Norwegian youth win climate court case against the Norwegian State

Norway is a beautiful modern liberal democracy, Saudi Arabia is a theocratic desert dictatorship hellhole.

Greenwashed a lot better? A lot better than whom? Which countries are more deserving of Norway's perceived status as one of the greenest nations?

"And that's what a comprehensive assessment will include"

Do you have evidence of this? A typical assessment of impacts, especially any environmental assessment I have ever heard of, only focuses on the negatives.

Carbon capture technologies produce more carbon emissions than they can capture if you account for the resource use for production and construction. Even when they do slightly better than breaking even the margin is so low that scaling it up is not a meaningful contribution relative to the amount of emissions we would need to counteract. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Geo engineering to the degree necessary to revert climate change is bad sci-fi, not science, no matter what billionaires selling personal EVs are telling you.

On the other hand we know that we are seeing an immense problem of overproduction which is incentivized by the economic system and impossible to tackle by blaming consumers for bad choices and asking the industry nicely to reduce waste or letting them get away with greenwashing by planting trees and raising honey bees. We could change that but it would require significant market intervention, which we (most Western nations at least) have been ideologically opposed to for decades.

It takes orders of magnitude more power to capture the carbon from the atmosphere than was gained putting it there in the first place.

It requires sucking in and processing inconceivable quantities of air requiring inconceivable amounts of land for the facilities, because the carbon we need to capture has been released and distributed into the earths atmosphere.

The engineering required to scale out any existing or envisioned technology to put a meaningful dent just on our yearly emissions is more than simply replacing the worlds energy production with zero emissions generation and storage.

No. Why?

It isn't if you aren't a scientist in that field. As you're not qualified to do otherwise.

As a physicist in quantum sensing. I follow the science (opinion) of climate scientists as they're the experts of that field. And that opinion is constantly evolving, but I follow that.

Anything else is just being an armchair scientist.

Without a massive amount of renewable energy we won’t be able use CCS at scale.

> Carbon capture is being successfully used all around the world.

[Citation needed]

The closest we have are emissions reductions on power generation and other highly polluting facilities. Carbon capture of CO2 from the atmosphere is not being used successfully, anywhere. There are plenty of feel good articles about trials and test sites and experimental facilities, none of which are within multiple orders of magnitude of being capable of scaled out to the amounts needed. They all require such vast amounts of electricity that it would be better using that electricity to not emit the carbon in the first place. There are no technologies on the horizon that could even put a dent in our current yearly emissions, let alone clean up past excess. Yet it is used time and time again to sell carbon neutral plans and policies to the public, which will never reach their targets.

>existential threat to humanity in which case we have nothing to lose

Being under threat doesn't justify making things worst. I know I'll die some day but that's not a reason to be suicidal.

Climate change can be an existential threat to humanity and Geo-Engineering can make it worse at the same time.

It may functionally stop all new projects (although I doubt that it will get that far).

I don't see anything implying that existing projects approved under the old framework would need to be re-assessed and shutdown though. That was my main point.

All spending creates new money and all taxation destroys it (at the federal level). Where else does money come from if not the government?

Do you know of any entity other than the Norwegian government who issues NKR?

For a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

It's gross domestic product, not net.

The problem is that anytime someone attempts to quantify the cost of climate change, no one is happy with the numbers.

Reminds me of the mindset of the species in Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. They basically accepted that they would die fast due to toxins / radiation / disasters for "progress" / "efficiency", and instead just focused on trucking forward and breeding like mad.

GDP is just a measure, and it doesn’t include externalities. Any state or person is free to make up their own metric that includes it. Call it GDP_E and put it in every government report!

Saying it should include externalities is like saying that the scales at the butchers should include nutrition information with weight: that would be cool but that’s not what scales/weight measures are for.

If we're going to include negative externalities then someone has to figure out all the positive ones too. The economic upside of cheap energy isn't being accounted for in the price either, because low prices tautologically can't capture high value per unit and flows on to people further down the value chain.

The challenge of doing so is insurmountable, that way is the madness of centralised planning.

