If a house was on fire, what would you consider a win to put it out? Or would you do everything possible to put it out? As the climate continues to rapidly change, the tolerance for extraordinary measures would rise I would imagine (especially amongst youth cohorts who will inherit the cleanup over the next ~100 years).

Shareholder value had a cost (industrialization in general [1]), and now it must be paid back.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

Reading the article, none of that seems to be in scope for the decision. The decision seems to focus on the fact these new locations didn't adequately meet their existing impact analysis requirements in the first place, not that the impact was deemed unacceptable.

We already have a massive sovereign wealth fund built from investments seeded by oil income.

Last year, large phosphate deposits were found in Norway, effectively doubling the known world supply. Given a similar taxation model, we could keep growing the wealth fund even as we phase out the oil industry over time.

Though oil industry phase-out is not something with a political consensus behind it right now anyway. Labour and the conservatives tend to reach across the aisle on that topic.

"And that's what a comprehensive assessment will include"

Do you have evidence of this? A typical assessment of impacts, especially any environmental assessment I have ever heard of, only focuses on the negatives.

In general short term goals (like current GDP) often takes a hit when long term goals (like the cost of the externalities) gets added to the mix.

But you can't just max out that credit card all the time you know.

Okay then. Then that’s what their next plan of action is. I thought you were going for some kind of burn.

Yes, climate change will negatively affect all countries. It might be possible for some countries to 'luck out' and gain productive land and improve agricultural yield. But all countries will suffer the global economic, humanitarian and military crisis.

All spending creates new money and all taxation destroys it (at the federal level). Where else does money come from if not the government?

Do you know of any entity other than the Norwegian government who issues NKR?

Yes I actually found that first one myself, you'll note that there is explicitly no evidence. "I have met allies who can report [...] He declined to give details [...] Nato's press office said the remarks were Rasmussen's personal views, not official policy [...] geology, rather than political concerns, was likely to be the main obstacle". So this guy says the environmental groups have been compromised, they say they haven't been, he declines to give even the vaguest semblance of evidence.

Your second article starts with the exact same quotes from the same guy. It at least tries to outline some circumstantial evidence, but the author doesn't seem to find it very convincing and I don't either.

There were a number of articles in 2014 spurred by a single quote from this one person, and absolutely nothing since then. I think the circumstantial evidence against these claims is equally strong: anti-fracking activism was increasing worldwide around this time, including in countries like South Africa and Tunisia that are not particularly hostile towards Russia. You can see a good list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_by_country. Fracking is simply unpopular almost everywhere.

I don't doubt that Russia viewed fracking as an economic threat, but I will need even the tiniest bit of evidence before I seriously consider the possibility that actually fracking is very popular and people only protested because they were getting paid.

The environmental effects of stopping oil and gas production in Norway are not clear. Norway account for something like 2% of the worlds production. OPEC are already price fixing the market, and could (and propably would) easily replace Norways production. Some reports argue it will even increase emissions due to being replaced by less sustainable produciton.

The developing world is too dependent on oil and gas. Rapid degrowth in global oil and gas production would lead to mass hunger. It is only the developed world who can afford to stop using oil and gas at the moment. We have to replace the worlds energy needs with something else, before we take environmental choices to cut production. Third world countries suffer without cheap oil and gas.

It takes orders of magnitude more power to capture the carbon from the atmosphere than was gained putting it there in the first place.

It requires sucking in and processing inconceivable quantities of air requiring inconceivable amounts of land for the facilities, because the carbon we need to capture has been released and distributed into the earths atmosphere.

The engineering required to scale out any existing or envisioned technology to put a meaningful dent just on our yearly emissions is more than simply replacing the worlds energy production with zero emissions generation and storage.

Carbon capture technologies produce more carbon emissions than they can capture if you account for the resource use for production and construction. Even when they do slightly better than breaking even the margin is so low that scaling it up is not a meaningful contribution relative to the amount of emissions we would need to counteract. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Geo engineering to the degree necessary to revert climate change is bad sci-fi, not science, no matter what billionaires selling personal EVs are telling you.

On the other hand we know that we are seeing an immense problem of overproduction which is incentivized by the economic system and impossible to tackle by blaming consumers for bad choices and asking the industry nicely to reduce waste or letting them get away with greenwashing by planting trees and raising honey bees. We could change that but it would require significant market intervention, which we (most Western nations at least) have been ideologically opposed to for decades.

It may functionally stop all new projects (although I doubt that it will get that far).

I don't see anything implying that existing projects approved under the old framework would need to be re-assessed and shutdown though. That was my main point.

For a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

If we're going to include negative externalities then someone has to figure out all the positive ones too. The economic upside of cheap energy isn't being accounted for in the price either, because low prices tautologically can't capture high value per unit and flows on to people further down the value chain.

