Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Alberta fundamentally has to shift gears - just like Saudi Arabia. The world will move on from fossil fuels and they had better have a plan to transition.

Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.

View on HN

> Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.

How so? Oil production is ticking back up and is higher than any time since about 2010.

> Alberta fundamentally has to shift gears - just like Saudi Arabia.

The only problem here is that Alberta was forced to give up all its money in equalization payment, and has none left.

Norway is an entire country that has just slightly more people than the province of Alberta, which is to say that is it much smaller than Canada, while having oil reserves equal to or greater than those in Alberta. Alberta should obviously have been more diligent in saving up oil revenues generated, but this ignores the fact that a huge amount of oil revenues generated in Alberta have gone to help the rest of the country develop as well. Roughly 250-300 billion dollars from Alberta has transferred to the rest of the country since Alberta's discovery of oil, which would essentially give funding equivalent to the Norwegian sovereign fund. So when people say "where did all the money go?" the answer is that it went to hospitals in Chicoutimi, roads in Neepawa, schools in Battle Harbor, etc, etc. Trying to compare sovereign Norway with a single province in a confederation is always going to give a skewed view of what Alberta should or should not have done with its resource wealth.

> Alberta should obviously have been more diligent in saving up oil revenues generated

It was literally all stolen by the Federal government through equalization payment. Can't really blame Alberta here...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com