Norway Is Walking Away from Billions of Barrels of Oil
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I can imagine a point in 30 years where there are new, safer and better ways of getting the oil out, and oil is necessary for processes that don't involve burning it into the atmosphere, and the price is considerably higher than it is now.
I despair of (my current home country) Australia's attitude of digging up all the resources it possibly can and selling them for cheaper than everyone else. And being proud of this, like it's a good thing. These resources are irreplaceable and belong to the whole nation. Maybe leave some in the ground for later when the prices have gone up?
I'm confused. (Libertarian here) Are mineral rights nationalized in Australia? How do they 'belong' to everyone there, as opposed to the person who owns the ground that those resources are in?
Some argue simply paying taxes. Others say it is a list of things perhaps, called "civic duties". Finally, some more extreme believe you have to do it all: attend the town halls, keep up with the times, understand the various debate points, otherwise you are somehow disqualified from playing. (A side note, it has become impossible to keep up with all the ways government affects your life, and this is one of the exact reasons the founders were for limited government. They argued as the responsibilities and roles of government increase, it becomes impossible for the "commoner" to keep up and stay engaged, thus becoming a form of tyranny in of it's own.)
I think it's definitely a gray area, but the more participation, obviously, the better, while still somehow maintaining the ability to serve those who participate little just as equally. Otherwise you become a government of some people, not of all people.
It’s more healthy than the alternative.
https://www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/mining-a...
Which seems as complex as you might expect for something based on similar UK laws:
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsUK/planning/legislation/mineral...
NB I've thought for a while that land 'ownership' is a slightly odd concept - not helped by being in Scotland where land ownership has had over a thousand years to get in a nice mess.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14614429-the-poor-had-no...
This Guardian article gives you a flavour of some of the issues:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-lan...
when you buy property in Australia, that does not include the mineral rights on that property, which are a whole separate thing. Farmers have got rich selling access to mine sites, but only the government can sell the mining rights (for the first sale anyway).
1. Economics predicts that the price of something will be the same as the price of its cheapest substitute. For a long time, fossil fuels were the substitute, keeping the price of renewables & nuclear down to unprofitable levels. However, renewables, storage and electric cars are all rapidly decreasing in cost, depressing their prices and the prices of their substitutes.
2. Carbon taxes or other similar schemes are looking more likely in the future. They shift the demand/supply curve, causing fewer barrels to be sold at higher prices, but the price doesn't go up enough to cover the full increase, leading to depressed prices before the tax.
3. Economics says that the price of a commodity is the same as the marginal cost of production. In other words, the highest cost producer of oil that meets current demand makes $0 in profit, all lower cost producers make >$0 profit. If demand is low, then that marginal cost is $10 Saudi oil. If demand is high, then that marginal cost is $100 Canadian oilsands oil. So if demand drops because of climate change mitigation and/or renewable substitution and/or electric vehicle substitution, there is supply of lower cost oil, meaning prices can drop.
4. We're not running out of oil, we never have been. As mentioned in #3, the price of oil is the marginal cost of production. Anything that costs more than that price isn't counted in reserves because it's uneconomical to extract. So by definition we always have almost no reserves and never will have.
There are trillions of barrels of oil in the Canadian and Venezuelan oil sands alone that aren't counted as reserves for this reason. We're less than 2 price doubling periods away from making this economical, keeping a fairly low ceiling on prices.
And of course technology marches on, continually decreasing the price of extracting that oil...
I mean, there are various ways to define what that means, but oil is getting increasingly expensive to get, alternatives are getting better, we may soon not have much oil left worth getting.
and of course we can bicker about what soon means.
Agreed. That is obviously a factor increasing oil prices, and may certainly more than balance the 4 factors I listed.
> alternatives are getting better
central to my argument
> we may soon not have much oil left worth getting
Oh I certainly hope so. I'm saying that we can't rely on oil prices going up substantially to ensure this. We need to invest in alternative energy sources and consumers and use carbon taxes to ensure it.
Oil is refined into many different byproducts. Some of the byproducts are used in manufacturing, and other byproducts are used in energy generation.
And most of that is lubricants and plastics. I think we can all agree that reducing our use of plastics is generally a good thing overall - we might make the switch back to more easily recyclable materials, e.g. aluminum and glass, which, although energy intensive to recycle, are almost endlessly renewable.
