Worse, the government transferred $3.6-billion from its Alberta Sustainability Fund to pay for its deficit this year. Worse still, said the OECD, the government intends to keep drawing down the fund until it has fallen to $4.7-billion from the $16.8-billion it reached in the 2007-2008 fiscal year.

Norway, by contrast, saves all its oil and gas royalties, drawing down just 4 per cent of the fund’s value each year – so future generations of Norwegians will benefit from today’s bounty. Today’s generation of Albertans, however, is hogging the revenues and building up a pittance for the future. Me, me, now, now seems to be the attitude of Albertans and their government.

So I wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting that Norway, as majority owner of Statoil, should intervene in its plans to develop the tar sands of Canada. I received a polite response, by letter, from the deputy minister of petroleum and energy. The government position is that the tar sands investment is “a commercial decision”, that the government should not interfere, and that a “vast majority in the Norwegian parliament” agree that this constitutes “good corporate governance”. The deputy minister concluded his letter: “I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad.”

A Norwegian grandfather, upon reading the deputy minister’s letter, quoted Saint Augustine: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

The Norwegian position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts.“

Tue May 19, 2009 3:58pm EDT

OSLO (Reuters) – Shareholders of Norwegian oil and gas producer StatoilHydro overwhelmingly backed the company continuing its Canadian oil sands venture despite attempts by environmentalists to derail the project.

At its annual shareholders meeting on Tuesday, owners with 3.64 million shares voted for Greenpeace’s resolution for StatoilHydro to withdraw from its $2 billion tar sands project, Greenpeace said. Investors representing a further 22 million shares abstained.

The figures correspond to 0.1 percent of total shares backing the oil sands exit and 0.7 percent abstaining.

Excluding the Norwegian government, which owns 67 percent of Statoil shares and voted against the motion, only 0.3 percent of free-float investors backed the plan and 2.1 percent abstained.

OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s center-left government effectively delayed a parliamentary vote on Monday on whether majority state-owned oil and gas producer StatoilHydro should withdraw from a $2 billion Canadian oil sands venture.

The oil sands issue has put the government in a bind four months before a general election, with political opponents saying state support for the oil sands project was hypocritical given the cabinet’s self-professed environmental ambitions.

Affluent Norway — the world’s No. 6 oil exporter and third biggest gas exporter — likes to see itself as a champion of green policies and the government even plans to make the country carbon-neutral by 2050.

It is hard to square such ambitions with activist views that producing oil from tar sands damages the environment and produces large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions.

The Associated Press
January 30, 2009 at 6:45 AM EST

OSLO — — Norway’s oil fund has blacklisted the U.S. conglomerate Textron Inc. and the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold Corp. [ABX-T] over concerns that their operations violate the fund’s ethical guidelines, the government said Friday.

Textron, with interests that include the Cessna and Bell aircraft companies, was excluded because its defence unit makes cluster bombs, Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said. Norway led a drive to ban the munitions in a treaty that was signed by 93 countries in Oslo in December.

This shows how there is always political opportunity in eliminating self-imposed restrictions. Most governments have a sorry record of raiding pension funds and otherwise taking actions that provide a moderate immediate bonus at a high eventual cost.