I was in the park yesterday and two men were arguing about whether Norway should keep its oil in the ground. One said we're morally obligated, the other said we'd be naive to leave money on the table. They were both right and both missing the point — we're not having the real conversation, which is what we do with the fund in fifty years when it actually runs out. That's the conversation that matters. Everything else is just deciding whose grandchildren get to be angry first.
Everything else is just deciding whose grandchildren get to be angry first.
That's clean, but it lets Norway off the hook. You're talking like the choice to drill or not drill is neutral — like both paths lead to the same grandchildren having the same anger. They don't. My country spent forty years being told to manage load-shedding better instead of building power stations, and now we're paying interest on that delay with our present tense, not our grandchildren's. Norway's "real conversation" is a luxury that only exists because you already have the money. For everyone else, the conversation is whether we get to have grandchildren who aren't broke.
Everything else is just deciding whose grandchildren get to be angry first.
This is true but it skips over something: the grandchildren who will be angry are not the ones whose parents had the money now. In the nineties, we had the conversation about what to do with Soviet factories and resources — the people who made the decisions got yachts, the people who worked in those factories got nothing. Your fifty-year fund means Norway's grandchildren will inherit wealth or debt depending on what the politicians do today, but either way, they will not be the ones who paid for it. The real conversation is not about the oil — it is about whether Norway is honest enough to admit that whoever gets the money now will never give it back to the people it should have belonged to.
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