Not sure what good substitutes for oil based lubricants would be.
How this will happen is not very clear (to me)
Consider EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). This is how much energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil from the ground, whether by pumping or by melting in the case of tar sands and shale. In the 1950s, EROEI was about 100 - the energy of a barrel of oil could extract about a hundred barrels. The Canadian tar sands have EROEI of about 3.5. They weren't profitable until oil became expensive enough to make it worthwhile.
Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably. Some of those "trillions of barrels" you talk about are in that camp. They don't count as reserves, because they're useless.
Meanwhile, oil is going to keep getting more and more expensive and difficult to extract. Offshore deep-water drilling, tar sands, stuff like that, it's incredibly hard and often environmentally dangerous/destructive. And renewables get cheaper and cheaper, as there's a lot more room for improvement in technology and manufacturing scale.
Eventually - and I don't think that point is far away - it will be impossible to produce fossil fuels cheaper than the cost of solar/wind.
> Eventually - and I don't think that point is far away - it will be impossible to produce fossil fuels cheaper than the cost of solar/wind.
I hope and believe that you're right. But I don't think it will be because the price of oil is going up, but because the price of alternatives is going down.
> Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably
EROEI is not a constant, it changes with technology too.
And we'll still need oil for plastic, so it's theoretically possible that we'll use alternative energy to heat the tar to extract the oil to use it in plastic.
But woe is us if we ever get to that state. We'll have burnt so much oil that we'll be well past the climate change tipping point.
I agree that for things like aircraft, there's unlikely to ever be an electrical substitute for the energy density of organic fuel. But that could be done entirely from renewables if needed.
This is not strictly true: First, non-fuel use accounts for 5-10% of oil use.
Second: As long as oil offers higher-density (fuel energy, thrust-to-weight, &c.) mobile power generation than alternatives, it can be profitable. Id est: if it's cheaper to extract and refine a barrel of oil (perhaps with renewables) than to produce the equivalent biofuel, the oil could be produced profitably.
And since anything that's in petroleum can be synthesized from simple molecules like water and CO2, given enough energy...
Petroleum consumption will, can, and has proceeded well beyond EROEI 1:1 parity within such uses -- see Germany's WW2 Fischer-Tropsch process.
The correct measure here is total economic return.
Fuel synthesis is negative EROEI.
Actually even 1 or 2 wouldn't make much sense. It was close to what people had in medieval times without oil (1.5 energy or something close, from animals, mills, fire, etc).
Actually we are consistently running out of oil, it being a finite resource.
You could say it's "enough for another 100 or 200 years" as opposed to those who say it's only enough for less, but you can't make it like we have infinite oil.
We chanced upon a source of relatively cheap energy that was created in geological time and takes millions of years to create. We didn't chance into some infinite tap.
>Anything that costs more than that price isn't counted in reserves because it's uneconomical to extract.
Beyond some point it would be so uneconomical to extract as to be meaningless -- or as to slow down the economy considerable, if it isn't for alternative energy sources (which also have their own problems if attempted at anything compared to oil use scale -- including storage, bad EROEI minus the subsidies, hidden costs, and unpredictable output, despite the solar cheerleading).
Climate change is very real on the North Pole and as a consequence, the US, Norway, Denmark/Greenland, and Russia are gaining access to new oil and gas fields that used to be inaccessible and are now being exploited. Particularly Russia is pumping out a lot of gas in that region and I'm sure Alaska is also doing well. So, there is indeed plenty of oil. But it matters whether you can sell it at 30$ or 100$ a barrel.
Another thing worth highlighting is that synthesizing carbo hydrates (aka. oil) from air is a feasible but energy intensive process. I.e. once clean energy prices drop far enough, that might actually become more lucrative than getting real oil/gas from the ground. Also a great way to store excess energy and you can do it anywhere. Like e.g. next to the refineries or pumps, thus cutting out transport as a cost factor.
https://electrek.co/2017/11/23/tesla-worlds-largest-li-ion-b...
https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia...
And another one:
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-virtual-power-plant-south-au...
