The Nordic country’s fund — now worth C$3 trillion — is explained at the Norges Bank Investment Management website:
The pension fund was established after Norway discovered oil in the North Sea. The fund was set up to shield the economy from ups and downs in oil revenue. It also serves as a financial reserve and as a long-term savings plan so that both current and future generations of Norway get to benefit from our oil wealth.
Each year, the Norwegian government can spend only a small part of the fund, but this still amounts to almost 20 percent of the government budget.
There is a broad political consensus on how the fund should be managed. The less we spend today, the better the position we will be in to deal with downturns and crises in the future. Budget surpluses are transferred to the fund, while deficits are covered with money from the fund. In other words, the authorities can spend more in hard times and less in good times.
Amounts measured in the trillions are almost impossible to grasp, but Norway’s financial position becomes easier to appreciate when viewed on a per‑person basis. The country’s oil and gas fund works out to roughly C$533,000 for every resident.
If British Columbia had a resource fund with the same per‑capita value, its size would greatly exceed the provincial government’s projected 2025 revenues. Such a fund would be a large multiple of the provincial government’s accumulated debt.
Yet both the governing NDP and the Conservative opposition maintain that natural resources primarily belong to the companies extracting them today. Taxes are kept low, subsidies are plentiful, and the idea that future generations deserve a share of today’s resource wealth is effectively dismissed.
Categories: Norway, oil and gas, Uncategorized
in-sights.ca 
This is a no-brainer. Norway has written the playbook. This should be a program supported by all our political parties. Other countries, including Singapore, Saudi Arabia and China have also built very large wealth funds. Sadly, many of our MLAs have never heard of the Norway miracle. We don’t have to be the stupid province.
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Lest we appear too modest there is no example too far above our own to emulate.
Certainly not Green China’s.
But has the forever-Tory BBC become far too cozy promoting China’s Green Revolution? Many think so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/resources/idt-8d2b6944-4f7a-45b4-96fd-2d92499ff97d
China has created a desert that no longer just reflects the Sun. It captures it.
Aluminium soaks up the rays on the golden dunes of Inner Mongolia, transforming one of the harshest landscapes into one of the world’s largest solar farms.
Xin Guiyi, who has lived here all his life, seems to welcome the change.
“It used to be so dry and the desert was getting bigger,” he explains, as he mixes feed for his small flock of sheep after bringing them in from the cold.
For decades, Xin and thousands of other helpless farmers in these parts watched their grazing lands shrink.
Vegetation thinned, topsoil blew away and the land lost its life because of overgrazing and rising temperatures.
More than 46,000 hectares of that land in the Kubuqi desert have been transformed by solar bases in the past decade.
The solar panels, scientists find, act as shade and windbreaks to protect the grass and restore the land. It doesn’t stop the desert but there is modest impact – and that gives Xin hope.
“Wind and solar energy are abundant in Inner Mongolia. We can contribute to our country.”
That sentiment may not be shared everywhere but Beijing’s determination to turn China into a renewables superpower is now evident across its vast landscapes.
In Gansu and Xinjiang, rolling hills and open plains have morphed into massive wind and solar bases. Shimmering silicon panels sit underneath turbines, capable of generating enough electricity to power tens of millions of homes.
China, which is still the world’s top carbon emitter, has been building an unrivalled green energy grid.
The country’s leader Xi Jinping told the UN in 2020 that China would aim to hit peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. This goal now appears to be within reach with analysts from Carbon Brief saying its CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for 21 months. [As have India’s]
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s White House has been pedalling back American commitment to green energy – last week it reversed a key scientific ruling that supports all federal action to curb emissions.
So Beijing finds itself in an unexpected position: at the helm of a renewables revolution.
At the time [2010] it had just a handful of large solar farms – providing a total of 0.1 gigawatts of China’s electricity. Estimates vary, but that is roughly enough to power 100,000 homes.
