Tormented Norway sloshes in oil money
Doesn’t everyone have a passion for a foreign country? Norway has been my crush for years, replacing Great Britain in the catalogue of nations from whom we Canadians can learn.
Face it, Britain had been coasting on its greatest hits for decades: the soft power of its personality and the arts, and its leaping internationalism combined with Big Bang money. Goodbye to all that, Brexit. But Norway was rocketing. It was unique. With a population of only 5.2 million, it had grown rich almost beyond imagining after it began drilling for offshore oil in the 1960s.
Norway had been relatively poor until then, with a fishing/farming economy. But unlike oil-rich Alberta, which squandered the initial promise of its Heritage Fund, Norway stowed its oil profits in a sovereign fund now bulging with nearly $1.2 trillion.
In just the first two quarters of this year, its international investments have brought in $78 billion. As the Financial Times reports, the fund owns on average 1.3 per cent of every single listed company on Earth.
But Norway has problems. Yes, they’re the kind of which Bruce Springsteen once said, “If you’re going to have problems, these are the problems to have.” It’s a useful slogan to keep in one’s pocket.
Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg has just been re-elected with a centre-right coalition that has defeated the centre-left for two full terms for the first time since the 1980s.
This leaves Norway with more of a moral dilemma than it has so far seen. Its wealth comes from oil that has already done immense planetary environmental damage. Will the centre-right increase the flow of dirty money?
Norway defends itself by saying its oil is extracted with superhuman efficiency, and it boasts of its domestic greenery. As the Guardian reports, Norway gets 97 per cent of its electricity from renewables, has a high carbon tax, and promotes electric vehicles and carbon capture/ storage.
But the cognitive dissonance looms large. However green Norway is, climate change is not local.
Now it is considering further drilling in the waters off its Lotofen Islands, an archipelago of astonishing beauty with a bounty of fish. Ecologically, it has been called Norway’s Amazon, its Great Barrier Reef.
Fishing and tourism are a peaceful means of living well in the area, but the $74-billion return (even at today’s low prices) from drilling there and nearby would be spectacular. It is nothing less than a battle for Norway’s soul. Things happened in Norway. Migrants began arriving and the extreme right reacted. The 2011 slaughter of 77 Norwegians — mostly young Labour students on the island of Utoya — by domestic terrorist Anders Breivik was the worst crime ever seen in Norway.
Journalist Asne Seierstad, in her 2015 book, One of Us, revealed that among other factors, Breivik had autism and was led to violence by years of solitary violent online gaming and a fascination with shadowy white supremacy. He was made ripe for it. Norway’s police force was inept. Breivik could have been helped. At least he could have been stopped.
It was Norway’s tragic stain, but it didn’t make voters return to Labour. Were they refusing to consider Breivik as a motivating factor in any voting decision, right or left? That would be the rational Norwegian approach.
As oil prices sank, jobs vanished and the migrant crisis began. Norway accepted its share of asylum-seekers, with over 31,000 applications, a third of them Syrian, in 2015.
There was something of a backlash, which may have contributed to the Sept. 11 election result. But Norway’s dilemma is shared by other nations in times of crisis, even those who don’t have its riches.
Should Canada loot its patrimony — oil, forests, water — for profit or should it all stay in the ground? The Liberals want to build the middle class with good jobs, not transitory ones, and industry can’t stand still. Can we move to technology?
The Americans made their decision long ago, not just with their elected money-mad dotard president. Money runs everything. Money changes everything. And when the money runs out — Americans have been trained to lash out at taxation — what purpose will their nation have?
Norway’s national aim was always to live honourably and prudently, and to find consensus. It did this. Its right is not rabid, its left not intractable. Now money is distorting that view.
Will Norway destroy its northernmost blue glistening waters for what in Norwegian terms is small change?
As I say, it’s a desirable sort of problem.