I'd like to think since the land of Oz has a very thin ozone it is great for solar. As the cost of industrial batteries come down, this seems like much more of a sensible future. In the US, battery + solar/wind is just now becoming cheaper than building new coal / natgas peaker plants. This will only continue as the economies of scale and tech improvements drive the cost further down for renewables.
I think its the notion that all the provinces are competing against each other, and that under any oil program some provinces will win and other lose that really holds us back. No one can see that we can all win by collectively working together. It doesn't help at all that there are now moneyed corporate interested involved that are not interested in seeing any changes take place.
As someone from Ontario, I wouldn't even care about it being federalized as long as it was better "provincialized":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust...
At the very least only payout dividends on a portion of the returns on investment from the fund:
Because Norway's oil is more profitable, it can be taxed much more heavily. If you were to tax the tarsands at the same rate, it would put the companies out of business.
"While royalty rates in Newfoundland are the highest in Canada, in Alberta they have fallen from a 40 per cent high during the 1970s to less than four per cent, and a complex system of exemptions ensures companies often pay even less."
That's insane.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/oct/...
We are literally bending over backwards to subsidize and prop up a rounding error in our economy.
Right now, 33 million people have to suffer, and pay more for energy, because one province is increasing its carbon output.
Edit: I am not a bastard, and I fully think that other provinces need to financially help Alberta disentangle itself from the tar sands. But it needs to be ready to accept this help, first.
You might be surprised. Last election we saw spots of orange and red appear in what was once always blue. Demographic change appears to be moving against the Conservatives and the oil industry.
Not "Canada", but the province of Alberta. Norway is a 'monolithic' country, but Canada has federalism where the provinces have jurisdiction over certain areas.
And Alberta did/does have a fund, but over the decades various governments (generally Conervative) have decided not to really invest into it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust...
This is not a sensible comparison. Norway produces 313,661 barrels per day per million people, which is higher than all other countries besides Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Australia produces 12,010 bbl/day/millon-people, i.e., just 3.8% of Norway's per capita production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
The extreme amount of mineral wealth that each Norwegian citizen has inherited makes Norway very difficult to compare to non-Arab countries on any issue connected to economics (i.e., basically everything).
Relatedly, the cost of living in Norway is much higher than Australia, despite Australia's extreme remoteness.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...
My bet is Uranium is going to be an important one too in the future.
https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/
Next time, consider looking the number up yourself and reporting back rather than just asking the question and so forcing me to look up the answer for you (or else look like I'm ignoring the issue).
Norway exports about $50 billion USD / year. Australia exports about $120 billion USD / year.
This is probably why the Australian is comparing the situation with Norway.
https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/frydenberg/sp...
https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/expo...
Again, I think this works out to a per capita endowment of that is still much, much larger for Norway, but you'd actually have to do a bit of work to check.
IMO you're on a hiding to nothing trying to support your position that the comparison isn't valid. The economic export situation is structurally quite similar between Norway and Australia, and the difference in how they've handled it is vast, far greater than any multiple in population.
And, if it comes down to it, we can pull near-unlimited quantities from seawater at $200-1000 per kg (~10x current pricing). The costs of nuclear power generation are almost entirely capital costs and insurance, the fuel costs are practically a rounding error, so this does not substantially change the costs of nuclear power generation.
https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/06/28/the-nu...
So, uranium will probably never be super valuable. Strategically important, and nice to have in a conveniently accessible form, but not economically valuable.
Would be way easier to understand the comparison if the notation would be the same on both numbers. I assume bbl means billions of barrels, this means Australia's number is higher by few orders.
You should not look at just oil, but natural resources in general (in case of Australia, iron, coal and gold in particular).
Norway still comes out on top, but only by a factor of ~2 (cf https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nor/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ ).
Australia's top exports are also based on natural resources, namely, Iron Ore, Coal Briquettes, Gold and Petroleum Gas, accounting for 60% of all exports at $144.6B. Assuming a population of 24.6M, this translates to $5.9k per person.
Point is, while Australia isn't quite as well off as Norway, there are resources aplenty to pull off something similar on a somewhat smaller scale.
Metals is an interesting case because on the one hand they are definitely a non-renewable resource. On the other hand, it seems like there's a difference between exporting ore and exporting refined metals, in terms of whether it's "just" resource extraction or not...
