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Transportation

In Norway, the Electric Vehicle Future Has Already Arrived (nytimes.com) 240

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
About 80 percent of new cars sold in Norway are battery-powered. As a result, the air is cleaner, the streets are quieter and the grid hasn't collapsed. The New York Times: Last year, 80 percent of new-car sales in Norway were electric, putting the country at the vanguard of the shift to battery-powered mobility. It has also turned Norway into an observatory for figuring out what the electric vehicle revolution might mean for the environment, workers and life in general. The country will end the sales of internal combustion engine cars in 2025. Norway's experience suggests that electric vehicles bring benefits without the dire consequences predicted by some critics. There are problems, of course, including unreliable chargers and long waits during periods of high demand. Auto dealers and retailers have had to adapt. The switch has reordered the auto industry, making Tesla the best-selling brand and marginalizing established carmakers like Renault and Fiat.

But the air in Oslo, Norway's capital, is measurably cleaner. The city is also quieter as noisier gasoline and diesel vehicles are scrapped. Oslo's greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30 percent since 2009, yet there has not been mass unemployment among gas station workers and the electrical grid has not collapsed. Some lawmakers and corporate executives portray the fight against climate change as requiring grim sacrifice. "With E.V.s, it's not like that," said Christina Bu, secretary general of the Norwegian E.V. Association, which represents owners. "It's actually something that people embrace." Norway began promoting electric vehicles in the 1990s to support Think, a homegrown electric vehicle start-up that Ford Motor owned for a few years. Battery-powered vehicles were exempted from value-added and import taxes and from highway tolls. The government also subsidized the construction of fast charging stations, crucial in a country nearly as big as California with just 5.5 million people. The combination of incentives and ubiquitous charging "took away all the friction factors," said Jim Rowan, the chief executive of Volvo Cars, based in neighboring Sweden. The policies put Norway more than a decade ahead of the United States. The Biden administration aims for 50 percent of new-vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, a milestone Norway passed in 2019.
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In Norway, the Electric Vehicle Future Has Already Arrived More

In Norway, the Electric Vehicle Future Has Already Arrived

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    • Works even without hydro (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @03:48PM (#63530117) Homepage Journal

      Re:Hydroelectric generation

      In the US about 20% of our electric grid capacity comes from renewable sources (and about 40% from natural gas, 20% from nuclear, 19% from coal, and 1% other).

      Anyone who switches to an EV in the US will today be swapping 100% of an automobile carbon emissions for 80% immediately if you consider only renewable sources.

      You could also consider nuclear as non-carbon (although not renewable), and note that energy from natural gas is more efficiently generated than the energy generated from gasoline in your engine (and there are delivery costs), so one might reasonably consider a 40% reduction (100% to 60%) in carbon emissions directly, and even perhaps an extra 15% from the enhanced efficiency of using natural gas at the power station, for a total reduction of carbon footprint roughly 50%.

      You have to account for the carbon footprint used to make the EV vehicle, but then subtract the carbon footprint to make the alternate ICE vehicle. There's a fuckton of differing opinions and analyses for this, but so far as I can tell an EV takes about half the carbon footprint to produce than an equivalent ICE vehicle, and then an EV has a much longer expected lifetime (over 500,000 miles) compared to the cost of an ICE and its expected lifetime (about 300,000 miles).

      The energy cost (electricity versus gasoline) is about 1/3 for an EV. This was for a truck in NH (at 18MPG), which is on the high end of electricity costs. If electricity is cheap where you live, you might get this down to 1/4 the cost of gas. This plus the reduced maintenance costs yields a tremendous monetary savings over the life of the vehicle.

      The electric grid is spec'd to handle maximum load, which is around 5:00 PM in the summer (when everyone gets home from work and turns on their air conditioners), and EVs tend to charge overnight when there is minimum load, so the grid is expected to be able to handle a lot of EVs before capacity becomes an issue.

      I recently did a calculation with my existing truck and the amount of gas used and came to the conclusion that it was roughly equal to what I would have spent with an EV. This calculation did not include for reduced maintenance or the fact that I don't have to deal with a predatory dealership, and the dealership thing would have saved me a $4,000 screwing by itself.

