Norway Is Walking Away From Billions of Barrels of Oil
For the moment, governments the world over seem to think that facing Fridays’s demonstrators head on rather than caring for the material security of their populations is the bigger threat to them, so they bow to their wishes. But most of the Friday folks are a fickle bunch – they will fizzle away quicker than a suntan in a basement apartment and then the government will have to face people, lots of people that are angry that an opportunity for jobs has been kicked to the dogs. Protecting the Lofoten might have been the right thing to do, maybe its right to say goodbye to oil, I would not know. One thing I know though is that people without jobs are a harder nut to crack than schoolchildren with iPhones.
Western Europe’s biggest petroleum producer is falling out of love with oil. To the dismay of the nation’s powerful oil industry and its worker unions, the opposition Labor Party over the weekend decided to withdraw its support for oil exploration offshore the sensitive Lofoten islands in Norway’s Arctic, creating a solid majority in parliament to keep the area off limits for drilling.