Global Energy Monitor, which collected the data, says once smaller solar projects – such as panels on top of homes – are taken into account, China’s total solar capacity is in fact already 1,063 GW.
Next Planned? 769 GW more of new solar energy.
==========
Canada?
With Canadian politicians as our Guiding Light, if it costs heaps of money to subsidize profits destined to gush straight to Texas we’d be downright unpatriotic fools to dream that China is on to something big.
Try to catch up to desertified Inner Mongolia and profit for it? No way! We’re agonna be an Energy Super Power, real soon.
Or bust.
You betcha!
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Explicitly, who determines global economic policy?
If not government.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/neil-macdonald-the-monarchs-of-money-and-the-war-on-savers-1.1358047
The plain fact, though, is that central bank- and government-imposed solutions to disasters caused by irresponsible, greedy, foolish behaviour are almost always carried out on the backs of the virtuous.
So it was with the bank rescues in 2008, and so it is with quantitative easing.
As Ros Altmann, a longtime pension manager and director of the London School of Economics, puts it, quantitative easing has amounted to a “monumental social experiment” — a large-scale transfer of wealth from older people to younger people.
This transfer from savers to borrowers has also been taking place here in the U.S. and in Canada, to varying degrees.
Some U.S. pension funds are in danger of default, at least partially because of these artificially low interest rates, and Canadian pension funds that are heavily invested in safer debt have been injured, too.
In an interview in his Ottawa office, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney defends quantitative easing elsewhere, and his own low-interest rate policy, though he does acknowledge that it has been hard on pensioners and savers.
Like all central bankers, he argues the (impossible to prove) negative: There have been consequences, yes, but if we hadn’t done this, things would be far, far worse.
Now in 2026 the same “Mr. Carney” is? Prime Minister.
Aside from the economic Presto Chango of Quantitative Easing there’s a far older less understood item in the Financial Magic category: Fractional Reserve Banking.
https://www.debt.ca/debt-clock
“The approximate interest rate on the cost of market debt in Canada is about 2.01 percent. Interestingly enough, the country accrues $75 million of debt per day in interest charges alone. That trickles down to the taxpayers, many of whom are seeking debt relief options for themselves.”
“According to the Financial Post, a study shows that Canada is a world leader in debt. One hypothesis for the debt getting so high is the fact that Canada came out largely unscathed from the last financial crisis. Low interest rates encouraged more borrowing, which led to bankruptcies and other economic downturns”.
There’s a Debt Clock for BC too.
https://www.debtclock.ca/provincial-debtclocks/british-columbia/
Ellen Brown explained that last century our Financial System was “regulated” by politicians. In 1972 when summoned government representatives attended a meeting with the Bank of International Settlements. The meeting’s purpose? “To Protect The Currency”.
Surprisingly from the end of WW2 until 1973 Canada\’s debt was a straight line: neither up nor down, a horizon.
Ever since that intervention in Switzerland in effect rising debt has governed what politicians are able to do to maintain a stable social environment; what politicians are able to do to curb corporate greed and illegality; what they are willing to do to protect public health care and social services,
Do? Other than, increase taxes, claw back essential services while complaining that the public just doesn’t appreciate how hard they’re trying to Keep Our Back.
Our Leaders are unhappy with how they are perceived. In part the attention they devote to an army of Special Interests and party-supporting industry Lobbyists may have tainted the romance.. In BC we refer to our worst polluters as? Stakeholders.
From Tragedy to Farce? Lets ask senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to explain the system
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=sanders+challenges+bessent&&mid=55953CF19A3C4BECA44355953CF19A3C4BECA443&FORM=VCGVRP
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Norway’s wealth fund is a lovely thing to behold. too bad B.C. didn’t do something similar. My take on it is Norway learned from history. At one time Norway had a high death rate for new borns . The government considered it unacceptable and devised a plan to change things. Hence the creation of the Baby Box. All children born in Norway were given a box filled with everything a baby would need to thrive and survive. The box it self was to be used as a bed for the baby to ensure it slept in a safe, clean enviornment. the new system worked. Baby deaths decreased.