Iron ore extraction isn't bad but it's nowhere near as profitable as Norway's oil extraction
You'd have to do that across the entire range of resources and then divide per capita - on that basis I think Norway would blow by 4x Australia just based on off-the-top of my head estimate
Statoil makes huge margins on their oil because once the tricky rig was set up, it just comes out like Gold.
Most other natural resources have much thinner margins due to processing, overhead.
'Sweet Crude' i.e. the kind you get in the desert, and 'sweet once it's setup to be' i.e. Statoil ... this is a different thing together from other natural resources.
Norway is like Kuwait, it's almost impossible to compare it to anything else.
They can leave the Oil in the ground for now because they are very rich and have more money than they know what to do with.
As far as I'm aware, profit margins on iron aren't too shabby either, though I'd have to do some digging how this all shapes up in these specific cases (Norwegian oil vs Australian gold, iron and coal).
They are fortunate that they are one of the few countries with functional government that could handle the oil wealth responsibly.
If you compare it to the United States, we socialize many of the risks associated with oil production, refining and transport, and let the extractors, refiners, and transporters reap the benefits.
Currently private sector and foreign business takes the risk. Then Australia gets a share of the profits through royalties and taxes as well as the labour income through employment of workers.
Which represents a tiny amount of value compared to the energy stored in the oil.
Australia provided mineral exploration incentives of $31m for 2018/19 at the tax payer’s expense, to mitigate that risk.
https://www.financeminister.gov.au/media-release/2018/06/26/...
Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/ in 2017 Australia exported $40.6 billion of coal, for a population of ~25 million. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/iron-ore-exports-country/ it also exported $49.3 billion of iron ore. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/gold-exports-country/ it also exported $13.1 billion of gold. Just between those three items that works out to ~$4k per person for the year.
Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/worlds-top-oil-exports-count... Norway exported $26 billion of oil, for a population of ~5 million. So about $5k per person for the year.
Now both countries do other resource-extraction stuff too. Norway's natural gas exports are almost equal to their oil exports, as far as I can tell. Australia's annual exports of natural gas seem to be in the $40-$50 billion range depending on the year you look at (it's grown a lot recently). And Australia is doing a bunch of non-iron-ore and non-gold mining too (gems come to mind).
Overall, per capita resource extraction revenue in Norway is certainly higher than in Australia, but it's not the "25x" higher than the oil numbers alone would indicate. Maybe 2x.
The point is that Norway has managed it's natural advantages to the benefit all of their citizens compared to other countries whose resources primarily enrich individual companies/owners.
Where the Norwegians could appreciate what the sovereign fund meant for them, the attempt in Australia was lambasted as another tax, copped serious lobbying by mining giants, etc.
However if they would introduce such a tax now then it might encourage new mining developments and let them be sped through the environmental checks faster than they are now. So there is a danger we would have many more Adani like mines popped up.
Though yet again maybe having a high enough mining tax would possible discourage such endeavours?
Is that true? Norway has a 78% tax on profits from the oil companies.
(For instance, there's a 14% employment tax, 25% VAT, car taxes that increase vehicle purchase cost by 100% and fuel cost by 200%, toll roads that are impossible to avoid during daily errands, 0.85% annual net worth tax, 31% capital gains tax, property taxes and municipal taxes, and that's without getting into extra taxes for luxury products or how corporate profits are taxed).
"The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil."
--- Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former Minister of Oil for Saudi ArabiaThe phrase is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
The problem this reveals is that oil will only be valuable in the longrun if some technology is developed that requires just stupefyingly large quantities of oil. Otherwise, the supply is just far too high. And a catch is that even if this new technology is developed, it's difficult to imagine any usage where 12 billion liters of crude oil per day would not have a massive environmental impact, one way or the other. I would not go long on oil, unless you think it will continue to be used as a primary source of energy generation decades from now.
We the people of earth depend on the rainforests of South America. Does that rainforest belong to South Americans? If you think that, please state your reason.
I'm so sick of nationalism. Where are all the globalists?
Who should decide who gets to extract the oil ?
If there's a system to solve those two questions, why is that system better(as you imply it would be) than the current system ?
