Scandinavia in general takes global warming more seriously than most other countries on the planet. And so this isn't strange at all. The whole of Europe is amping up alternatives to petrol- and diesel-based transportation, from e-bikes, cargo e-bikes, e-scooters to Teslas and electric Porsches (Taycan), and anything inbetween.
Their tax structure on vehicles is such that a loaded Tesla costs about the same as a Civic - the taxes (that are exempt on EVs) are quite massive on new cars.
Norway is wealthy thanks to selling fossil fuels. Norwegians feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to stop selling them.
This is essentially performative environmentalism from them. Still, it will help other countries by throwing up unforeseen problems in all-electric ground transportation, and some solutions.
I don't think it's a country of virtue signallers as you think, just people who like to get the best bang for their buck. And gas cars as well as fuel get taxed so much, that buying electric makes sense for them.
Who would've thunk, economic incentives help!? Sadly in many other places the deciding economic incentives are the ones the politicians get from the oil and ICE car industry.
The claim is not that the individuals buying cars are signalling, it is the public policy (incentivizing individual EV ownership while exporting carbon emissions) which is hypocritical.
Norway also spends a lot of energy criticizing foreign regimes for attempting to follow the same path as Norway; prosperity through natural resource extraction. It’s great that Norway has gotten rich enough to turn the corner, but not every country is so fortunate.
arguably, taxes are the government's way of making the decision for the people, so if by "Norway" gp more accurately meant "the government of Norway", you haven't refuted their claims
We (as in the Norwegian population) have voted for politicians supporting this, though. At the election a month ago, it was just a thousand or so votes from being an incredible amount of green representatives.
It’s a matter of some pragmatism. At least their sovereign wealth fund is trying. As much as I wish all nations would take more serious action on the issue, it would seem self defeating for a small nation to step out too early ahead of larger nations in cutting off a major source of revenue. Meanwhile, maybe they’re doing better with the profits for themselves and the world by directing their wealth fund as they are.
Which is a political decision made in a democracy, not a law of physics. Norwegians chose to do this. (Yes, a relatively small subset of people are actually empowered in a democracy, but it's the least-bad system known, etc etc).
Not only there was no referendum that allowed Norwegians to decide if this was their political volition, but political volition alone is not enough to tax something. If it were, everything would be taxed, because you can construct any 51% against any 49% on any topic and add a tax.
If you want to know what Norwegians really think about the tax, make it optional and see how many people pay for it.
> If you want to know what Norwegians really think about the tax, make it optional and see how many people pay for it.
If you want to see what Norwegians really think about paying for things in stores, make shoplifting laws completely optional, and replace cash registers with tip jars, and see how that works out.
Norway has been doing a relatively good job of investing their oil revenue into technologies and infrastructure that will carry their economy through the end of oil and hopefully help reduce global warming.
Given their relatively contribution to the total global production and OPEC's supply management to control prices, it is unclear if a halt in Norwegian oil sales would raise prices significantly enough to matter. There is an argument to be made that is is better for Norway to capture those profit and invest them into the research we need to reduce oil dependence and sequester CO2.
I don't think that the electric car adoption is purely driven by environmentalism. Norway has extremely cheap energy that makes electric cars much more economically attractive.
I don't think that the electric car adoption is purely driven by environmentalism.
On an individual level basically no one in Norway buys an electric car due to environmentalism. It's 100% an economic decision. Buying a new gasoline powered car today in Norway simply doesn't make financial sense no matter how you look at it.
It seems the answer is yes. There are two refineries. According to https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/terminals-and-refineri..., Mongstad (the larger of the two) has capacity: "Petrol (gasoline) production at Mongstad is 4 times Norwegian domestic consumption"
One way to avoid the resource curse is to use the bounty of the resource to develop diversified dependencies/capabilities for a future when that resource runs out or is devalued.
The UK and Norway found oil in the North Sea around the same time. Norway used that revenue to create the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The UK squandered it on tax cuts.
That's an awful lot of money. The US National Debt is around $80K per US citizen. The War in Afghanistan cost around $7K per US citizen, based on numbers from Wikipedia.
It is however much more spread out. Driving from the northernmost to southern most town of New Mexico is ~700 km. Driving from the southern most to northern most town of Norway is over 2300 km, or about the same has from the southernmost town of New Mexico to the Canadian border.
It's not about the max travelable distance in the country but the max distance actually traveled for most trips. The higher density (and population concentration in the south) reduces the latter and makes maintaining a charging network much more practical (their high adoption rate also help a lot with that.)
Edit: The reason why this is the important measure is because what people care about is how often their trips require N charging stops not the maximum number of charging stops they might have to make.
But what about those living in the north, in the Fjell, and those working in remote spots such as forests? Are those really served well by EVs, and is it really all that sustainable to subsidy EV?
