If this is said about Europe's largest oil producer (between Nigeria and Kuwait in world stats), there's something wrong with energy production accounting.
If you're fortunate to have a ton of renewables and petros, the renewables typically don't travel well so you use those domestically and sell the petros on the global market.
Not necessarily. Norway has lots of hydro power. As energy producers go, Norway is not comparable to other oil producers from internal economic point of view as they've extensively rigged their economy not to implode from the "resource curse" .
No, placing the burden on the individual consumers doesn't work. "Tragedy of the commons" type problems are generally solvable only by organized collective decisionmaking.
Irrespective of that, discounting oil production from "share of renewables in energy production" is just nonsensical.
Regarding accounting re. renewables share in energy production, yes, I think their oil exports should be taken into account, and we should say that Saudis aren't model citizens of renewable energy production.
Regarding political responsibility, I think we should definitely hold producers responsible as well. We can't burn all the oil that's still in the ground without devastating climate effects, and it's in every nation's interest to reduce oil production and consumption in an orderly but swift fashion.
EDIT: responding here as I can't reply below anymore.
This discussion was about energy PRODUCTION, you are below talking about energy CONSUMPTION. US oil imports should indeed count as energy production in the exporting country. Re electricty production - this subthread was about general energy production, not electricity!
About your edit: fair enough, if you are talking about primary energy production. I understood what the figure provided in the first comment was referring to (electricity production/consumption) and was addressing that.
In the end, I think the fact that they produce all of their electricity from hydro is a fantastic achievement. That you (and many others, including a lot of people in Norway) would like them to stop pumping oil from the North Sea is (for me) a different issue.
I don't think Norway producing less oil would reduce global oil consumption.
FWIW, they produce about half of what they did in the early '00s.
I believe Norway produces 140TWatt-Hr per year vs Costa Rica 9 GWatt-Hr per year. Norway produces a lot of aluminum that takes a lot of power to produce. Is this right 14 thousand times as much power generated by hydro in Norway than Costa Rica? National statistics can be very misleading.
In what way would you regard nuclear as renewable? It is fuelled by finite stocks, the extraction and refining of which are completely dependent on fossil fuels as a base.
I don't see how it could be classified as "renewable," but I'd argue the more relevant terms would be "clean" or "sustainable."
"Renewable" makes you think of "some of this stuff is going to run out!" which is all wrong. Sure, oil and coal and gas are finite, but if we actually burn through a good chunk of the reserves, the emissions will totally screw us long before we actually run out of stuff to burn. The problem with fossil fuels isn't their finiteness, it's the long-term effects of their use on the planet. If there were an infinite supply they would still be just as bad.
Alternatives are clean, in that they don't emit nearly as much harmful stuff, and they're sustainable, in that they can keep being used for centuries without massive ill effects. Nuclear fits into that just fine, even though it's not really renewable.
Uranium is available in seawater in virtually limitless quantity (for all practical intents and purposes), so nuclear power should be considered renewable.
Uranium is available in seawater in virtually limitless quantity...
So is gold, which is back up over US$1200/oz, while the spot price on U3O8 is US$39.50/pound. If it isn't economically viable to extract Au from seawater, it's certainly not for U.
Actually, nuclear is not generally regarded as renewable energy by definition [0].
I can somewhat see the reason (of course, it's arguable) in the fact that there is some identification of renewable sources of energy with their "cleanness".
But how can you call solar power 'renewable'? It's powered by fusion reactions in the sun, which are finite; it's going to run out.
Only partly tongue-in-cheek. Fission power will also last hundreds of millions of years, so although it is "non-renewable", it shouldn't carry the same connotations of "will therefore run out".
One of the non-renewable aspects of Nuclear power is the storage of nuclear waste, which has specific geological requirements which are not easy to satisfy in many parts of the world.
I expect that's a more limiting factor than the availability of nuclear fuel, but I could be wrong.
It has specific political requirements that are not easy to satisfy in many parts of the world. We can do it technically, it's just that no one is happy about having a nuclear waste dump in their backyard.
My understanding is that this is a difficult technical challenge and an active area of research. It is difficult to predict which geological structures on Earth will be stable and inaccessible by life forms or geologic volatility on timescales > 10,000 years.
I'm not an expert in this area, just that we spent considerable time discussing the challenges in some earth science courses I took, but that was several years ago. So if you have some good review sources to suggest, that would be helpful.