      So if you can manage the larger up-front cost for an EV, over the life of the vehicle you will save quite a bit of money in the long run.

      Oh, and you will reduce your carbon footprint as well, if you care about that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        The electric grid is spec'd to handle maximum load

        Which electric grid is that? My neighborhood was designed with gas heat, hot water and cooking. We don't have much air conditioning in this part of the country. So the local distribution is sized for about 5 kW per house. Load diversity will allow individual households to run at several times that for short durations.

        They could upgrade the local distribution. But it's all underground. So that would mean digging up the streets or do a lot of horizontal boring. Both of which are expensive and won't make the

        • Re:Works even without hydro (Score:4, Informative)

          by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @09:00PM (#63531119)
          Legitimate concern, but even with a household budget of 5kw you could top off your EV without too much hassle. Sure, if you have a larger 80kw battery, and can only manage 2kw charge, it’s maybe something like a 2 day charge rate from empty to full. But it’s probably enough to gain 5-8 miles per hour, enough to satisfy most peoples EV needs. So yea, it’s no third megawatt, but if you can maintain your house with 3kw (no need for electric heat or oven) it’s an option.
          • You make a solid point that many people miss. You would rarely need to charge your car from empty to full. It's my impression that some people perceive a car like a phone. If you have a range of 400km, and drive 30km in a day, you don't need to put 100kWh back into the batteries, and you likely don't need to do it in an hour.

      • There's a fuckton of differing opinions and analyses for this, but so far as I can tell an EV takes about half the carbon footprint to produce than an equivalent ICE vehicle

        Studies have shown that an EV takes betweeen 1.5 and 2 times the CO2 emissions of an ICE car to manufacture. This is coming mainly from the battery, so the bigger the battery, the more miles/kms you need in an EV to offset that difference. You can look at this study [ademe.fr] from the ADEME (french energy thing), which shows (diagram page 4, you can understand it even if you are too lazy to translate the study):
        - an EV with a 22 kWh battery is better CO2 emissions-wise after ~20000 kms
        - an EV with a 60 kWh battery is

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      CAN WE REALLY TRUST NORWAY!?!?!?!?!?
      Norway scrapped covid protocols and masking much earlier than other countries. CLEARLY they don't understand the seriousness of covid. So how can we trust them on this.

      https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]

      Norway Ditches Face Masks as Covid Regulatory Measures Scrapped
      February 12, 2022

    • Re:Hydroelectric generation (Score:5, Informative)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @05:11PM (#63530445)

      It's not just that. Norway has a massive surplus hydro. They (and Swedes) are the main reason why Denmark still has an electric grid after they went for massive wind.

      Basically they have a deal with Swedish and Norwegian operators where when it's windy, Swedes and Norwegians slow down the hydro and collect water in reservoirs. And when wind is out, they start pushing collected excess through the turbines to compensate. This is the dream grid for intermittents and electric vehicles, because electricity generation is widely distributed, can be both ramped up as needed and actually collected into a gravity battery when not.

      The problem is that this sort of a perfect geography, where you have a long and relatively thin peninsula with rmountains going in the center throughout the peninsula, with seas on both ends generating significant precipitation is very, very rare. Mountains being not too high to have good passes running though them (and so rivers to dam and lakes to store water in at height in a natural reservoir), but also high enough to generate massive glaciers in winter? That basically doesn't really exist anywhere else.

      And the cherry on the pie is that it's actually really hard to traverse those mountains down the peninsula. So normally this wouldn't work for a unified grid. But because of how Swedish-Norwegian relations are, what happens is that Norway runs many of its interconnects into Sweden, down through relatively flat areas at the Eastern edge of Swedish side of the Scandinavian Peninsula, and then back into Norway. So Norway actually has two separate grids that aren't connected to one another directly. They're only connected to one another through Sweden.