It appears to me that many larger countries are not going green (in particular the US climate change denial) and part of the problem is that those at the "top" are very detached from those at the bottom.
Why would a single global political entity care more for the median person or the poor person? Care more for a forest, or a global oil company?
Add to that the unprecedented (truly unprecedented, world wide) growth of the economy (where "growth" is measured only against the things we choose to measure, i.e. GDP) thanks to being a mining colony of China and presto: we're great! A bunch of pollies were along for the ride while Chinese technocrats happened to channel a bunch of cash Australia's way, and decided that they were responsible for "success" they had nothing to do with. Why plan for the future?
I live now in the USA where the problems are really really bad. I still have hope that the lucky country will come to its senses. Australia has so much wealth to work with. Compare it to, say, Russia, also a primarily extractive economy: the two countries have roughly the same size of economy but Russia divides it over 5X the number of people, and has if anything an even less diversified, and far more corrupt economy.
Modestly unlikely. The need for negative emissions will probably result in producing hydrocarbons from captured atmospheric CO2, which will be expensive, but not as expensive as paying whatever giant carbon tax will be assessed on geological oil.
It would be very easy for the country to rely on their oil only, and forget about everything else. But instead, they realise the importance of renewable energy and try to build a sustainable future.
Countries like Japan and China are much bigger and yet pivot on a dime politically when there's consensus. China went all-in on coal and when things got so bad pollution wise, they went all-in on solar.
It's not a limit on population size, it's a limit defined by political cohesion. Look at the US today with two parties, one center-right wing, one extreme right wing, where they can't get anything done because one party would rather shut the country down than negotiate.
A multitude of opinions is fine so long as they're not the polar opposite or just pure obstructionism.
It's the Norwegian politicians/people that I praise.
The reason divestment is not “morally good” is that the current price of the assets reflects the net present value of all future cash flows for those assets. So if you choose to sell and materialize those assets as cash today, you’re just expressing a preference for cash instead of oil assets, but are not fundamentally signaling anything about the future cash flows. Particularly if you are realizing a profit in cash from having held those oil assets for a long time.
If you wanted a divestment-like action that could possibly be considered a morally good stance on climate change, then you should give away your assets to groups of people likely to receive direct negative externalities from continued operation of the oil industry. Liquidate your position in oil and give away that cash to coastal property owners, developing countries, laborers or communities exposed to environmental damage. After all, it has been your choice to hold those assets and act as a shareholder demanding increased value (which you received) that has been a huge reason for environmental damage in the first place.
Any possible way of realizing a capital gain from that environmental damage you incentivized with your shareholdership is at best nothing but everyday financial activity and at worst greed.
I can’t stress this point enough, that merely divesting and realizing capital gains from selling out of your oil asset position is emphatically not a moral or ethical stance on that industry, not an attempt to migrate to renewable energy, nothing.
Divestment is literally nothing but realizing a profit from capital gains in one particular way.
The public moralizing about it, I think, is just a way to let rich people have their cake and eat it too, because the yes-man thing they want to hear is that there is a possible way to extract big profits from oil investment while at the same time promoting migration away from fossil fuels. But you can’t.
The largest issues if we were to stop oil production immediately wouldn't even be monetary, they would be ethical, as it would massively reduce food production and distribution.
Basically, Norway is working closer to the hardware when they stop oil production.
We need a transition and repair story, not a "stop civilisation" story.
We don't have to do anything that extreme now, but give it another twenty years and we'll have to do a whole lot more than that.
(Edit: link to article below doesn't work well through Google indirection ... And search for original at Financial Times website is paywalled ... apologies ... search for article title "The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil", you'll find a readable link.)
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a...
This is such an unbelievable story. Thanks for sharing. TIFL!
More to the point, they've managed their oil money differently, investing it in various things. They have state philosophers on board to help invest. The country itself is relying less and less on oil - lots of hydropower, for example, and lots of encouragement to buy an electric vehicle and/or take the bus.
They've had help: Others responding along with you mentioned an Iraqi that has helped them.
The fund itself is pretty amazing. It might even be more of a blow to see the fund shrivel up than the oil, honestly.
I just had this mental image of a drug cartel trying to go legit and leaving their criminal past behind.
