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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