      So you have perfect geography, perfect cultural alignment, perfect politics and perfect societal structures to enable the Norwegian-Swedish-Danish triangle to work the way it does. Remove even one factor and this wouldn't just not work. It would crash. For example, have a major political conflict between Sweden Norway, cutting the Swedish interconnect? Oslo would have had long blackouts last year, because they had very wet period in the Northern Norway and very dry in Southern (even with interconnects you had a hilarious 1000% or so spot price difference between Northern and Southern Norway in Nordpool), And if you find this hard to imagine, read up on last few centuries of Norwegian history.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teun ( 17872 )
        Yes these countries have well thought out cooperation on electrical power.
        My car is often charged via the Danish power grid where we have a so-called Flex contract, meaning the price changes per hour and is lowest when there is a lot of wind and/or sun.
        When time allows it, patience to wait for the right time for charging makes driving an EV quite cheap, even when you throw in the few times you can't wait for cheaper hours.

        With a wider grid to share many other countries can benefit, examples are the exis

        • Re:Hydroelectric generation (Score:5, Informative)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @07:53PM (#63530917)

          It's not well thought out at all. Danes almost fucked it up with sudden closure of coal plants, and they also had stages of illegal coal plants "we're legally closing them, but we're also legally preventing operators from closing them because our grid will collapse if we do".

          Not to mention the fact that Swedish grid operator some time during last two years just casually informed that they'll be billing Denmark triple for electricity transfer. With typical Swedish "all our neighbours are our inferior weird little brothers", they also made the same declaration to Finland.

          Denmark, having literally zero options just quietly paid. They understood correctly that if they try to haggle, the price will likely go up, not down and if they ever had a problem with transfers from Sweden, they would have blackouts. Many blackouts. As opposed to Finland's Fingrid people who upon receiving the message looked Svenska Kraftnät representatives in the face, and told them to pound sand. Because Finland has a far saner electricity policy and well diversified grid than Denmark. Though to be fair to Danes, Finnish Greens have been slowly pushing nuclear our in favour of wind too, down to having the infamous "memorial to selfishness" that has the names of politicians that approved Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant. It was an excellent ad for those politicians in the recent elections for having great foresight to diversify the grid further. This toxic anti-environmental and anthrophobic ideology is very much present in all Fennoscandic nations.

          As a result even failing as much as they did with all these idiotic things, it didn't stop them from massively oversubsidizing overbuilding wind, and even demanding that military takes down their early warning radar systems to allow for more overbuilding of wind. They luckily failed at that last one. For now.

          As for "but the other countries will have the same power", no, they will not. Nordic hydro is tapped out. What we can reasonably dam has been dammed. Where we can reasonably make natural reservoirs at altitude, it has been done. And even with that, Norway itself often has significant price spikes because of how distributed and separated its own grid is, and because of how awful the intermittence of Danish grid is. Basically power and grid companies in Sweden and Norway are exceptionally profitable, but consumers get utterly screwed because of Danish fuckups, as electricity bounces between negative and several hundreds of Euros per megawatt. Often within the same week, sometimes during the same day. Which makes industry have a horrible time having to insure itself against this as an example.

          So no. There's no power left over most of the time to feed Dutch and German grids. But unfortunately we have been forced to connect Nordpool to the central European version of it. And so now our price volatility is not just fucked by Danes, who have at least some sanity in their system. Now we're being routinely fucked by "we're saving the planet by transitioning from nuclear to lignite, because that totally makes sense" German Greens.

          • Nordpool is a common market for electricity, and before 2000 just for the Nordic countries. It has its origin in Norway and has now expanded into many other parts of Europe.

            Prices are set every hour and are decided by availability and demand. Pricing is divided into various regions and Denmark has two.

            You can see the day-ahead prices here: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/... [nordpoolgroup.com]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Teun ( 17872 )
            You are a bit off on the suggestion other countries want to have their share of (Norwegian) hydro electricity.
            The grid that interconnects the Scandinavian and now other North Western European countries works both ways, when there is an excess of (wind/solar) power in the south it is send north to help pump up the reservoirs.
            Like in The Netherlands they are now about to build a huge storage battery facility near the landing site of the cable(s) to Denmark, other cables are planned to Iceland where they hav

      • I guess, you're pining for the Fjords.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Fjods suck ass. Cold, hard to navigate, don't look that good.

          Visit the islands like Åland and Gotland if you want good scenery. Great boating, fairly easy to navigate, look pretty.

      • And you thought all those lovely crinkly bits were just for decoration.

