Oil firms forced to consider climate effects of new drilling, rules Norway court | Hacker News Reader

Oil firms forced to consider climate effects of new drilling, rules Norway court

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51 pointsbo0tzz44 comments

The requirement is for the government to produce an impact statement (including carbon emissions in foreign countries and emissions from e.g. combustion) as part of the plan for development and operations that is presented to parliament for approval. This follows from the Supreme Court decision in 2020.

There is also a temporary injunction on further developments and decisions related to these three oil fields until the validity of the plan has been decided.

The District Court ruling was appealed by the government yesterday.

Edit:

Machine translated judgement: https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-sweden-stateless/2...

Court documents (mostly in Norwegian, some witness presentations in English): https://www.greenpeace.org/norway/dokumenter-fra-oslo-tingre...

One of the richest countries is considering leaving oil, and by association, money in the ground.

If only they could make a deal with Canada to swap these oil fields for leaving tar sands in the ground, that would be even better.

Lots of countries are going to have to make this selfless decision if we're going to get a handle on climate change. I don't want to guess what the odds of that are.

Technology is probably still our best hope.

It's bullshit. Us(Norway) not pumping oil doesn't change anything. The problem isn't pumping, the problem is burning. We need to reduce the demand, not the supply. Reducing supply from Norway just causes other suppliers to scale up and the end result is exactly the same. Until they run out and we pump up this oil anyway because the world needs oil and nobody's addressing that part of the problem.

Your argument doesn't make any sense. If they pump it out of the ground, someone WILL burn it. If they don't, it can't be burned.

Also: less oil -> higher price -> less burning

You don't understand my argument. If they don't pump it, someone else will pump more to compensate and we'll end up pumping it up later anyway.

I don't think there's going to be transport ships docked for lack of fuel just because Norway doesn't develop some oil fields. And I think once supply some day gets to a point where oil price skyrockets, we'll probably end up developing them then - they'll revisit the case and circumstances changed (or maybe just politicians changed) and they'll suck it up anyway.

Or maybe US/Russia/whoever will come liberate it. I mean I doubt that's happening any time soon but it's definitely a real possibility in a future scenario where resources are dwindling.

> If you don't pump it, we'll end up pumping it up later anyway.

Well just give up now then.

Let's assume we can have enough sense to decide not to pump it and leave it that way. Then it's a win.

Yeah but pointless performative self sacrifice is kind of our thing.

Call it environmentalism if you like, but there is a strategic advantage to leaving more of it in the ground, ready to be pulled up later on as the need arises.

Norway doesn't need the money from additional drilling right now. They might need the money later. Or NATO may need the oil directly later...

My first thought was your last statement. Absolutely spot on

Also, oil is pretty good at powering engines but utterly essential for making things.

Rotating machinery, linear machinery, turbine oil for wind farms, dielectric oil used in transformers and other HV electronics, cooling oil, cutting oil, gearboxes, almost all plastics, and hydraulics are all essentially oil based processes.

The reason machinery can run for any significant length of time? It’s almost always oil.

If it moves, it likely has oil in it. People really only think of it as a fuel for vehicles, but it is so very, very much more important for its other roles.

As potent as it is for a fuel, we should be focused on not burning it as it’s essential for civilization in ways people do not broadly realize yet.

But the quantities needed for the rest of the applications are so much smaller.

It’s about 25% of every barrel we pull out of the ground. It’s not insignificant.

Then we could avoid the worst sources such as tar sands, fracking, arctic deep sea etc.

Burning it in search of its replacements is a decent idea as well, though.

We know the replacements for oil for energy, especially electrical demand, we're just unwilling to go through the social changes and costs to get there quickly. The US and Europe could have been on an entirely nuclear and renewable energy mix for electricity a decade ago if the social will had been there to force it but there's a lot of money in the existing industries to lobby against that.

Well, there's a lot of lobbying from Greenpeace that's set nuclear back a few decades. It's not just industry.

