https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19594153 (347 points, 129 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28780108 (115 points, 81 comments)
Original 2009 article:
http://archive.today/2022.06.15-104752/https://www.ft.com/co...
The UK and the Dutch just spent the money they got from the North Sea oil and at least the UK has little to show for it.
Anyway, the Norwegian economy is doing just fine without it, we bounced back from COVID faster than practically everywhere else and everywhere I look there are new commercial and industrial buildings going up.
The ideas that this decision can not be made in a hurry and that the spending can jump in size too quickly are reasonable. But the ones that there is absolutely nothing better to do with the money, and that most of it will be there in a large crisis when they need to withdraw are both ridiculous.
There's plenty to criticize about the Norwegian economy.
The taxation of the oil wealth is definitely a great success story, but how that money is used from year to year is very much a mixed bag. We have per-capita public expenditures approximately twice those of Sweden. Average household debt at 114% of income, third place globally. We don't build housing, same as California.
Oil money contributions to the national budget were approximately $6500 per capita in 2022, and on top of this we have a total taxation percentage on the order of 40% of income on average, if you do the honest calculation and look at all payments to the governments.
In addition we have an energy production infrastructure that's nominally almost 100% publicly owned, but now sell electricity to citizens at EU prices (~300% markup) with the surplus going into public budgets - this is additional taxation we're not talking about.
It could be worse and there are many things going right, but selling Norway as an unquestionable economic success story doesn't completely reflect reality.
My pet peeve about Norway and oil: How very few people ever call them out on being the Saudi Arabia of the north (well, minus the murders/various other kinds of oppressions).
They do so much (excellent!) PR that shows them being the ethical/environmental leaders.. that totally ignores the fact that they are the people making money on pumping old fossil remains out from their seabeds. If they really meant it, they could, like.. stop doing that? I mean, pick a lane.
And while stopping the pumps would probably wreak havoc on our economy, we could at least stop looking for new fields while emptying the ones we have for some more years. So slowly wean off the oil tit. But every time that's suggested, the government says "develop, not stop". And use straw men like "we can't stop abruptly!!", even though that's not the suggestion on the table. And they've used the same excuse for a decade to not do anything. If we actually started transitioning away from oil a decade ago, we would be better off. And if we at least started now we would be better off. But that can just gets kicked down the road.
Criticizing us for climate profiteering, or even war profiteering, as some European voices have done, is extremely intellectually dishonest coming from Sweden, which followed suit to Germany and shut down more than 1 GWh of nuclear energy generation capacity during an ongoing climate gas emission crisis.
The "starve the beast" strategy did not work for the Reagan tax cuts and it will not work for energy.
I can't really blame the Norwegians though - even if they care about the environment greatly, it would be hard for anyone to have a lifestyle based around their $250k income and to go back to a lifestyle based around having more normal $50k income.
It's quite simple - they should pick one: stop pumping up old fossil remains to sell to keep up their luxurious lifestyle or stop bragging about how clean they are.
In my opinion, a lot of people in the comment section don't get that there is a somewhat real concern that the abundance of oil revenue has made Norwegians less ambitious and innovative in comparison to what they could have been with that kind of a world-class education system, in comparison to its neighbours. And the greenwashing of the Norwegian oil industry is actually a real thing too.
(Here's the complete picture regarding the grid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...)
There are power cables between RG Nordic and RG Continental Europe/RG Baltic/RG GB but to my knowledge they are all via high voltage DC - so not AC phase synced.
without trashing the NORWEGIAN environment, but let's not whitewash over all of the CO2 they have unleashed on the world.
More generally, I think it will be interesting to see what happens next with Norway - while they have avoided the principle resource curse - what happens when all of these oil jobs disappear (10% of direct employment and probably up to 25% in an indirect sense)?
People are too quick to blame "state-owned monopolies" when the development and success of any producer is dependent on the gatekeepers of the global oil marketplace.
And then there's Norway. The sole exception.
I don't understand why we Europeans are so invested into the US economy when every American on twitter/reddit is saying the US dollar and economy is about to collapse. They might be wrong and are probably wrong but it is still incredibly stupid to invest in a country when its own citizens think it will collapse in a year or two.
