs.

Norway before the discovery of North Sea oil was one of the poorest nations in Europe.

> Norway before the discovery of North Sea oil was one of the poorest nations in Europe.

Not really. In 1969, the GDP per capita of Norway was $9,899. Compare that to Sweden ($12,540), UK ($10,552), Ireland ($6,089), Germany ($10,440), Finland ($8,878), Italy ($9,566), Portugal ($4,987) etc.

http://www.worldeconomics.com/Data/MadisonHistoricalGDP/Madi...

You're off by a few years. Norway in the first half of the 20th century was certainly one of the poorest in Europe. This held true through the (global) great depression, which was coupled with and compounded by their own home-grown economic crisis.

However, the Norwegian economy had made substantial progress in the post war years - prior to and independent of oil.

Half-Norwegian / Half-American here. Comparing the stories I was told from the grandparents and great-grandparents on each side, this checks out at least anecdotally. Norway in 1900--1940 sounded like absolute dirt poverty compared to the USA in 1900-1940.

Also my (Norwegian) mother born just after WWII grew up without electricity and farmed with hand tools

Ah, my bad. Thanks for the information, I got to learn something today :)

> Crippling Pension schemes like final salary

Interesting. Final Salary schemes generally only became crippling as funding regulations were progressively lightened and removed during the Thatcher years. In allowing less investment, loaning back from the fund, funding holidays etc, many pension funds were hugely underfunded for a decade or two. Tied in nicely with wanting to promote personal pensions. Little surprise we then got the pension crises and failures, most notably Maxwell. More recently we had the pension miselling scandals and compensation claims stemming from this.

> Crippling strikes in '70s

Hah! Doing my A level homework by candle light. The unions absolutely had too much power in the 70s. Now they probably have too little, well nearer none. I remember the 3 day week and power cuts because the electric co was on strike. Every week someone else would be going on strike. I seem to remember even grave diggers went on strike in 78/79. A pony could probably have got elected wearing a Tory badge in 79 :)

With hindsight, the Thatcher "solution" was far too dogmatic, but much of the change was needed and backing away from the excessive taxation (80% top rate in 79). What's less well remembered is when Howe cut top rate in 79 from 80 to 60% he more than made up for it by doubling VAT and collection rates were far improved at 60% too, and again when they dropped to 50%. So tax take went up. Unemployment went from 1m to 3.5m (infamously they got elected in 79 with help from an election poster "Labour isn't working" [1]), and gave her the escalating welfare bill on which to squander oil revenues. Scotland and the industrial centres were hit especially hard under Thatcher which is why the Tories are unelectable there, even today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Isn't_Working

>Final Salary schemes generally only became crippling as funding regulations were progressively lightened and removed during the Thatcher years.

This isn't even slightly true - you can look at a company such as BA which is now a pension deficit with an airline attached - the liabilities drastically outsize the company turnover. That means Interest Rate changes and Mortality expectation changes cause changes in funding requirements which are completely un-sustainable.

The changes to pension funds under Thatcher (and let's not forget Gordon Brown, too, wanted a piece of that money and was willing to screw people over to get it) definitely had a negative impact - but final/average salary defined benefits pensions are by design unsustainable because they never considered the current economic environment as a possibility.

Back when interest rates were 10%+ and most people died before taking 10 years of pension, they seemed like a good idea.

Hmm you're probably right - I didn't consider sustained low interest rates. The decline started long before rates came down but I've no idea how 30+ years of differently funded schemes would look (ie without the funding changes). That's a lot of compound interest.

> let's not forget Gordon Brown

Oh he gets no free pass on pensions - he raided them for billions.

My personal pension has performed disastrously from 2 bad years it'll probably never recover properly from. There went my early retirement thoughts. My parent's generation retirement options look pretty good.

We're probably still understating the deficits by assuming interest rates will increase soon™ - and yet the deficits are somewhere in the region of 1.5 times GDP in the UK[1]. It's terrifying

I empathise with you on the personal pension - but that's the reality of risk/reward investments. I'd have thought a lot of the bad performance should have recovered based on current markets? Depending on your age the solution is usually to: -Contribute more -Risk on (aiming for higher rewards) -Work longer.

I think it's really really important to recognise that early retirement probably means finishing work ~65 years old if you want a comparable "lifetime in retirement" to earlier generations who retired at 55. One simply cannot expect to spend 25 years in full retirement after only working 25 years. I think as a society we've got to make some huge adjustments in expectations, because we're stuck in a mindset from 70 years ago that isn't really viable. Personally I expect to aim to retire "early" into a different role that is less stressful and in the countryside - but I don't intend to stop working until much later.