This has been a long fight for the enviromental lobby. But really, it should have been obvious.
We _know_ that if we want to limit global warming, we can't even extract all the oil from currently developed fields.
In addition, an oil spill outside Lofoten could devestate the cod population of the north atlantic ocean, and destroy industries both in Norway and elsewhere.
a) protecting the sensitive environment around the Lofoten islands
b) increasing the cost of oil slightly
c) leaving the oil around Lofoten for future generations if necessary
All three are quite positive effects of this decision, with a+c) being more limited to Norway and b) potentially having an effect world-wide. It will also make it easier to tax "dirty" oil imports (such as from sensitive natural environments) and all goods produced using such oil into the EU if no internal player is doing the same.
Petroleum fuels are only the only game in town for some of their applications. For everything else, raising or lowering the price relative to the alternatives will cause switching to or from petroleum fuels. This is going to be lagging (because there are usually capital costs associated with the switch, so it doesn't make sense to switch if you won't recoup the expense, so the fuel cost difference needs to be substantial), complex (because the switching will actually be based on the perceived future price difference, not the current price difference) and somewhat sticky.
If oil prices fall because supply was increased too much, then demand will increase in response to the lower prices of oil.
In that regard, I think Norway not drilling may be a net loss for the environment since they have some of the better protections. It may even be a net global loss, even if it means a localized win.
- Highest proportion of electric vehicles of any country in the world: https://cleantechnica.com/2017/08/19/top-electric-car-countr...
- Establishing new onshore windmill farms: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-wind-idUSKCN1RD27H
- The rules for the government pension fund (aka. the oil fund) have become much more strict about investments in coal recently: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Full disclosure: I am a Norwegian.
Buying an electric car in Norway also gives you much more than just tax savings (but they do have a lot of those). You don't have to pay road tolls, you can use the highway lane reserved for taxis and busses, you can park and charge for free in government provided parking spaces, you have 50% off tickets for ferries, cheaper mandatory yearly road insurance, and some shopping centres previously had free charging while you shop.
The right to drive in the bus-lanes was changed to only with at least one passenger during rush-hour, as they became so clogged that busses were stuck in traffic as well. The free road toll will be changed to 50% off this year, and the exemption from sales-tax is up for review in 2020. The free charging on government provided parking will be limited to 4 hours this year, and a fee per hour will be introduced. You can still park for free though, but those spots with charging stations are too popular.
It's also worth noting that these rigs would be much closer to shore than the current rigs outside of the west coast. I would be able to see the rigs from Lofoten where much of my family is from although I don't live there myself. For me personally putting up rigs would have been a disaster even without the oil spills.
More of us keep finding that unquestioned following the values of a system created in ignorance that we could lower Earth's ability to sustain human life and culture doesn't make us happier.
Taking responsibility for how our behavior affects others doesn't sound as much in-the-moment fun as most of the crap that burning fossil fuels does, but it builds community, personal growth, and enduring emotional reward.
I used to crave eating mangoes in the tropics and seeing as many of the world's sites as I could. Now I see the bigger issue wasn't the mangoes or sites, which were passing fancies, but the craving, which the oil industry shows in the article. Life in service of others, compassion, responsibility, and such outweigh whatever profits they get abandoning them.
I can give their past generations of pollution the benefit of the doubt for our collective ignorance. The evidence of the result of their craving is overwhelming now. I hope they escape that craving in favor of responsibility and humanity before my home, and the homes of billions of others, is underwater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
There are lessons to be learned here, perhaps?
I find this incredibly depressing. Should I teach my daughter to ski? Is it going to be of any use in 20 years?
Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger Is Walking Away from 155 Opportunities to Kill Someone (2009)
Steve Wozniak Is Walking Away from Thousands Of Dollars in Hewlett-Packard Salary (1976)
Homo Sapiens Is Walking (Literally) Away from Brachiation and Dominion Over the Tree Canopy (-1,000,000)
There has to my knowledge not been explorative drilling in Lofoten/Vesterålen/Senja yet.
If that was what your comment was addressing...
We don't want to burn even all of our existing already-being-extracted oil fields, but chances are we'll always be extracting some oil.