When the oil came along it probably wasn’t hard to convince the population a wealth Fund was a good idea. Norway also is much better at managing their forests.
Things like natural resources ought not to be the property of corporations for their personal financial gain. The land of a country belongs to the country. Politicians do not have the right to say, oh that section of land is now the property of a, b, or c. For all the wealth taken out of this province and country, we ought not to have the poverty we do or the homelessness, etc. Norway has some interesting social programs.
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Do you live in Scandinavia? Specifically Finland?, Then you might not be surprised that for 9 years in a row Finland topped the latest World Happiness Index.
Canada? Not so impressive. From last years rating at 18 this years rating is 25.
CTV National News ran this story but then said something odd. Given as the reason for the sudden drop the report cited the influence of Social Media as a likely contributing factor.
Really? So social media in Scandinavia is positive but in Canada it is negative?
Aside from blaming Astrology (the stars have not properly aligned themselves except over Scandinavia) how does social media (people talking to each other) explain the results?
https://globalnews.ca/news/11737516/canada-25th-place-global-happiness-rankings/
A new report says Canada has dropped down to 25th place in world happiness rankings, as researchers highlight heavy social media use contributing to a sharp decline in well-being among young people.
The annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford found that Finland is the happiest country in the world for the ninth year in a row, with other Nordic countries such as Iceland, Denmark and Sweden ranking among the top 10.
Canada slipped to 25th place after coming 18th last year, finishing behind the 23rd-ranked United States.
In the 2015 report, Canada ranked fifth but has since steadily declined, with 25th place marking its lowest ranking since the report was launched in 2012.
The report found that life evaluations among under-25-year-olds in Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand have dropped significantly over the past decade, suggesting that long hours spent scrolling through social media is a key factor in that trend.
As in previous years, nations in or near zones of major conflict remain at the bottom of the rankings with Afghanistan ranked as the unhappiest country again, followed by Sierra Leone and Malawi in Africa.
https://wellbeingintl.org/world-happiness-report-2025/
Each World Happiness Report features a table ranking countries worldwide based on their happiness levels. It is also focused on a specific theme each year. It contains multiple chapters written by various experts who examine different aspects of global well-being and happiness related to the theme. The theme for this year’s report is “The Impact of Caring and Sharing on People’s Happiness.” The chapters explore how prosocial behaviors and sharing contribute to overall happiness. The chapters in this report are as follows:
1. Executive Summary
2. Caring and Sharing
3. Sharing Meals
4. Living with Others
5. Connecting with Others
6. Supporting Others
7. Trusting Others
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Another EV lesson for Canada? How it’s done….in Norway.
https://www.independentwomen.com/2025/08/05/norways-ev-transition-is-funded-by-oil-and-gas-royalties/
(Dated Aug 2025)
Norway’s EV Transition is Funded by Oil and Gas Royalties
The government of Norway recently reported that 88.9% of new cars sold in the country in 2024 were 100% electric. Headlines claim that “Norway Is All In on Electric Cars,” but it wasn’t due to consumer choice.
The Norwegian government has set the goal that all new passenger cars and light vans sold by 2025 should be zero-emissions. Heavy-duty vehicles should largely reach zero-emissions by 2030.
Norway has gotten this far with expensive carrots for EVs and punishing sticks for gasoline vehicles. The Norwegian government credits a “combination of taxation rules and incentives” for the “high adoption of EVs.” Norway also exempts EVs from most road usage taxes, which it describes as “intended to cover external costs such as noise, local air pollution and congestion.”
EVs can also only be charged 70% of toll road rates by local authorities. Norway also penalizes the purchase of gasoline and diesel cars with high registration taxes.
When one option is costly and another heavily subsidized, consumers must make choices in accordance with their pocketbook.
