[DerJacques]

I can't help but being impressed by Norway and the decisions they have made in regards to their 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.

[nwatson]

They have an Iraqi immigrant [1] to thank for their far-sighted policies. Farouk al-Kasim moved to Oslo in 1968 for family health reasons and was in the right time and place to help steer Norway's national policy toward unexpected oil wealth shortly after.

(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...

[maaaats]

I linked to it this weekend, and it ended up as a top-level post on HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19594153

[airstrike]

https://outline.com/zgaw23

This is such an unbelievable story. Thanks for sharing. TIFL!

[piokoch]

I hate to be cynical, but isn't this decision made also because oil prices are very low now? It's not as low as in the '60, but adjusting for inflation it is not that much higher. Norway is a very small country in terms of population, it does not need much oil for its own needs so it makes perfect sense to keep it for times when prices will go up.

[Broken_Hippo]

No is the short answer.

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.

[Arn_Thor]

No, a majority of the big political parties are for oil exploration in this area, including (until very recently) the Labour party. The reason they have done a 180 on this and blocked the proposal for oil exploration there is because of pressure from the youth wing of their party, who are vocally against it and have been so for decades. There is no grand calculus, just a political reality. In fact part of the labor party is very upset because some labour organizations have been in favor of oil and gas exploration there because of the jobs it would bring.

[cheez]

The population of Norway is smaller than the city in which I live. I would say the city in which I live often teeters between sustainability and the opposite. Is there some limit to human organization scale where we can be effective?

[astrodust]

It's an attitude thing.

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.

[hcurtiss]

Correction -- China went all in on solar AND coal.[1] These stories that China is going through some kind of environmental renaissance are fiction.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

[cheez]

Interesting. So I suppose culture is important. Do we want to build a culture of sameness which allows for this kind of pivoting? I'm not so sure.

[astrodust]

It's not sameness so much as getting everyone on the same page.

A multitude of opinions is fine so long as they're not the polar opposite or just pure obstructionism.

[bagacrap]

They've tried to build a sustainable future? The majority of their economy has for decades been built around enabling the rest of the world to burn fossil fuels. Now, much later, with large and well-managed cash reserves from said activities, they're exporting less oil than physically possible. Thanks Norway.

[nugga]

>The majority of their economy has for decades been built around enabling the rest of the world to burn fossil fuels.

I just had this mental image of a drug cartel trying to go legit and leaving their criminal past behind.

[bamboozled]

It seems they’re just trying to relocate their operations elsewhere. https://www.fightforthebight.org.au/

[DerJacques]

By "they" you refer to the oil companies? Sure, they will go wherever there's oil to be found.

It's the Norwegian politicians/people that I praise.

[mlthoughts2018]

One huge caveat is that divestment from oil / fossil fuels is in no sense a moral, ethical or socially responsible act, yet lots of organizations (like famous universities or the Norway sovereign wealth fund) try to play the divestment card to curry goodwill and social signaling.

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.

[moosey]

Or everyone could stop pumping oil _right now_. Economics are great and all, but economics is an abstraction layer on top of production - and the economics that we use today are basically spaghetti code on top of production.

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.

[mlthoughts2018]

I’m only discussing divestment. There are plenty of other things worth pursuing and Norway is doing well in many of them. I just think it’s important to get the story straight on divestment specifically.

[sgt101]

Good thought experiment.

We need a transition and repair story, not a "stop civilisation" story.

[astrodust]

People made huge sacrifices in World War II to stop an imminent threat. They stopped driving. They stopped leaving the lights on. They cut back on everything.

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.