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Comment by farrisbris | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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