[1] I haven't seen updated numbers in a few years, maybe it's better now..

In addition to the other comments, regarding the debt repayments to the US: The only reason it took so long was that the interest rate was fixed at such a low rate that there was no compelling reason to pay it back early - most years the interest rate was below inflation. It'd have been trivial for the UK to pay back faster, but it'd have been silly to do so all the time the debt has basically gotten cheaper and cheaper by the year.

The debt was crushing.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/mar/14/past.educati...

1956: "Britain itself was only beginning to emerge from postwar austerity, its public finances crushed by an accumulation of war debt."

It may have been crushing early on psychologically. Debt to GDP reached around 200% in 1945. But despite that, the UK interest payments as a percentage of GDP were far lower in 1945 (at around 6%) than after WWI, when it reached a peak of around 9%. It also rapidly dropped.

By 1956 it was down to about 4%. When the last parts of the load was being paid back it was around 2%.

And note that this was total interest on the total British national debt, not just the wartime loans.

Consider that when the debt was taken out, it represented about 10x as much in 2016 dollars as what was paid back in absolute terms including interest. The total amount paid back in 2016 dollars would be higher, as some was obviously paid back all the way back in 1950, but on the other hand, by the time of the final repayments, inflation had reduced the overall value of the repayments drastically. Overall, I believe the UK profited immensely on the loan over time - certainly for most of the period of the loan, the UK would have been able to repay in full but didn't because it received more interest on its dollar reserves than it cost to service this loan.

There are still bonds around predating the Napoleonic wars for the same reason: The interest rates are so low that you can get a better return investing the money elsewhere than by cutting your interest payments by paying off the debts.

Norway was not affected by WW1 directly, but Hitler occupied Norway during WW2. When the Soviets came to the rescue, the Germans burned down everything as they withdrew from the northern parts.

The most populated areas were largely not affected though.

As for infrastructue, Norway was one of the poorest contries in Europe 100 years ago, with similarly poor infrastructure - so it was not a matter of rebuilding, rather a matter of building.

In this sense oil helped, and foreign oil investments were welcome in the late 60s, but at a 78% tax rate.

Over 1 million kr (not $) per citizen. Big difference.

The math seems to be a bit off

$860B / 5000000 people (2013, wikipedia) = $172000

"The fund, worth about $800bn (£483bn), owns 1% of the entire world's stocks, and is big enough to make every citizen a millionaire in the country's currency, the kroner."

$860B USD = 7T KR / 5M people = 1.4M KR each

I'm not sure why you responded to the parent, instead of the grandparent, which first asserted "$1 million" implying dollars.

Because the parent was the one I was clarifying for.

I suggest you use "," when writing long numbers -> 5,000,000

This way it's easier to read for the rest of us.

Comma is the decimal separator in many countries (including Norway). ISO and several other standards bodies recommend space for digit grouping: 5 000 000.

Only if 'the rest of us' is located in one of the blue areas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#/media/File:Decim...

His point isn't about commas over periods, it is that "5000000" without any delimiters is hard to read.

To be fair, considering China and India are included, I think that's more than half the world population. China, India and the US make up more than 40% of the world population alone, apparently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

(The US is the 3rd most populous country by the Wikipedia hivemind's reckoning. Who knew?)

Yes and i dont use Arabic numerals. Whats it in Roman?

Sorry about that, I'll keep it in mind for the future :)

Why not? This is both good long term for the environment and good long term for their investments' potential growth. As Coal gets less favored status more coal companies will feel pressure on their stocks. Sort term they may lose out on some growth markets like India and China, but even those markets will surely shift toward renewables in years to come leaving coal and companies tied to it depressed.

What exactly do you mean by "feel pressures" on their stock? Once a share has been sold the company has already received all the money it will ever receive from that share. Whether it goes up or down from that point is irrelevant to the company. For whoever bought that share it might be a problem if he wishes to sell it again. Most of the investors buy IPO shares for dividends, so as long as the company makes money and pays dividends they also don't care about the share price.

> as long as the company makes money and pays dividends they also don't care about the share price.

Oh, they care very much. For one thing, a tanking share price means the dividend will surely be cut. A rising share price means the dividend will likely increase.

Dividends are paid from company earnings (profits), not stock, and as such, stock price doesn't affect the ability of the firm to pay dividends. They could both have the same underlying cause though - which is, a deteriorating business condition that reduces earnings. Otherwise, e.g. if Coke's stock price falls by 50% in a recession, doesn't mean it will cut its dividend.