This model wouldn’t scale in the U.S., anyway. Norway has a small population of approximately 5.5 million, with dense urban geography and almost 90% hydroelectric power. The U.S. has 330 million people across thousands of miles, powered by a diverse energy mix.
Norway is able to fund its lavish EV subsidies in part with oil revenues. The oil and gas sector in Norway is the largest in terms of value added, government revenues, investments, and export value. In 2025, oil and gas revenues made up 21% of GDP, 32% of Norway’s revenues, 22% of Norway’s total investments, and 48% of total exports. And the Norwegian government openly acknowledges the costs: In 2025, it expects a loss of 50 billion NOK ($4.86 billion) in car-related taxes, with a total revenue loss of 640 billion NOK ($62.2 billion) from 2007 to 2025.
Norway might consider the costs of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel involved in manufacturing EV batteries, too. Those have environmental costs as well—particularly when mined in environmentally destructive ways, sometimes by child labor, in Chinese-owned mines. For instance, a 2024 Department of Labor report interviewed cobalt workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and found that 44% could not refuse to do hazardous work, 85% reported restrictions on their movement, and 52% of workers reported children working at their mine site, especially artisanal mines (63%).
Norway’s push for EVs isn’t proof that the market wants electric cars. It’s proof that if the government of a small, oil-rich country twists the economic screws hard enough, it can manufacture demand for EVs. That isn’t a model for consumer choice, fairness, or fiscal responsibility, and it isn’t a model that would work in the U.S.
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What to do during an oil crisis.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-world-s-evs-were-already-replacing-70-of-iran-s-oil-exports-the-war-just-made-that-matter/ar-AA1YUFgT?ocid=BingNewsSerp
The world’s EVs were already replacing 70% of Iran’s oil exports. The war just made that matter
The war in Iran has already transformed the world’s energy map. It might yet redraw America’s auto market.
Now in its third week, the U.S. and Israeli military campaign in Iran has escalated to involve targets across the Middle East, including the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that serves as the world’s most critical fossil fuel chokepoint. The war has effectively closed the oil tanker traffic that used to navigate the strait, which on a normal day carries up to 20% of the world’s traded petroleum.
Fuel costs worldwide have soared as a result. Average gas prices in the U.S. are now $3.79 a gallon, up from $2.92 a month ago, reminding drivers of the 2022 energy shortage and even of the devastating oil shocks of the 1970s.
But unlike during those crises, the world now possesses a massive, rapidly scaling, and for the most part readily available asset to soften the blow: the electric vehicle.
The global EV fleet has been growing for years, gradually chipping away at the world’s oil consumption as drivers turn to charging ports instead of gas stations. Last year, EVs worldwide avoided the consumption of 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, according to a report published Wednesday by Ember, an independent energy think tank based in the U.K. That’s roughly 70% of the 2.4 million barrels Iran exported daily through the Strait of Hormuz in 2025.
While the crisis has sent global oil prices soaring, the declining need for petroleum in transportation is providing a critical cushion in some countries. And the longer fuel prices remain elevated, the more attractive EVs become to buyers.
“Oil is a particularly tricky resource to replace,” Daan Walter, a researcher at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Fortune. “It has been for 125 years now, except for the past five or six years, when we’ve had this new competitive lever in electric vehicles.”
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The UK now wants to emulate Norway on EVs?
Yes, how Norway has adapted to the the Iran War is looking very clever compared to the UK.
https://www.newsbreak.com/the-independent-517119/4549491408941-with-petrol-prices-soaring-norway-s-ev-gamble-is-paying-off-here-s-what-we-can-learn
With petrol prices soaring, Norway’s EV gamble is paying off – here’s what we can learn
There is room for improvement when it comes to the adoption of EVs in this country. As of last month, there were around 1.85 million fully electric cars on the roads of the UK, which has a population of 69.5 million.