The challenge of doing so is insurmountable, that way is the madness of centralised planning.

GDP is just a measure, and it doesn’t include externalities. Any state or person is free to make up their own metric that includes it. Call it GDP_E and put it in every government report!

Saying it should include externalities is like saying that the scales at the butchers should include nutrition information with weight: that would be cool but that’s not what scales/weight measures are for.

Reminds me of the mindset of the species in Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. They basically accepted that they would die fast due to toxins / radiation / disasters for "progress" / "efficiency", and instead just focused on trucking forward and breeding like mad.

It's gross domestic product, not net.

The problem is that anytime someone attempts to quantify the cost of climate change, no one is happy with the numbers.

The cost of oil production in Norway is high compared to most OPEC countries, so net production will mostly flat. They can just loosen their grip a bit. The GDP would drop for nothing.

The evidence is all there, you just refuse too see it as such.

We are counting orders of economic effects, not orders of physical effects.

Burning fossil fuels releases CO2 and other chemicals into the air. Many of the other chemicals directly harm your health when you breath them in, so thatthis air pollution, which is a first order physical effect, is also a first order economic effect.

On the other hand, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, another first order physical effect, has no economic impacts. Breathing in an extra 50ppm of CO2 has little impact on us, perhaps a bit to plants. So the first order physical effect of excess CO2 is not an economic effect. But second order physical effect of excess CO2 is increased atmospheric temperature, which again on its has very little economic impact. Its really the third order physical effects of CO2 (higher variability in rains and seasons, storms, melting glaciers) where we really see the economic impacts (failed crops, destruction of property and human life etc). All of these things cause large direct economic damage, so that is your first order negative economic effect of fossil fuels.

Because their renewable sector is growing faster than everything else? And has 3x the size of the vastly more rich USA?

I did not say they are 100% green. They have real constraints, mainly yes, they need economic growth first - so they also build coal (only some countries do not build coal plants anymore).

>existential threat to humanity in which case we have nothing to lose

Being under threat doesn't justify making things worst. I know I'll die some day but that's not a reason to be suicidal.

Climate change can be an existential threat to humanity and Geo-Engineering can make it worse at the same time.

Greenwashed a lot better? A lot better than whom? Which countries are more deserving of Norway's perceived status as one of the greenest nations?

Norway is a beautiful modern liberal democracy, Saudi Arabia is a theocratic desert dictatorship hellhole.

The way I understand it, the "uncertainty" about global warming as of 2024 is the same kind of uncertainty as whether an alcoholic with liver cancer can live three or six more months if he continues ignoring his doctor's advice.

I'm open to discussions about different approaches and their relative merits, but we're beyond the point where "we don't know how bad it will get" is a valid argument for anything.

Fossil fuels will need to be left in the ground [1] [2], it's as simple as that. The value of those reserves and assets on books, if not naturally declining to zero, must be forced to zero. If nations or corporations act self interested and don't leave them in the ground [3], what do you expect to be done as the world burns? Nothing? That's not an option.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/climate-majority-of-fossil-f... ("The vast majority of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground to have even a 50% chance of keeping global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.")

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03821-8 ("Parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to limit global warming to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial times1. However, fossil fuels continue to dominate the global energy system and a sharp decline in their use must be realized to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 °C (refs. 2,3,4,5,6,7). Here we use a global energy systems model8 to assess the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be left in the ground, regionally and globally, to allow for a 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. By 2050, we find that nearly 60 per cent of oil and fossil methane gas, and 90 per cent of coal must remain unextracted to keep within a 1.5 °C carbon budget. This is a large increase in the unextractable estimates for a 2 °C carbon budget9, particularly for oil, for which an additional 25 per cent of reserves must remain unextracted. Furthermore, we estimate that oil and gas production must decline globally by 3 per cent each year until 2050. This implies that most regions must reach peak production now or during the next decade, rendering many operational and planned fossil fuel projects unviable. We probably present an underestimate of the production changes required, because a greater than 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C requires more carbon to stay in the ground and because of uncertainties around the timely deployment of negative emission technologies at scale.")

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38506585 ("HN: Cop28 president says 'no science' behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels")

Again, If you don’t know how bad it will get, how can you balance the negatives of remediation?

We already created misery via starvation due to biomass subsidies, what makes you think our future policies will be harmless?

Of course my example was absurd, but it illustrates the trade offs involved.

The closest we have are emissions reductions on power generation and other highly polluting facilities. Carbon capture of CO2 from the atmosphere is not being used successfully, anywhere. There are plenty of feel good articles about trials and test sites and experimental facilities, none of which are within multiple orders of magnitude of being capable of scaled out to the amounts needed. They all require such vast amounts of electricity that it would be better using that electricity to not emit the carbon in the first place. There are no technologies on the horizon that could even put a dent in our current yearly emissions, let alone clean up past excess. Yet it is used time and time again to sell carbon neutral plans and policies to the public, which will never reach their targets.