Stock prices come from the same forces that shape dividends. There's a reason that dividends from diverse companies all tend to cluster around the same percentage of the share price.

True but a weaker share price means it will be more expensive to access capital or bond markets or to get a loan. Coal is a very capital intensive industry so this is significant.

Bonuses are often paid in stock units or options, so there is that pressure.

It's likely not out of the goodness of their heart but rather coal's terrible performance. There is a bankruptcy filing every other week. This week alone the largest miner, Peabody, filed for bankruptcy.

It's because the parlament told them to. Divesting in coal is a political move stemming from environmental concerns. At least officially, I think some parties supported the move because Norway doesn't export that much coal, and this could potentially increase gass and oil revenue.

The European oil/gas companies all support a carbon tax for the same reason. Coal is such an appallingly bad fuel that a carbon tax would kill it (even faster) and gas would replace it in large part.

Wouldn't that information already be priced in to the market?

Absolutely, but it by no means marks the bottom. Have a look at the last 5 years of KOL (ETF because I can't recall the coal futures symbol).

There's no futures symbol because coal is inherently worth different values based on location. It's a solid, it doesn't spoil (sometimes it spontaneously combusts), you need a whole lot of it to do anything useful. These difficulties fragment the market. For example there are futures for: Australia coal, South Africa coal, Wyoming powder basin coal, Illinois basin coal, etc. It is transported by train or on a dry bulk ship.

Well, the same is roughly true of oil although it's a little harder to store and ship. There's at least two futures markets (Brent and WTI), various oil grades etc. People seem happier assigning a single "oil price" despite local variation.

    > but it by no means marks the bottom

If you know with any degree of certainty at all which way an asset will move, you stand to make a gigantic amount of money. Everybody you have ever heard telling you which way an asset is moving is guessing just as much as people who tell you it's going to move the other way.

It isn't as much the fact that the asset will move, as the direction and the timeline that matters, as well as the availability of investment vehicles. If I'd wanted to profit on the knowledge that coal will go down, I'd have to short the stock which isn't free, so it is important for me to know on what time frame it will go down (if I knew it would go up, but not on what time frame, it would work just fine). Another example, I know lithium (the commodity) is going to go up, but 90% of the lithium market is dominated by 3 companies, each of which get less than 20% of their revenue from lithium mining, meaning I have no way of profiting from my knowledge.

Top tip: if you're willing to forgo the timeframe, it's possible to become a super-genius stock picker. I GUARANTEE you that the US stock market will crash!*

* Sometime, one day, in the future

It's a good move, that nevertheless retains a healthy dose of irony given the fund was developed almost entirely on the back of petroleum.

I was going to say the exact same thing!

"Our environmental destruction is fine. But yours? That is just too much!"

This is more a press release than reportable news. The companies were sold last year.

Well, it's good that they sold last year, because Peabody Coal went bust last week.

Alternative Title: "Fund built from selling petroleum gets holier than thou with selling coal"

The fund's international speculative investment portfolio has seen positive YOY growth, and it was only recently that the NBIM has decided to go ahead with actively tackling social and environmental issues.

And Norway's petroleum engineering is top notch.

Frankly I think the moral superiority is justified -- they have an opportunity to make a positive contribution to the world and they didn't sabotage the planet or employ slave labor to get here.

What do you imagine was done with all of that oil that they sold? Do you think it wasn't put into combustion engines? Do you think that Norwegian oil that was sold somehow wasn't emitted in the form of C02 into the atmosphere?

If they hadn't sold it, there'd be more money and power flowing to other oil-producing countries, many of whom have had a considerably worse impact on the world than originating Barbie Girl.

Oh please. That was Denmark.

And now you've inserted the ditty into my brain, where it problably will stay all day. Shame!

While I fully support blaming Denmark, the singer is Norwegian.

Is that why you think they sold petroleum? Out of the goodness of their heart? Not that I disagree with Norway's decision. It's a nuanced topic.

Your response makes no sense at all. It is not even clear what you were attempting to say.

Higher oil prices discourages use. By participating in the market they are indirectly encouraging use. There is no way to wash your hands of selling oil.

The difference is that there's currently no large-scale acceptable replacement for oil, so ditching oil would be committing a global suicide (or genocide, if you will), while ditching coal in the presence of nuclear, wind, solar and hydro plants that can replace it much more seamlessly is merely a reasonable thing to do at this point.

In addition, this is apparently an investment fund and the coal stocks are tanking, what would you do with the money of the people who turned it over to you for safekeeping? Keep it there?