So what's the highest quality, cheapest to extract, least environmentally damaging oil we could extract? Should we extract as much oil as we can from our current fields or shut them down and go elsewhere? Should we drain any field we are using completely dry or should we just take some from a lot of sites before shutting each down? Is it better to frack site A or put a deepwater rig at site B or a conventional well at site C?
I could imagine a golden future where petroleum is a relatively minor but important resource, and where all the exploration now is a valuable dataset for deciding the most ethical way to extract it.
The problem is exactly with the demand for cheap energy. If the whole western world becomes carbon neutral we'll simply see the oil getting exported to other countries. There's plenty of margin for it to remain profitable.
1. Raises prices or decreases total used
2. When prices are raised, encourages alternatives
It is similar to a carbon tax in its effects. Look at the diagram in the article and visualize the S curve moving left, and what effect that has on equilibrium.
Here is the thing: the US will be net energy exporter by 2021. As of now it is self-sufficient. At the time when we put such a emphasis on using less fossil fuels, we also have more and more countries producing the stuff.
All it did (Norwegians not drilling) is raised prices for the oil exported by the US. Thank you! Recently it has been very cheap. Hopefully this will help a bit.
So that's global perspective.
The local perspective I'm happy that Norwegians are so wealthy they don't need to drill as much anymore or can focus on other issues then providing to the Sovereign Fund. Good for them!
AFAIK Americans already don't plan to leave oil in the ground if it's economical to get it out. They can't drill more if they're already going to drill it all.
Oil is easy to obtain and contains an amazing amount of energy in fluid form, can also be used for plastics and many other things. There will always be demand for oil, it's almost magical. We must still leave oil in the ground.
We need to work out what we will do to maintain our lifestyle without the oil income, if not then Norway will slowly drift back to being a relatively poor country. Norway is an expensive country to run, not just because we have high incomes but also because quite a lot of the landscape is quite hostile to life and unproductive both industrially and agriculturally. The population is too small to make mass production of low cost export goods practical and raw materials are expensive to extract and refine so we will have to become more self reliant. Historically Norway has been good at this but recent governments have started to be less and less interested in solidarity and more interested in market ideology.
For me it is probably not a particularly pressing problem, I'm 63, but my children will certainly be affected.
All the oil money goes in a sovereign wealth fund. 4% of the fund's value per annum is taken as government revenue (like tax). So, any new oil found will only gradually increase budgets in the future. Also, the can stop drilling now and the annual revenue just stops growing (unless the market). It doesn't shrink.
Forethought.
Actually: if you're taking out 4%, but various investments are bringing in >4%, then the principal will continue to grow.
Of course the current government never had any plans to conduct any preliminary steps. The two major parties (the Conservatives and the Progress Party) are all for it, but the minor supporting parties (the Liberals and Christian Democrats) are not, and so far they've gotten their will.
Emissions free oil production. Oh, the irony.
Sure, so then since the pendulum has been on one side (polluting the world with fossil fuels) for so long, let's swing it over, in order to be "balanced", and ban/eliminate fossil fuels as soon as possible, hopefully in the next 10-20 years.
Just jealous I guess ...
So we located more oil, we could get more of it out of the ground, and more of it made it to your gas tank.
Since then people have made the zeolites many times larger in diameter. I've no idea why that improves efficiency but that's the claim.
However through all of this the amount of energy to refine one gallon of petroleum has gone up and up. That's one of the complaints about tar sands. For some of those the yield is a 10:1 ratio (one gallon to produce 10), whereas we used to be many multiples of that ratio.
Coincidence?
I conclude that there's no win for Norway whatever happens. I am deeply sad because I see good in Norway and that's a rarity.
"Occupied depicts a fictional near future in which Russia, with support from the European Union, occupies Norway to restore its oil and gas production, in response to a Europe-wide energy crisis caused by the coming to power of Norway's Green Party, which stopped the country's oil and gas production." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied
Opinions aside, it is interesting to consider what issues might arise if one country or industry abruptly chooses to leave behind non-renewables before its peers.
The idea of Russia invading Norway to resume Norwegian oil production because the EU asked it is absurd.
Were it to happen in real life, Russia would be applauding Norway for rising the oil price and ramping up its own oil production as much as it can.
When America invades with the intent to steal a country, let me know.