      • It's not just that. Norway has a massive surplus hydro. They (and Swedes) are the main reason why Denmark still has an electric grid after they went for massive wind.

        Right, so better get started on copying that part then...

        Oh, wait, you thought that was an excuse to get out of having to do something?

  • As an oil/gas exporter, Norway has some advantages when it comes to funding the necessary infrastructure upgrades. These exports account for 20% of its GDP contribute greatly to the nation's wealth.

    Too bad we in he US don't learn that lesson as well, use our exports to fund such infrastructure. Instead we engage in greenwashing by limiting our production while increasing oil imports. Essentially off-shoring the accompanying pollution while not really changing consumption.

    • The US is a net exporter of oil.
      https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... [eia.gov]

      And most of oil imported to the USA (>50%) comes from Canada.

      The USA is also a big net exporter of gas. With 99% of imports coming from Canada
      https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl... [eia.gov]

      So how is the USA exactly off-shoring pollution exactly?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        So how is the USA exactly off-shoring pollution exactly?

        By reducing domestic production and asking for Saudi and Venezuela to sell us oil.

    • Re:As an oil/gas exporter, Norway ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by steinarb ( 10393809 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @03:26PM (#63530029)

      Common misconception.

      It isn't oil revenues that finances Norway's infrastructure, such as e.g. the chargers.

      The oil money is kept out of the home economy as much as possible. Instead the oil revenue is put in a fund that invests abroad [wikipedia.org].

      Public works, such as the mentioned chargers, are financed with taxes on the public and businesses.

      • Mod the above post up please. There is nothing that Norway has done here that any other first world nation couldnt do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Common misconception.

        It isn't oil revenues that finances Norway's infrastructure, such as e.g. the chargers.

        The oil money is kept out of the home economy as much as possible. Instead the oil revenue is put in a fund that invests abroad [wikipedia.org].

        Public works, such as the mentioned chargers, are financed with taxes on the public and businesses.

        Money is fungible. Without oil/gas revenue there would be no investment abroad? There would be no pension fund investments offshore? Or would such things also be funded from taxes on the public and business.

        Gov't revenue is gov't revenue, the ability to spend oil/gas revenue in one place just mean other revenue is available for other things. The oil revenue still benefits the latter.

    • Norway gets about 90% of electricity from hydro-power. But it is wind-power that is expected to grow the most during the next 30 years or so. The Nordic countries have a common market for electricity. Norway is a net exporter of electricity today (even to Germany and UK), and expected to remain so.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Norway gets about 90% of electricity from hydro-power. But it is wind-power that is expected to grow the most during the next 30 years or so.

        Thanks in part to decades of experience in oil/gas. The skills for building and operating offshore oil/gas drilling platforms are transferable to offshore wind farms.

    • You think the US is short on funding? Fucking bizarre.
      We can spend 2 Norwegian economies, yearly for a couple of decades to "gotcha fuckers" some assholes who murdered a bunch of people, and you think we can't afford to upgrade our infrastructure.

      Our problem isn't finding the funding. The problem is that ~40-60% of the population doesn't want to.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        You think the US is short on funding?

        Yes, because we spend a lot on stupid stuff. And we do wasteful things for optics like import oil instead of more fully develop domestic production.

        Also the scale of the necessary infrastructure is much greater than Norway. More people and more dispersed over a greater area.

        Our problem isn't finding the funding. The problem is that ~40-60% of the population doesn't want to.

        They want to, they just want the switch over guided by the market not politics. People will naturally gravitate toward EV as the tech improves.

  • do they have 3rd party repair / battery swaps there?
    do they let them put cars with unauthorized repairs (non dealer) on the charging black list

    • It's not clear that battery swaps will ever be needed in the vast majority of cars: Tesla gives update on battery degradation: only 12% after 200,000 miles [electrek.co].

  • They used a ton of resistive heating ... (Score:3)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @03:20PM (#63529993)

    They used more electricity for heating than pretty much any other country, their residential grid was already generously dimensioned to begin with. Other countries have more work to do.