> Carbon capture is being successfully used all around the world.

[Citation needed]

Without a massive amount of renewable energy we won’t be able use CCS at scale.

It isn't if you aren't a scientist in that field. As you're not qualified to do otherwise.

As a physicist in quantum sensing. I follow the science (opinion) of climate scientists as they're the experts of that field. And that opinion is constantly evolving, but I follow that.

Anything else is just being an armchair scientist.

No. Why?

You claimed "only some countries" which seems to claim that most of the 200-something countries in the world are building coal plants.

Now you say that you only think of Germany, Poland and China.

The same logic applies to shutting down oil and gas production: if we are not certain, then why risk the downsides?

I’m not saying this is a good way to think, just that it shows the fault in your logic.

The age old question of the ethical heroin dealer.

Does not selling to the local school while riding an electric scooter make it alright?

I hate Gorgon too, they tarnished the name of CCS for commercial gain. Their system is throttled for economic reasons though, not technological. Even worse: the government funded it!

If the Australian Government held their feet to the fire they would have sequestered the promised amount. However they didn’t, and Chevron has no incentive to fix it properly.

What’s the maths and physics that make it impossible? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’m interested in the limits.

I still think reflexively opposing a potential solution is stupid. Skepticism is healthy, automatic rejection is a waste. I wholeheartedly agree politicians spout a lot of nonsense, and that the solutions are closer than we think, we just need to get the bad policy out of the way.

I think if you’ve looked at numerical models then you have enough knowledge to at least judge the underlying assumptions: boundary conditions, numerical stability, discretisation methods, validation methods and results.

In the same way that I can verify a SAT solution, I don’t need to know how to code a sat solver.

Unfortunately there are fundamental disagreements about most of the critical parts of climate science, so going by the opinion of the field isn’t foolproof (who to choose? How to choose?). Many fields have had false consensus beliefs before, and most of their problems weren’t 1000th the difficulty of climate modelling.

Your intuition of scientists updating views is wrong, see Kuhns scientific revolutions for more examples. Scientists generally stick to preconceived notions long after there is data to refute them.

E.g. heliocentrism, germ theory, cigarettes being unhealthy, lobotomies being optimal

You summarised my point nicely.

What we call ‘truth’ is just the beliefs we think are most accurate. ‘Just follow the science’ is silly because it essentially means following beliefs on faith without questioning whether they are the best theory. In many cases the better theory goes against the consensus.

E.g. mothers who ‘just followed the science’ and took Thalidomide caused their children untold suffering. They could have been skeptical but instead they had faith in science, which was unfortunately done badly.

I work with a few climate scientists so my opinions aren’t my own. I referenced 2 researchers above, what is wrong with their opinions?

[4] isn’t climate denial, it was an attempt to get some criticism of an interesting heterodox theory, and I found it! [5] CCS is being used at large scale on many projects. Maybe we have different definitions of “at scale” and “successful”

I don’t need to prove it can be done: we already produce these with emissions and we already have CCS to avoid these emissions, there is nothing technological stopping this except economics.

The consensus is that climate change is real and I agree wholeheartedly. What I disagree with is exaggerations of the negative outcomes and rejections of technological solutions based on politics rather than science. In this aspect you will find many conflicting opinions.

Also please answer my question about 2C. Asking this is what led me to realising how much of climate policy is based on convenient politics and not science.

Opium does not save lives, it's a painkiller. And it is not the same at all. If millions would die if people stopped selling medical opium, I am sure you would argue it unethical to stop production of it before there was anything to replace it.

I would say a better analogy is selling alcohol to an alcoholic because you can't just cut off the supply right away because they could die from the abstinence symptoms. You need to get them off their dependency slowly. In this case, you need to decrease their dependency on oil and gas slowly and replace it with clean alternatives, which are currently way too expensive for the developing world.

Countries would literally go to war tomorrow if they lost their supply of oil and gas.

You would be silly not to take a better algorithm. It doesn't matter if it came from sales, a student or a homemaker.

If you can't judge something on it's merits and must rely on other signals then you end up judging the envelope and not the message.

This is true, but there are no biological simulations in the mainstream models, just various correction factors with their own uncertainty. I wish they had biological data because then we would have more domains in which to measure their accuracy.

So your criteria for success is to ‘save the world.’

How about we aim for ‘reduce emissions’ or ‘develop solutions’? Or even better ‘stop opposing people who are trying to help’?

All tech starts at small scales. Yours is an absurd rebuttal.

My claim was and is, the majority of countries are still running coal, china is no exception there.

Only some rich countries decided to phase out. My source confirms it.

Do you have other sources?

All I’m asking for is a specific project that looks promising instead of a Wikipedia page that is mostly a list of available funding.