Perhaps we might take inspiration from Norway, where the rapid increase in the number of electric cars is as conspicuous as it is remarkable: with a population of 5.6 million, Norway has just passed the milestone of one million EVs. No country has a higher proportion of EVs on the roads – they now account for around a third of all passenger cars.
At the Møller Bil, main dealer for Volkswagen, Audi and Skoda in Stavanger, Norway’s fourth-largest city, hundreds of cars fill the showroom. None of them is petrol or diesel. General manager Jan Olav Fikstvedt is surprised at how rapidly the transition to electric cars has happened.
“We haven’t sold a non-electric car since last year, which is surprising,” he says.
In December, EVs made up 97.6 per cent of all new car sales – up from 15 per cent 10 years ago.
The figure is around 23 per cent in the UK.
“Electric vehicles have become a natural choice, and we have made them attractive and easy to use,” says Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, Norway’s state secretary for transport, adding that the country had shown that “a clear political direction can work”.
“I’m happy to say we’ve made the transition with passenger cars, but there is still work to do with HGVs, freight transport and coaches. There is a long way to go, but we can learn from the early success.”
Certainly, in Stavanger, electric cars – instantly identifiable by the E at the start of every registration plate – are no longer the exception, and are more the rule.
“It’s very much the new normal now,” says Christina Bu, secretary general of the Norwegian EV Association. “Everyone has been surprised that things could change this quickly. We met a lot of scepticism early on, but it’s actually quite uplifting to see how much people’s views have changed on electric vehicles.”
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Meanwhile in Canada…
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/03/18/news/ford-drop-ev-sales-mandates-uncompetitive
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is urging two of his provincial counterparts to scrap electric vehicle mandates that he says are hurting workers and businesses.
On Tuesday, Ford told British Columbia and Quebec Premiers David Eby and François Legault that their provinces’ EV sales mandates are creating “a fragmented, uncompetitive market that risks pushing investment, jobs and production out of Canada and into the US.”
EV sales mandates have been eliminated or watered down across the board in the past year.
Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was scrapping the federal EV sales mandate and replacing it with stricter fuel-efficiency standards and EV purchase rebates, which climate experts said was a “huge setback” from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective.
In September, Quebec softened its previous standards and will require 90 per cent of new vehicles sold from 2035 onwards to be EVs, which also includes conventional or plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs).
BC has also walked back its commitment of 90 per cent electric sales by 2030 and said it will introduce new, updated legislation sometime this year that will bring the province in line with the federal government.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Eby said he “can assure Premier Ford” that the province is amending its EV mandate “to ensure it reflects the realities of today.”
However, “electric vehicles are a way for British Columbians to shield themselves from high gas prices driven by the war in Iran right now,” he added. “Our mandate helps us get access to more vehicles and cheaper vehicles for British Columbians, which is a crucial thing.”
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https://angusreid.org/premiers-performance-march-2026/
Current polling places David Eby at 37%, Doug Ford at 31% and Francois Legault at 26% in positions 7, 8 and 9. PEI isn’t included in the survey.
In first place? Manitoba’s Rab Kinew with 61%.
Busy ignoring the Iran War and an oil shock that could last ten years the Ford admin wants what the automotive industry wants. An end to EVs.
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https://www.autoblog.com/carbuying/these-18-automakers-are-walking-away-from-ev-plans
After years of rapid growth, the electric vehicle boom is hitting turbulence. With demand slowing and incentives fading, at least 18 automakers are now canceling, delaying, or scaling back EV plans in the U.S., including major brands like Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Volkswagen.
After growing nearly eightfold between 2019 and 2023, demand for battery-electric vehicles flattened out last year, then took a dive off a cliff after federal tax credits phased out at the end of September. That’s sent an array of automakers scrambling to rethink their EV programs and, by Autoblog’s count, at least 18 brands have now decided to drop existing models, scrap upcoming plans or, at the least, stretch their launches out, hoping to see demand rebound.
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