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Comment by omosubi | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this quote a lot recently - "Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money." It's attributed to a canadian Aboriginal but could apply to any industrialized or semi industrialized country. Hopefully we save ourselves before it's too late

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Canada has a terrible environmental record that completely undermines its progressive reputation. The tar sands project may be the single most egregious resources undertaking in history.

But other so-called progressive industrialized nations aren't much better. Norway is also wealthy primarily due to the extraction of fossil fuels.

Hopefully with the oil prices so low and keep getting lower, the tar sands is a dead project

> with the oil prices so low and keep getting lower

cries in french

Low prices means higher consumption, which will do the opposite of kill off that project.

260$ billion to clean up Alberta's oilpatch https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/11/01/what-...

Sheeeet..

Norway is in the middle of trying to figure this out. Or we are where we have always been: Pretending to do everything we can to protect the climate while actually doing almost nothing that would impact our standard of living. Its hard to tell if we are actually moving the discussion forward or not.

We are happy to spend billions funding rainforrests around the world, but we won't make any hard choices that affect us at home.

Stopping the national subsidies for oil exploration is something that would probably stop it dead in its tracks. But we are not doing that. We are instead in the process of opening new areas for explorative drilling. There might be some truth to the "clean oil technology" talk, but it doesn't change the fact that oil == carbon.

The only reason we havn't started drilling in "Lofoton"( our famous fishing grounds and home of a lot of magnificent scenery constantly posted on reddit ) is that a few small swing parties are putting their foot down. All the larger parties want to drill. As they always have. Its depressing.

We do have the fairly new(in terms of actually being voted for) "Green" party which is basically a single-issue party. I'm hoping they can steer the conversation to a point where will be able to make hard choices.

Not to derail too much, but this also applies to everything else we do or dont do. Like not cutting arm sales to the saudies etc. Its money talks all the way.

Edit: and don't get me starte on wolves. Even while the majority of norwegians seemingly wants wolves in our forests, we seem to be dead set on limiting their numbers to a population which is not going to sustain itself genetically. Rip wolves.

What? I'm in the industry and believe me, Norway is making transitions. Statoil -> Equinor. Your SWF no longer will invest in fossil fuels. Wayyy more mandates regarding emissions/pollution during extraction.

They shouldn't just stop drilling. It is a moneymaker for the country and gives the government lots of money to spend on policies which reduce the country's emissions. Norway produces lots of oil relative to the country's size so if they took it off the market, it would just come from somewhere with less standards and less commitment to the environment. They should make calculated moves which don't risk the country's economic future. Taking the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world's money out of FF stocks is a good way to start, and doesn't jeopardize much, if anything.

Green's only purpose should be to change the dialogue, not to be given any legislative power whatsoever. They will make drastic moves which will yield economic consequences felt by the public. Reality is, people have to be in good economic circumstances to care about altruistic goals like curtailing climate change. Take those good economic circumstances away from them - and suddenly the environment is no longer much of a priority.

Changing their name is not really changing what they do. I realize they are diversifying into other areas(which is only sensible), but they are still also doing what they have always been doing. Push for more drilling. And i'm not sure i buy their argument that since someone else will just pick up the slack we should keep doing it. I realize that oil is what has brought us our wealth, but this is what i meant by hard choices.

> Taking the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world's money out of FF stocks is a good way to start, and doesn't jeopardize much, if anything.

This is also what i mean by hard choices. In this case it wasn't really that hard.

I don't know why you insist on a choice being "hard". What matters is the outcome. Taking billions of dollars out of foreign FF stocks has a good outcome for the environment and leads the way for even more to be taken out. The economy is unaffected. Government gets their petrorevenues to spend on reducing the country's emissions.

Stopping drilling just means another producer fills the void, and the Norwegian economy suffers as a result. People rightfully react to that and often elect someone on the other end of the political spectrum. Not only do other producers have less env. regulation, but the backlash from the Norwegian populace could elect a government within Norway who slashes this regulation and restarts production. History is replete with reactionary governments, especially when the Overton window is shifted too fast.

My point is, keep diversifying the economy, keep diversifying energy sources. Just because drilling continues does not mean alternative energy is slowing down. Take it slow, else you risk backlash.

Its not that they have to be hard choices. Its rather that we are only commiting to try the easy ones.

And i do agree that what matters is the outcome. I just don't think we are changing the outcome as much as we should be doing given our beneficial position in the world. There are only so many easy "things", for lack of a better word, we can do. The rest are hard. And it seems to me that we are stopping short of committing to doing anything "hard".

I could be wrong about what produces the best outcome with regards the environment considering wether to stopping or continue drilling(edit: in norway). But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.

>But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.

What now? Your emissions have remained flat for the last ten years, you have a carbon tax, your country was one of the first to implement CCS technology [1]. You guys have by no means been sitting on your hands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Norway

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