    PS. Tesla really is the Apple of EV ... why would you get anything else and have to suffer the absolutely shit chargers from other brands or pay extra for the proper Tesla ones? Governments need to get their ass in gear and enforce proper quality metrics including strict downtime penalties on the charger industry, everyone who is not Tesla clearly need a gun to their head to not be shit. A couple companies need to get fined into bankruptcy to get this fixed.

    • PS. Tesla really is the Apple of EV ...

      Only in the sense that Apple had to do a massive recall of practically every laptop because of their shitty keyboard design, and Tesla had to do a massive recall of basically every car they sold in China. Tesla gets credit for kicking the industry in the ass, and making a great electric Lotus, but everything else is a seriously mixed bag.

      • Tesla failing to mass-produce the 35k Model 3 feels like a major missed opportunity, even though they likely could not afford it. You can make good money selling mid-premium cars, but in the grand scheme of the global car market that is a small area to grow in.

        Companies like BYD are likely going to end up eating their lunch in many of the markets, especially the lower-end if Musk keeps pursuing vapor ware projects like humanoid robots.

      • > Tesla had to do a massive recall of basically every car they sold in China

        By that logic Microsoft is recalling Windows many times a month and my Linux is being recalled daily.

        What Tesla did was just a software update that added new features. In the context of the contemporary car industry, 'recall' should be split into more precise sub-terms.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tizan ( 925212 )

      Indeed Apple is the leader in the US mainly and not much elsewhere...
      and yet yo get a new model every year.

      Similarly Chinese and Korean EVs are kicking ass on the world market right now...
      The Kia EV6 will charge from 20% to 80% in 18 mins on fast charger....nothing to sneeze at.
      In Europe you see more Peugeot and Renault EVs now and Volkswagen is gearing up with the bus ...which will have a high demand in the US with right price and fast charger capability.
      Tesla had its time....no new model year in and ye

    • They used more electricity for heating than pretty much any other country, their residential grid was already generously dimensioned to begin with. Other countries have more work to do.

      No that's not how this works. Grids are sized for peak demand regardless of how that demand forms. Using resistive heating didn't give Norway any head start over any other country. Their grid is generously dimensioned because people consume electricity generously, and adding an EV causes identical problems to any other country.

      The simple answer is Norway planned ahead. They've been investing in their grid for over a decade in anticipation for this, and they continue to invest now (major MAJOR project underw

  • Not really saving the environment, until they stop extracting and exporting oil. It is a step forward, but they need to find a new revenue source to power the economy.

  • Interesting test case, but same problems (Score:4, Insightful)

    by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @03:33PM (#63530063)

    The air is cleaner. That's definitely a good thing. However, Norway has also shown that the two biggest problems remain.

    First, scaling up charging practically is a problem. Addressing charging for the richer people that can charge at home or at work is the easier part. However, a large part of the population will need charging stations, and those stations will need to be provisioned for peak usage. Since provisioning for peak usage loses money for vendors and requires too much parking space, that won't happen. So, there will be lines. Even with just a third of cars in Norway being electric, there are long lines. And the problem won't just get worse linearly. The remaining people who haven't bought electric cars yet will be the ones who tend to not be able to charge at home or work and will make the lines at the charging stations longer.

    Second, electric cars and infrastructure require lots of money. Norway is subsidizing that cost with its huge oil export revenues. And it hasn't yet addressed subsidizing the cost of cars for poor people, i.e., a large portion of the remaining people who haven't yet bought electric cars. There are exemptions for VAT and highway tolls, but those aren't so meaningful for poor people compared to the cost of the car. The only way to get poor people to buy electric cars are to either provide government subsidies or to encourage the market to produce cheaper cars. Then again, maybe the government doesn't way this, since pricing poor people out of the car market improves traffic congestion at the arguable expense of income inequality.

    It's not clear how Norway's situation can be extended to other countries. Most countries don't have the benefit of $180 billion in oil/gas exports to fund electric car expansion. And more importantly, most countries don't generate 95% of their electricity from hydroelectric plants, so the improvement in air quality won't match Norway's.

    • Every problem with 'building out infrastructure' is, well, the same 'problem' that automobiles had back in the early 1900s when they were introduced. In other words, problems that are dead easy to solve. It's not like there was a network of gas stations, then suddenly somebody invented cars to make use of them.

