Cowboy Nation: Norway’s Wild West fantasy – “It’s your misfortune and none of my own”
By Henrik Olav Mathiesen
11 September 2019
(The Dark Mountain Project) – Equinor is the publicly owned Norwegian company firmly intent upon wreaking havoc on the world for as long as possible. Off our own shores – and far beyond.
In 2017, the company won the bid for two licences to drill offshore in the Great Australian Bight, despite strong and continuing local protests.
Trust a company like Equinor to know how to square a circle: ‘We know how much the Great Australian Bight matters to you. It could also be one of Australia’s largest untapped oil reserves.’
The Wilderness Society South Australia, meanwhile, is convinced that ‘Norwegians would be justifiably horrified to find out that their state-owned oil company is carrying on like cowboys in Australia’.
Would we, though? Let me tell you something, pendejo.
Fossil-fuel nation
This is what we do. In an evident attempt to disguise who we are, our state-owned oil company Statoil (i.e., ‘State Oil’) recently rebranded itself as Equinor. While the intention might have been to obfuscate what the company actually does and who it represents, in reality we have exposed our true selves. The equestrian-sounding name alludes to our ongoing Nordic rodeo show: our fossil fuel company is an untamed horse, and we will ride it for as long as we can.
Equinor is owned by all Norwegians. This is our nation’s company, our common property, our treasure chest. We save up all our fossil fuel profits in what we call the ‘Government Pension Fund Global’ – colloquially known as the ‘Oil Fund’ – herded along by the national bank. Our trillion-dollar fund invests in dirty industries across the globe: oil, gas, oil sands – you name it, we have stakes in it.
Even when we divest, it is to protect our oil money. The decision in March 2019 to sell our shares in companies exclusively dedicated to oil and gas exploration and extraction was made, according to the Minister of Finance, to ‘spread the risk’ of our investments.
You think we are horrified by our actions? We are a nation of cowboys. Barely holding the reins of our public fossil fuel company, we drive our prize cattle across vast distances in search of the profits waiting for us at the railway depot.
In 2016, our Minister for Petroleum and Energy declared that ‘those who will turn off the lights on the Norwegian continental shelf [i.e., on Norwegian offshore oil and gas fields] have yet to be born.’
To put it in cowboy terms, ‘It’s your misfortune and none of my own’. This is a line from an old cowboy ballad, used by the historian Richard White to describe the attitude driving the exploitative, extractive, and environmentally disastrous economy of the Wild West. It still applies. [more]
