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I have AkademikerPension as my pension fund through work and this move suits me quite well. They've already excluded Tesla as well as a variety of companies tha

I have AkademikerPension as my pension fund through work and this move suits me quite well. They've already excluded Tesla as well as a variety of companies that profit of weapon production, fossil fuel production or are suspected for human rights violations. https://akademikerpension.dk/ansvarlighed/ekskluderede-selskaber/ https://akademikerpension.dk/ansvarlighed/ekskluderede-selsk...

petterroea 4mo ago
In Norway the oil fund are actively arguing against boycotting these kinds of companies saying, and I paraphrase: "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals" Good to see it isn't necessarily the case.
- petesergeant 4mo ago
  That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit. In turn you also want democratically elected politicians above that saying “yes, but the people want their money made ethically, so you can’t do that”.
  - Natfan 4mo ago
    sorry, but i wouldn't want my money manager to attempt to engage in unethical or illegal practices in order to turn a profit...
    - chabska 4mo ago
      The point is that it's the job of the democratic legislature to codify what you just stated here into law, so that all money managers have to abide by this standard, not just those that have a personal conviction for it. That's the essence of rule of law.
      - DangitBobby 4mo ago
        You can't have a functioning government if it's elected by a corrupt society. Exhibit A, current US situation.
      - s1artibartfast 4mo ago
        There is room for both. Not every aspect of morality needs to made law, as significant portions are subjective and debated. Law should be a least common denominator. This leaves room for individuals to act in accordance with their morals above and beyond the law.
  - petterroea 4mo ago
    Of course, some back-and-forwards is healthy. In a good system both sides fight for their interests, and the outcome is some middle road compromise that optimizes for everyone's benefit.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit. The job of the police is arresting people who break the law, but similarly to your money manager, you really don't want them to do this regardless of anything else, there is more things to consider than just "do everything you can to arrest people", and hopefully the same for your money manager. But also, I might be too European to understand the true value of "money grow regardless of society cost at large".
- sgt 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - notarobot123 4mo ago
    I've always wondered, do people who complain about virtue signaling just simply not believe in the concept of virtues or integrity at all? Human nature is pure vice mediated by violence and contract law, that's it. I get the cynicism about performative acts vs. authentic values but where's the line? Putting your money where your mouth is has to count for something.
    - sgt 4mo ago
      You have a point. I'd hope most of us actually do care about virtues and integrity, but 90% of the time it doesn't need to be said. It's how we were raised. Now, true virtue signalling is saying X to change the perception but yet doing 100 evil things in the background.
      - youngNed 4mo ago
        > Now, true virtue signalling is saying X to change the perception but yet doing 100 evil things in the background. No, thats hypocrisy.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes. How would you know if they are doing those moves because it's what they believe in, vs it's just a position they'd like to broadcast publicly? In my mind, a symbolic gesture would be to speak against Tesla and SpaceX without actually doing something, that'd be "virtue signaling" in my mind, but since they're actually doing something, a practical action to not just speak but also not invest into those companies, doesn't it stop being "virtue signaling" at that point?
    - Swenrekcah 4mo ago
      Railing against virtue signalling of some people is the preferred virtue signalling for some other people.
- petterroea 4mo ago
  For some context, this Norwegian cartoon by a group that used to make satire for the government run news agency is a pretty decent summary of how things were discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs. The old man is a caricature of Jens Stoltenberg (who seems to be running the Norwegian economic machine rather well nowadays, controversial or not)
- SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
  It's maddening how quickly ESG and similar programmes have been thrown in the dumpster once the political climate in the US swung back to "anti-woke". > "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals" What these clowns conveniently forget is that their job is not just "to make money" but to make money over a span of decades and centuries in the case of the sovereign funds. A long term investment fund that optimizes for the next quarter at the expense of the long term is a bad fund. And so the ESG and woke "hippie bullshit" is nothing more than the basic capitalism of maximizing your gains by 2100 by not destroying the one planet all your companies are on. Long term funds do not have the luxury of being passive owners. If they take no role in management, that role will instead by taken by whatever short-term owner walks in next. They don't care about the value by 2100, they just want the company to tear the copper out of it's own walls so they can sell with a profit by next quarter, retail even sooner.
  - tordrt 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - Geee 4mo ago
    How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index. ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways. And that's why no one takes it seriously any more.
    - SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
      > How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index. ESG is more than just the environment. In Tesla's case, Elon Musk's governance is a serious risk to the corporation. > ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways. Right now as we speak, a bunch of "arbitrary opaque committees" are deciding to rush SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI into the major stock indexes. Even completely passive investment leaves one at the whims of said committees.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- jcoyne 4mo ago
  > our job is to earn money Which is exactly why you wouldn't put it in a company with a ridiculous valuation.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kyleblarson 4mo ago
    I don't know the AUM of this pension fund but if the managers were doing their jobs they should have had at least a tiny bit of exposure to SpaceX years ago.
- mejutoco 4mo ago
  The sovereign fund of Norway also researches a lot of the state of the companies and then invests into the whole market vs the ones they dont consider good according to some metric. Sounds like this Danish example.
