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https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/norway-is-laughing-at-milibands-net-zero-folly/

Yet still Norway has no net zero target. Why? Because its government, unlike ours, seems to have thought the whole thing through properly and realised that to go all the way to net zero would be fantastically expensive. It is one thing curtailing your carbon emissions; quite another blocking off every conceivable source of them. Norway, unlike Britain, values economic growth over ideological purity.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise, then, that Norway’s energy minister, Terje Aasland, has just scorned Britain’s policy of running down North Sea production of oil and gas. His own country, he says, will continue to develop the North Sea for the long term. It will do so, he says, partly because the industry has helped make the country fantastically rich, allowing it to build up a sovereign wealth fund which our own deeply-indebted government can only envy, and partly because it recognises that however hard you might aspire to switch to clean energy, it is a long process, and that industrialised societies will remain reliant on fossil fuels for decades to come. […]

While Britain hit the oil and gas industry with windfall taxes in recent years, Norway offered tax concessions to ensure that oil and gas exploration could continue during Covid, in order to maintain Norway’s energy independence. That just about sums up the difference between UK and Norwegian policy. This week, with Tony Blair’s intervention, it seemed briefly as if the government might transition towards a more level-headed policy. But sadly, with Keir Starmer taking Miliband’s rather than Blair’s side, and Blair bizarrely backtracking on his remarks, the moment has passed.

https://archive.ph/35NZf

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