Industry is the real money behind it though. The waste disposal issue in the US because we don't reprocess our spent fuel was a legitimate issue but it was over reacted too along with big scares like Chernobyl and TMI. Singular events like that stick out a lot more than the slow poisoning from coal and gas plants but that's just a fact of human psychology and the difficultly of definitively attributing deaths to slow environmental poisons like that.

It might be the real money (who knows), but I think public and political sentiment was massively swayed by Greenpeace.

On the other hand, even here and even today people argue "if we don't do it someone else will" to resist switching from oil to anything else. So I wouldn't blame it on the industrial lobby, or at least not entirely. The status quo is a powerful argument.

Isn’t that the plot of Waterworld?

Ignoring oil reserves would be a silly way of storing value, as it is an asset that requires years of work to access and is thus is extremely illiquid. Even then, once production wells are completed, the value trickles out slowly over time, limiting its usefulness. If you actually want a strategic store of value, you would pump the oil, sell it, and store the proceeds in liquid assets, where the sum total of the value extracted is available instantly.

Further, there is no shortage of oil reserves globally, so the "save it for later" argument makes little sense.

I think the parent meant that in case of war you can't fuel your tanks with money.

I'm not sure how important the difference is in practice, offshore oil drilling sounds like something that can be easily disrupted during a war.

Whereas you can fuel your tanks with unrefined oil that's half a mile under the ground?

In terms of military strategy, your argument might make sense, but it's unsound from a purely economic perspective. Norway's solution is far better: Drill the oil now, export it, and invest the money abroad. From the perspective of the domestic economy, the result is mostly the same, but now the money multiplies abroad, and is far more easily available when it's needed.

If so that would be an unintended side effect. This was an ideologically driven activist ruling that the majority of the population is opposed to, and which is being appealed by the government.

These rules mainly encourage imports of oil from counties with less strict regulations, who are often less reliable partners as we have seen in recent times. Somehow farming is important enough to require protectionism (despite having large greenhouse gas emissions) but not energy.

How come Norway, literally "the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East" [1], responsible for over exploitation of fisheries, is also a pioneer in enforcing rules like these. I'm not complaining, I just find it unexpected, perhaps I'm missing something.

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

How weird.

Putting all responsibility on the seller.

Why not

"car owners should consider climate effects of pumping the car with gas"

"shoppers should consider climate effects of buying food in a grocery store"

Haven’t we all done our carbon footprint calculations for 20 years since oil company BP popularized the term[1]? The idea is exactly to diffuse the responsibility to tiny units so that no one is actually doing enough harm to really matter. Handful of companies are doing the producing side of the equation and it’s so much easier to do meaningful actions in that side. Problem is that we really do need oil so it’s easier said than done.

[1] https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

>Putting all responsibility on the seller.

It's a share responsibility. If the seller is domestic (under local laws), they're responsible and can't sell if sales doesn't follow climate change regulations. But if seller is foreign (not under local laws), then buyer can be help responsible.

It's a transaction so both parties should be responsible.

Cars, yeah, that’s a big decision, making the right pick is a responsibility that lots of people fail at. It is all well documented, MPG is provided, so you just have to make the right pick.

Groceries, unfortunately the carbon cost is not obvious, food grown in one country, shipped to another, processed and packed in a third country. It’s all a convoluted mess. If the companies were required to track and report their carbon cost on the box, maybe we could start talking about personal responsibility.

In general burning fossil fuels is way of externalizing a cost onto the planet (cheap energy as long as you don’t account for the environment). Companies receiving this free subsidy from the environment have an advantage over companies that don’t receive the subsidy, and it is basically impossible to detect who is receiving the subsidy from the outside. We need to correct this evasion of normal market forces.

That the responsibility is in the end of the whole pipeline (the consumer) is 90% of the environmental propaganda—plastic bags, plastic straws, consumer lifestyle.

Is that so weird? I do all those things that you are quoting.

Look up the best selling cars in America. We buy big cars and trucks. Lots of them!

It’s the science religion’s concept of Original Sin. Everything you do requires penance.

That's one way to look at it. I prefer to think of it as "everything that I do requires me thinking about the consequences". I can see how that can feel like "penance" for someone not used to do it. It's not that bad. It's less difficult than going to the gym.

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