      Hell, things like the Michelin Book were invented to give people a reason to travel in their new cars.

      Hell, it's easier to put a charging station somewhere by running high voltage cables than it is to excavate a giant fuel tank and deliver gas in a tanker however often.

    • The air is cleaner. That's definitely a good thing. However, Norway has also shown that the two biggest problems remain.

      First, scaling up charging practically is a problem. Addressing charging for the richer people that can charge at home or at work is the easier part. However, a large part of the population will need charging stations, and those stations will need to be provisioned for peak usage. Since provisioning for peak usage loses money for vendors and requires too much parking space, that won't happen. So, there will be lines. Even with just a third of cars in Norway being electric, there are long lines. And the problem won't just get worse linearly. The remaining people who haven't bought electric cars yet will be the ones who tend to not be able to charge at home or work and will make the lines at the charging stations longer.

      At the same time more people will get charging stations at home and apartment buildings will even start installing them in parking stalls. Lots of businesses will add them and there will maybe even chargers for street parking. The nice thing with electricity is it's a lot easier to transport than gas.

      There's definitely congestion during the transition, but it's a problem that largely goes away.

      Yes, charging is slower that pumping gas so it really sucks if you need to hang around for an extended period to do

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teun ( 17872 )
        When it is about improving the environment it is fine that the richer are the first to get EV's.
        Have a look at a site that lists the countries by the CO2 emissions per capita and you'll see the vast majority of CO2 is emitted by the rich.

    • So, there will be lines. Even with just a third of cars in Norway being electric, there are long lines.

      You're being disingenuous. There are no "long lines" except for a few rare exceptions. A quick Google search will reveal that that just a tad over 60% of EV owners reported queuing... at any point in the past year. A bit more digging will show that the majority of those queues were limited to just a couple of days a year, specifically the start / end of summer holidays where northern Europe engages in that favourite pass time activity of the holiday roadtrip.

      Nearly all EV owners will not face a queue for th

  • There are many die-hard ICE fans that will spend a lot of energy defending ICE vehicles, until they actually use a devent EV for longer than a couple of days. I have strictly owned EVs for the past 10 years or so. There is no going back to ICE for most of us EV owners. ICE is going the way of horse carriages. Yes, they are still around. But not practical for most purposes.

  • Fact: Most people live in cities. We need to invest in low & zero carbon ways to move people around in cities because that's where we can make the biggest reductions in greenhouse gas & particulate pollution emissions. Private cars, even EVs, aren't a good solution.

    Cities that are convenient & cheap to get around in tend to have extensive, interconnected networks of rail, light rail, trams, & metro, with buses serving the lowest frequency/density areas. It's also beneficial to populations

    • Fact: Most people live in cities. We need to invest in low & zero carbon ways to move people around in cities because that's where we can make the biggest reductions in greenhouse gas & particulate pollution emissions. Private cars, even EVs, aren't a good solution.

      Well, Norway has that covered too. Oslo has an extensive mass transit network and they relatively recently decided to more or less eject cars from the centre and published their new road building regulations which mandate all sorts of th

  • No they won't. They keep pumping it from the ground, selling it to buyers who will use it for the usual things done with petrochemical products - like running ICEs.

    So EVs in Norway may be nice for local air quality, noise levels and virtue signaling, but they will not mean any fossil fuels remain unused.

    • Is it relevant? I mean if Norway stops selling oil will you stop driving? I'd argue that every drop of oil Norway sells overseas is a drop of oil that is produced under high quality western environmental standards. The emissions from digging oil of the ground in Norway are not the same as say Turkmenistan or Saudi Arabia.

    • If EU retains its economic power and goes to net zero in 2050 with carbon border taxes, a lot of the oil will stay in the ground simply because their recovery costs are pretty high. Those are big ifs of course, EU could become irrelevant while the US waffles.

      https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]

  • Norway can afford luxury beliefs as it has an enormous sovereign fund created by taxing sales of fossil fuels to the rest of the world. This has been used to subsidise the purchase of EVs. They also have a grid that is powered by hydroelectricity. So yes, in context they can afford it and it makes sense. It is not a model the restt of the world can or will follow.

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