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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Using oil to fuel your pivot off oil, economically or directly for energy, strikes me as the most sensible use of oil for any nation.

What's upsetting is how much of the oil burned so far, and continuing to be burned today, is completely frivolous and unnecessary. To still be carrying on this way when we still haven't pivoted from fossil fuels as a species, given clear evidence we're headed for global climate disaster, is completely asinine.

We need something like a carbon tax something fierce, it needs to be cost prohibitive to fly across the country by jet for a weekend change of scenery and some instagram selfies.

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Norway is the quintessential don’t get high on your own supply oil dealer. Subsidize green energy while fueling the world. NIMBY.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-sweden-electricity...

98% power comes from renewable energies. Quite impressive.[2] They were in 13th place last year for oil production and about the same as Saudi Arabia if you look at per capita oil production. Per capita they are on par with most middle eastern countries.[3] Only difference is they fund their country via the oil fund not some monarch kleptocracy family.

[2] https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/energy/renewable-energy...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_pro...

> Only difference is they fund their country via the oil fund not some monarch kleptocracy family.

This is not the case though. The government for the first time ever withdrew funds from the fund in 2016 while the fund has been around since the 70s

In general oil is really important for the governments budget but not through the fund but taxation instead (both the companies and the highly paid workforce)

> is completely frivolous and unnecessary

How so? Would people not stop polluting voluntarily if it's so frivolous?

Instead, there are protests like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

That's what happens when policymakers don't consider the effect on people's livelihoods.

The moral of the story: if you add a carbon tax, don't let it push large numbers of the population downward on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Nobody who loses their job due to climate change policy will give a shit about the planet, unless/until they get another job.

How was this tax supposed to help the people it taxed curb their emissions?

Or was it just going into some pension fund for underproductive bureaucrat?

Buying plastic crap from amazon, commuting to office work every day, SUV's, eating too much meat, flying halfway accross the globe for a business meeting or vacation. It all still happens (though Corona proved how much if that was not needed) , and all is frivolous. And all will stop when the oil runs out, or would be greatly reduced if the oil price is set at say 10x the current level

I was just thinking the other day about how much flying for business meetings is done for the point of having somewhere to fly to. It’s purely a lifestyle thing dressed up as some kind of necessity.

A high-ranking coworker of mine is flying out to NYC for a meeting next week. This is a guy who’s been working from home since covid started. Why all of a sudden does he need to fly anywhere? Why can’t another zoom call work?

If and when we have full-fledged businesses on the moon corporate execs are going find a reason to fly there too, just to tell people that’s what they’re doing.

I agree, it's easy to be complicit, and I think it counts. I personally have stopped all of the activity you mention, and I used to do quite a bit of it.

They have a giant oil fund ($1.3T) already, why not use that? Show some balls like Greenland just did.

You are shifting the blame from the entitity who pumps to oil up from the sea bed to the entity which combusts it. Why?

Possibly because an invasion of Norway with the tacit approval of the EU wouldn't be as much of a stretch as you imagine.

The oil must flow. Look at Venezuela if you believe otherwise.

This TV series was mostly bad, but sometimes exciting. I saw it all, unfortunately. Did you actually take the premise seriously?

Norway getting invaded because they removed 2% of the global oil supply is not realistic.

I'm not familiar with the series, my opinion comes from my time working in the industry. Based on what I saw there I do not believe that any profitably-extractable reserves will be left unexploited simply because their current owners decide to take them off the market, too many powerful interests have too strong an incentive to change any such policy one way or another.

I have no problem with the entity combusting it if they're doing it to drive their nation's pivot off fossil fuels.

Surely Norway sells its oil to nations manufacturing the very things Norway requires to build its green future.

My problem is with frivolous waste of oil and the externalized costs of its use being placed on future generations enabling such waste.

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