Because invading oil-rich countries, installing a puppet government, seeding chaos leading to deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is so much better than bloodlessly reuniting with a piece of your own territory stolen during the dissolution of the USSR.
LOL. The Soviet Union was an empire forged through invasion, occupation, and brutal repression. The Russians have as much right to Czechoslovakia as Nazi Germany did.
Your unapologetic defense one one of the greatest evils of the 20th century would be funny, if it wasn't disgusting.
Ex-Soviet states didn't choose a "political association" as you say, they were invaded and brutally occupied in an attempt to erase their existence.
Nazis get the proper context in 20th century history, the Soviet union sadly doesn't. If you were here defending Hitler's invasion of Poland i'd image the response would be different.
It shouldn't be.
What do you mean specifically?
I merely encouraged GP to research the evil shit, because it might offer some sorely needed rhetorical support for his Russia animus. I don't care one way or the other about it. "Governments are evil; news at eleven!"
The US acts recklessly and causes much misery and death through its actions. It don't invade places with the intention of occupying and steal land/resources.
Sure:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Well, in that case almost every country in the world needs to be re-partitioned and given back to indigenous populations, most of which are long since wiped out.
All to justify Russian invading Ukraine. What happened 2 years ago is the same as the carnal free-for-all that was pre-modern civil society. Well done, wasn't expecting that.
As I said before, justifying Russia acting like a medieval power in 2018 by citing American expansion in 1850 is just stupid. It's whataboutism but not even logical.
You would have been fine if you just stopped with "Russia has invaded other nations". That's simply true. This "Russia invades more nations than USA" is obvious bullshit. Even the TV news admits that.
Most of the USA outside of the founding states was stolen by invasion, including the overseas territories. (Though some of it was covered by purchases made possible by invasion, or under threat of invasion, or from people who claimed most of the covered territory despite not actuslly effectively controlling it while other people lived on it.)
2. Overseas territories are more complicated, most have semi or fully autonomous status, while others voted to maintain their formal status with the US. If any wanted full independence, they would be granted it. Ukraine voted to increase trade relations with the EU and was properly invaded and had partially annexed. How you can even begin to compare the two, I have no idea.
Makes perfect sense.
Of course, there's also an audience for unflattering caricature of Russia. Besides there is some leftover animosity from historical invasions. Also a Russian invasion looked more exotic on the screen. Our screens are already full of American culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...
Actually this wasn't a geopolitical point. It is simply a fact that Russian food, music, and other cultural indicators are less common on TV than American culture is. So, it makes for more interesting TV. That's all "exotic" meant.
You can start from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria_War#Involvement_o...
Thank you for multiple examples of russophobia you have provided in your comments.
What precedent are you talking about?
In the recent history the only territory that joined Russia is Crimea which historically has been Russian for over 200 years and was assigned to be a part of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during Soviet time when all republics were parts of the same country and it didn't matter much.
After an illegal coup in the Ukraine 'midwifed' by the US it was a strategical imperative to take the peninsula back and nobody is brutally oppressed, in fact, according to Gallup's poll almost everyone in Crime approve reunification with Russia [0].
If anything, the Crimea was stolen by the Ukraine during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and was finally returned to the country it was a part of for centuries.
As for Russia-Norway relations, Russia has given Norway a part of the Barents Sea in order to settle 40 years old territorial dispute [1] which makes your claims even more absurd.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...
[1] http://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2010/09/16/norway-and...
A quick look at Google Maps should raise suspicions, because migrating from Syria to Europe via the Russo-Norwegian border is the most ridiculously convoluted path to take. I believe it to be impossible for large number of migrants to accomplish this feat without official help from the Russian government.
Student loans: Everyone who lives and work in Finnmark and/or North-Troms can have a yearly, tax-free, writedown of student loans based on 10% of the original loan sum. Maximum of 25.000 NOK per year.
Less tax: Everyone living in Finnmark and North-Troms that pays taxes gets an automatic writeoff for 15.000 (tax class 1) / 30.000 NOK (tax class 2). They also have a tax rate that's 3.5% less than the rest of the country.
Exemption for electricity charge: Pay 9.5 øre less per kWh, also the whole of Northern Norway doesn't pay VAT on electricity.