Ironic that the first country to ditch ICE cars is also a country whose economy is heavily dependent on fossil fuel extraction.
If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs?
If everyone else switches to EVs, where will Norway get the money for its own EVs?
This question doesn't even make sense. EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership. There are clear signs that we will soon see EVs that are outright cheaper to buy than ICE, and that replacing a battery will be cheaper than replacing an ICE engine.
This whole EV transition isn't something that's costing Norway money. It's an investment which is already paying huge dividends.
Norway is now building the worlds largest undersea tunnel, and they found that due to the high share of EVs in Norway, they could save 30 million dollars on the project due to decreased requirement for active ventilation. There are lots of examples like this.
The number of car fires in Norway is going down, as EVs are ~10-20 times less likely to catch fire. While each EV fire takes a bit more work to put out, it's not 10-20 more work than an ICE.
Norway can already measure significant decreases in air pollution. What impact do you think that has on the public health insurance expenses?
You should also know that Norway's economy is surprisingly diversified for an oil nation. Norway was fairly wealthy before oil, and will still be wealthy after oil. There are still huge natural resources (hydropower, fishing, etc), a fair amount of industry and manufacturing (Hydro, Yara, ..), a decent tech sector. And after all, a lot of the profits from the fossil fuel extraction has been put into one of the worlds largest sovereign wealth funds, which could be used to help bootstrap more industry in the transition away from oil.
> EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars when it comes to Total Cost of Ownership
Are you talking about Norway or in general? Because overall I highly doubt that if we're talking about US/EU markets. In Norway EVs are heavily subsidized and ICEs are on the contrary taxed, so this might be true there. But in Europe ICE cars of comparable class are probably cheaper when looking at TCO, especially given abysmal depreciation of EV batteries. From quick googling it seems that EVs are _sometimes_ cheaper when one factors in tax cuts and/or subsidies and only on the horizon of ~4 years +- one year. Given the average lifetime of a car of ~10 years (now closer to 12), EV will be much, much more expensive than ICE when averaged across population.
EVs are cheaper than ICE cars in China or if they are imported from China without tariffs. Do we really want to go that way?
> save 30 million dollars on the project due to decreased requirement for active ventilation
> The number of car fires in Norway is going down, as EVs are ~10-20 times less likely to catch fire
These sound like a rounding error when estimating net effects of EV vs ICE.
> Norway can already measure significant decreases in air pollution. What impact do you think that has on the public health insurance expenses?
Norway always had exceptionally clean air. I think that this impact is not measurable.
I think the question makes total sense, as does your reply. :-)
If we get to a world where fossil fuels are worthless, then society as a whole will likely be in a world unrecognizable from our own, and problems would likely be thought of in a different way.
This page says thay have about 1.1 Trillion dollars in Equities (after converting from NOK):
https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/#/
Which is about 1% of the total global market cap of about 109 Trillion or so.
The other investments aren't stocks.
USA has 60x the population of Norway. So the American equivalent would be rich enough to own… 90% of all listed companies in the world!
That’s just a provocative thought experiment. But it highlights the stark difference between how nations allocate their wealth. Some have centibillionaire oligarchs and airplane carriers and space programs, others have well-managed sovereign wealth funds and universal healthcare.
Have you met people? Have you worked for the US govt or large enterprise? My gut tells me this would be a huge misallocation of funds and destructive to business if it were to be replicated in the US.
Indeed America now has "innovators capable of making humanity multi-planetary" (whom some would call egoistic oligarchs) + mostly shit government (and politicians who want to keep it that way).
Could it have taken a different path in the past to instead have well-managed national wealth and less dick-shaped chrome rockets? Would that still be possible?
That problem seems sadly so far away in the future, that Norway likely would not need to worry about it, even if they wouldn't have meaningful industry otherwise already.
I wonder how long it will take though for oil demand to go down significantly.
Most countries don't have access to as much cheap and clean electricity, so it makes less sense both economically and ecologically for them.
> Annual emissions from the combustion of exported Norwegian oil and gas are approximately 500 million tons of CO2, which is at least ten times higher than Norway’s annual domestic emissions
https://www.nhri.no/en/report/canary-in-the-coal-mine/5-norw...
They're much smarter than other countries with similar populations and exporting as much oil though (Kuwait, UAE), but clearly it's a cheat code in Europe
That's false, though a common myth. Norway was already a fairly wealthy country before the discovery of oil. Norway was always fairly strong in trade, and after it got hydro-power there were already industry giants like Norsk Hydro, and there was plenty of natural resources other than oil.
Norway is surprisingly diversified for an oil nation. Just look at a breakdown of exports of Norway vs other countries where oil/gas dominate.
Qatar: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qatar_Product_Export...
Norway: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Product_Expor...
While oil/gas is a huge share of exports, since there's hundreds of various industries that's already well-established, it's not gonna be too hard for those industries to absorb the capital and labor which is freed up when the oil/gas industry winds down.
My experience with an industry outside of oil and gas in Norway, is that the industry has a growth which has been severely hampered by lack of capital and lack of labor. We could easily double in size over the span of a decade, if the capital and labor pool doubled.
It is misconception that Norway was poor before it found oil. Statistically Norway did as well as or better than – based on GNP per capita – most other European countries from 1830-1938; similar to Germany, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...