Should everyone stop trying to make improvements, lest they attract the attention of your self-defeating cynicism?

The fund … doesn’t?

They just seem to be following new regulations, regulations that, apparently, aren’t even uncontroversial.

The fund is not the Norwegian government, the Norwegian government is not the Norwegian parliament. This article doesn’t even say anything about what the fund thinks about this. It’s just matter of fact reporting on regulation changes and consequences. (All we know is that a majority in the parliament is in favor – and that’s why this law exists – and the minority government was “reluctant” concerning this law.)

The article doesn’t even explicitly say anything at all about motives.

Arguably, all of modern capitalism was built on the back of some very dirty and polluting technology. Would you say, then, that the capital of all the developed world is tainted?

Except, in Norway, their pension and economy are STILL getting built on O&G.

I think your claims are too extreme.

edit: adding quote from European Commission data

  "Norway is in the global top 5 exporters of crude oil.  The oil
  and gas sector constitutes around 22% of Norwegian GDP and 67% 
  of Norwegian exports." [1]

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...

At this point in time, it feels like a national addiction.

We know it will be over some days, we know it does all kinds of harm, but we seem incapable of stopping.

The nation is as we "speak" grinding to a slow halt thanks to the oil slump.

And during the peak people were all set about starting extraction in the middle of one of the nations biggest fishing areas.

"their pension and economy are STILL getting built on O&G"

I don't quite get the peculiar use of the word "still" in your sentence, seeing as the topic seems to be ditching coal and not ditching oil or gas.

Yes, the NOR pension is ditching* coal.

That said, you're not fairly representing the context of my comment. The parent comment made this exaggerated critique, saying that "all of modern capitalism" can be considered tainted based on PRIOR behavior (assuming the grandparent's comment were valid.)

This is not only a strawman, but absurd.

I'm pointing out that it isn't limited to prior behavior for what we're talking about. Here, we have a petro-state with 2/3 of its exports STILL in O&G (aka "dirty technology") taking a stance on coal because coal's not Environment Friendly™. This contrasts with countries that were built on "dirty tech/slavery/whatever" and are no longer utilizing similar means.

To clarify, nobody's saying NOR can't change course or exhibit environmental leadership. I'd argue NOR's investment implications and the $2.3B change in allocation aren't significant.

Not to mention significant amounts of slave labor, child labor, war profiteering, fraud, outright theft, etc.

In other words, by similar logic it could be called “holier-than-thou” for westerners to have any standards whatsoever about investment choices, because our wealth is built on all kinds of unsavory sources.

And you will see the likes of China pull that card whenever there is some kind of international talk about something that will affect their industries.

  "by similar logic..."

Please...do other countries currently have 22% of GDP tied to [slave labor, child labor, war profiteering, fraud, outright theft, etc.]?

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...

edit:

  In other words, by similar logic it could be called “holier-than-thou” 
  for westerners to have any standards whatsoever about investment choices,
  because our wealth is built on all kinds of unsavory sources.

I also find it ironic that "westerner" in your world doesn't seem to include Norwegians ;-).

I recall seeing a documentary about the start of Silicon Valley, where a lot of the early money came from Rockefeller and other "east coast" money. Does that mean that the current tech industry owes a debt to Standard Oil? Probably. Is it relevant? Probably not.

All economies were built on the back of dirty and polluting technology.

To clarify, you'd rather they doubled-down on an investment in coal?

I would rather they focus on making money for Norwegians and making the lives of people in other country better.

You'd like them to improve people's lives by continutuing to invest in coal? You think that forgoing a minuscule return (or actually probably increasing return) to dampen an industry that is demonstratably harming people in the present and probably harming people into the future is helping people?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%27m+all+rig...!

That's ridiculous. This is a laudable first step towards divesting themselves from carbon-producing industries!

You have to start somewhere, coal is as good as any place to start I think.

Or... once you are rich you can afford a high horse.

The list of dropped companies is here, if anyone cares: http://www.nbim.no/en/transparency/news-list/2016/first-coal...

"Investors other than Norway invest $860B in coal; money remains fungible and markets remain pretty efficient"

Well whoever acquired Norway's stake in the oil industry probably lost out since making that investment last year, so that fungible money now is gone.

Midbrow dismissal

I mean, yes, but I'll change my mind if I notice all the higher brows disagreeing.

GDP assigns no value to work that’s not done for a paycheck, and extracts no penalty for destruction of natural resources http://qz.com/663110/happiness-is-the-new-gdp/

Good move by Norway!! Can you read this? I cant tell if I am shadow banned? Please give me a vote in any direction

>I cant tell if I am shadow banned?

