Norway Shows the World How to Achieve Electric Car Dominance
It’s all about incentives: The profits from oil sales equivalent to 50 tons of CO2 can avoid one ton of CO2 with EVs.
I love living in Norway. It’s a beautiful country with nothing other than the weather to complain about. But this Nordic dream comes with a sizable oil stain; a foundation built on 50 years of lucrative hydrocarbon exports.
From official data, I estimate that Norway has sold fossil fuels amounting to roughly 44 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Norwegian production costs are attractively low, so we can reasonably assume a profit of $23/barrel to reach a cool $1 trillion in historical profit (resource rent, to be more precise).
Unlike many other oil nations, Norway has wisely invested a sizable portion of these profits: $360 billion (roughly a third of the historical oil and gas windfall). Investment returns have been stellar, and Norway now sits on an oil fund worth almost $1.3 trillion.
For a country with only 5.3 million people, this is a stupendous amount of money. Think about it this way: Total US Federal tax revenues amount to 16% of GDP. For Norway, a below-average year with a 5% return on the fund’s investments will yield that same 16% of GDP in passive income! On…