The cost of oil production in Norway is high compared to most OPEC countries, so net production will mostly flat. They can just loosen their grip a bit. The GDP would drop for nothing.

In general short term goals (like current GDP) often takes a hit when long term goals (like the cost of the externalities) gets added to the mix.

But you can't just max out that credit card all the time you know.

The environmental effects of stopping oil and gas production in Norway are not clear. Norway account for something like 2% of the worlds production. OPEC are already price fixing the market, and could (and propably would) easily replace Norways production. Some reports argue it will even increase emissions due to being replaced by less sustainable produciton.

The developing world is too dependent on oil and gas. Rapid degrowth in global oil and gas production would lead to mass hunger. It is only the developed world who can afford to stop using oil and gas at the moment. We have to replace the worlds energy needs with something else, before we take environmental choices to cut production. Third world countries suffer without cheap oil and gas.

Yes I actually found that first one myself, you'll note that there is explicitly no evidence. "I have met allies who can report [...] He declined to give details [...] Nato's press office said the remarks were Rasmussen's personal views, not official policy [...] geology, rather than political concerns, was likely to be the main obstacle". So this guy says the environmental groups have been compromised, they say they haven't been, he declines to give even the vaguest semblance of evidence.

Your second article starts with the exact same quotes from the same guy. It at least tries to outline some circumstantial evidence, but the author doesn't seem to find it very convincing and I don't either.

There were a number of articles in 2014 spurred by a single quote from this one person, and absolutely nothing since then. I think the circumstantial evidence against these claims is equally strong: anti-fracking activism was increasing worldwide around this time, including in countries like South Africa and Tunisia that are not particularly hostile towards Russia. You can see a good list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_by_country. Fracking is simply unpopular almost everywhere.

I don't doubt that Russia viewed fracking as an economic threat, but I will need even the tiniest bit of evidence before I seriously consider the possibility that actually fracking is very popular and people only protested because they were getting paid.

Because their renewable sector is growing faster than everything else? And has 3x the size of the vastly more rich USA?

I did not say they are 100% green. They have real constraints, mainly yes, they need economic growth first - so they also build coal (only some countries do not build coal plants anymore).

Okay then. Then that’s what their next plan of action is. I thought you were going for some kind of burn.

Fossil fuels will need to be left in the ground [1] [2], it's as simple as that. The value of those reserves and assets on books, if not naturally declining to zero, must be forced to zero. If nations or corporations act self interested and don't leave them in the ground [3], what do you expect to be done as the world burns? Nothing? That's not an option.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/climate-majority-of-fossil-f... ("The vast majority of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground to have even a 50% chance of keeping global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.")

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03821-8 ("Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to limit global warming to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial times1. However, fossil fuels continue to dominate the global energy system and a sharp decline in their use must be realized to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 °C (refs. 2,3,4,5,6,7). Here we use a global energy systems model8 to assess the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be left in the ground, regionally and globally, to allow for a 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. By 2050, we find that nearly 60 per cent of oil and fossil methane gas, and 90 per cent of coal must remain unextracted to keep within a 1.5 °C carbon budget. This is a large increase in the unextractable estimates for a 2 °C carbon budget9, particularly for oil, for which an additional 25 per cent of reserves must remain unextracted. Furthermore, we estimate that oil and gas production must decline globally by 3 per cent each year until 2050. This implies that most regions must reach peak production now or during the next decade, rendering many operational and planned fossil fuel projects unviable. We probably present an underestimate of the production changes required, because a greater than 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C requires more carbon to stay in the ground and because of uncertainties around the timely deployment of negative emission technologies at scale.")

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38506585 ("HN: Cop28 president says 'no science' behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels")

The way I understand it, the "uncertainty" about global warming as of 2024 is the same kind of uncertainty as whether an alcoholic with liver cancer can live three or six more months if he continues ignoring his doctor's advice.

I'm open to discussions about different approaches and their relative merits, but we're beyond the point where "we don't know how bad it will get" is a valid argument for anything.

Yes, climate change will negatively affect all countries. It might be possible for some countries to 'luck out' and gain productive land and improve agricultural yield. But all countries will suffer the global economic, humanitarian and military crisis.