Yes, you are. Seems to have happened after this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291099

We banned your account early on because you appeared to create it to post trollish comments here. If that's wrong, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban people when there's reason to believe they will only post civil, substantive comments in the future.

coal is in the process of consolidation/deleveraging/bankruptcy and they would be making this decision anyways. congrats on extracting social justice points from your business decision.

Along with a heaping dose of hypocrisy. If the co2 from coal is bad, then the same is true for the coal from oil and natural gas.

Hey, I know this is silly because the fund isn't event taking these actions explicitly for environmental reasons, BUT if they were, your comment would be a great example of an Internet debate fallacy that I try and fight.

If an entity is doing something 'bad', reducing the scope or amount of that behavior is neither hypocritical nor pointless. It doesn't matter if it's a big company that pollutes, or an individual trying to reduce a bad habit. Movement in the right direction is an essential part of things getting better.

According to that standard then if you got rich selling illegal drugs so long as you then start doing "good" things with your illicit gains after that, nobody can criticize you? Sure, I guess...

Of course they can criticize you for selling illegal drugs in the same way you can criticize Norway for getting rich off oil. He's saying that praising that person for doing something like giving money to charity or anti-drug efforts isn't completely inconsistent.

I disagree that it can't be hypocritical. If Norway was doing this for environmental reasons I think it'd be quite hypocritical. That doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do though.

If these are good actions, then do more. What's the point of half measures?

Relevant read https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Well, for one, they make about 50% of full measures, give or take.

That's not how the chemistry works. Most of the energy's in the hydrogen bonds, and the ratio of carbon to hydrogen is much higher in coal. The same amount of energy produced by coal produces much more CO2 than oil or gas. That's not even touching on higher heavy metal contamination and fly ash.

However, methane is a greenhouse gas in its own right, and 100x worse [1] than CO₂. And some unknown amount, I guess 2% to 10%, of methane leaks into atmosphere during the mining and transport and use of natural gas. Depending on the exact amount of this leaking, natural gas might even be the worst offender, per unit energy produced.

[1] 100x worse on a 20 years time scale, 30x worse on a 100 years time scale.

Only, but only a little gas gets out. It's ok. Coal is the enemy mainly because you can see it. Natural Gas requires infrared camera to detect. No this isn't snark/cynicism: we regulate the opacity of a scrubbed coal plant's output.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Even if only 1% leaks, but because methane is a 100x more potent greenhouse gas, this 1% leak doubles the climate impact of natural gas.

here are some images for you to meditate on

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrtQUEgYjKs

http://media.mlive.com/saginawnews_impact/photo/12375884-lar...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECqpbqbT3UA

The bigger question about Norway's $860BB fund is the price of oil. Right now oil is trading at $39.75[1] a barrel. Now that the Doha deal fell through earlier today, it is highly likely that oil will further fall over the coming weeks. Norway, and other sovereign funds, are now liquidating assets to make up for the shortfall in revenue.[2] We're talking about $5.7T in assets across these oil derived sovereign funds. That's a lot of selling folks.

[1] http://www.investing.com/commodities/crude-oil-streaming-cha... [2] http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3533485/investo...

The withdrawal from coal is a year old decision[1] made my our parliament, which is as far as I see not based on plugging the holes in any way. We have a policy that states you can use up to, but not more than the expected surplus of the fund for the coming year. [2] So, I agree we're spending more than we used to do, but this is exactly the reason the fund was made in the first place. As long as politicians are curbed, and we stay within this rule, I'm not scared no matter how many billions are used from the fund.

EDIT: and the core of my comment should have been, that I'm not sure this could be seen in the same context as other national funds, as we're "too big to fail"^tm

[1] :http://e24.no/boers-og-finans/oljefondet-ut-av-kull/23459941

[2] :https://snl.no/Handlingsregelen

More scared about the number of people in the oil business competing for jobs as the number of redundancies increases. As a n expat Brit in Norway I'm already at a disadvantage when applying for work.

No problems with oil though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norwar_Exports_Tree_Map_(...

We will see this fund drain to zero over the next few years easily, Norway is a completely broken economy with high unemployment masked by "scholarships".

>No problems with oil though!

Electric cars are still not widespread yet and oil will always be used in planes, trucks or ships for long distance transport.

For that matter I'm pretty sure the growth of the petroleum driven automobile industry in Asia and Africa is going to vastly outstrip its gradual (and later perhaps even mandatory) replacement with electric vehicles in the West...

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