- davedx 4mo ago
  If you want to make money, buying SpaceX stock isn't the way to do it This is about valuation not ESG
  - xorcist 4mo ago
    ESG is supposed to be about valuations, long-term. People conventiently tend to forget that when it doesn't suit them. It has been shown over and over again that it is a working predictor of valuation, in which it is not alone of course. Economy students regularly invent such predictors. And the dirty little secret about ESG is that it is probably G that is doing the heavy lifting. Companies without good governance seldom survive the first change of leadership. No one in the green movement ever spoke about "ESG" as if that was a thing. It is an investor thing. Invented by bank economists, to sell financial products. It's not like your local environmentally concious hippie type figure would suddenly start investing in Shell, just because they improved their ESG score. Does it work as a predictor for company valuation? It seems so. But it would probably have worked better if you separated E and G, because they have nothing to do with one another. Will it work in the future? No one knows. Once you start gaming these things, all initial bets are off by a lot. Just don't say "valuation, not ESG". It does not make sense. If you mean "short term valuation, not long term", then just say so.
- __Joker 4mo ago
  Yeah, there is lot talking out of both sides of their mouth here. If nothing else, at least these should be choice of users to let them choose based on their values and requirements.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4mo ago
    The pension fund is the user of the stock here. Pensioners should get the same amount regardless of investments, as long as there is enough funding, which it seems there is for the moment. Of course, if someone wants to risk their own money, they can invest in whatever they want. They can even sell their pension for a cash lump sum and invest that.
  - intended 4mo ago
    By who exactly ?
- scoofy 4mo ago
  The secondary market isn’t where morally dubious choices get made. There is a huge difference between funding oil extraction that is happening anyway, and funding a company to start extracting oil. However, this is the intersection of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue theory.
  - lefra 4mo ago
    Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.
    - scoofy 4mo ago
      The point is that in the secondary market, the oil will be extracted regardless. By you not participating, you actually increase the return on equity for others, making it more profitable. Buying the stock does not add money into the business. The area for disincentivizing oil production is the political sphere, not the financial sphere. Refusing to participate in secondary market ownership does almost less than nothing to disincentivize the extraction. At least with ownership, you get a say in the firms harm mitigation.
      - lefra 4mo ago
        To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company". I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects. The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
        scoofy 4mo ago
        >Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong. I mean that's fair, but it's also why I brought up the three major schools of ethics. The consequentialist likely won't care if it's going to happen anyway. The virtue ethicist will.
ifwinterco 4mo ago
How does Tesla fit with the rest of those? I'm not a huge fan of Elon Musk but Tesla is a company that produces electric cars (mostly in western countries with half-decent labour laws), it's not associated with any of those things. I guess one could argue with some merit that the governance is bad enough to exclude it on that basis alone?
- sgt 4mo ago
  Agreed - Tesla has been an insanely good investment. I'm not sure about the next 10 years, but people have continuously underestimated them (and Elon Musk). The Norwegian so called Oil Fund owns more than 1% of Tesla.
  - RugnirViking 4mo ago
    has it been an insanely good investment because of changes to profit and loss, or because of other factors? (of course, building a car company of the scale they have is impressive. But by looking at tesla's financials vs stock price, youd conclude basically any other car company ever was a great buy by any reasonable metric)
  - Gomotono 4mo ago
    Tesla is not and never has been a good investment. Its a gamble. The current evaluation of Tesla is still higher than real car companies + robot companies + robot taxi companies.
    - sgt 4mo ago
      Fair enough I guess, it has been a gamble. But risky investments are still investments that paid off well. Or they can drop like a rock.
    - derektank 4mo ago
      Never is a strong statement. Tesla’s price to sales ratio wasn’t absurd prior to 2020.
apexalpha 4mo ago
Defensive weapons are very much needed in Europe…
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  Indeed, hence most European defense companies experiencing somewhat incredible growth recently, with no signs of stopping. Do we need Americans weapons? Unlikely and probably counter-productive long-term. Do we need European weapons? Hell yeah!
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  The new asymmetric reality is mostly short/medium range drones, ECMs and hypersonic missles. Loitering munitions are going to make tanks mostly obsolete and Jets are too expensive to risk over enemy territory that still has working radar/anti-air except for large shock&awe actions. A lot of this stuff is hard to stop and too cheap to effectively stop economically anyhow, the best solution is distance and preemptive strikes at staging areas.
  - burnerRhodov3 4mo ago
    we have seen .005 radar ap is the most important because drones aren't long range enough in a real war. Ukraine and Russia should be looked at as a local conflict and not indicative how a real "war" would be fought now.
- Gomotono 4mo ago
  No they are not. The amount of military spending europe has, is already higher than russia. Russia clearly showed how incapable they are, they are not even able to present modern war technology at their freedom parade. And china we don't fight china.
  - dijit 4mo ago
    we have about 30 years of catching up to do, better defense spending: 1) Saves our lives in Europe, by having access to better training and force multipliers. 2) Seeps into the economies of every country in the union through research spending. Defence is unambiguously a good thing, it becomes a problem if you put an expansionist cunthead at the helm of it.
tordrt 4mo ago
The fossil fuel part doesn't seem like a rational decision to me. Why are we pretending that fossil fuels dont provide an immense amount of value for humanity, and that its horrible to invest or support building out any fossil fuel production whatsoever. Lets not do produce it ourselves, lets just instead outsource it to the gulfs and Russia…
- pietervdvn 4mo ago
  The fossil fuel industry is both the most subsidized industry worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies) and the second most expensive source of energy (at least for electricity production). The only energy source that is more expensive is nuclear (!).
  - tordrt 4mo ago
    The second most expensive source of energy is misleading in terms of whole picture. They are using a theoretical cost per kwh generated. You have to account for the much higher infrastructure and systemic cost of electricity generation you can not control (wind/solar). You cant simply use wind or solar without pairing it with an controllable source like hydro, gas, coal or batteries. Which is why the world is still very much using gas and coal (and still building more). Renewables are a cheap and good supplement to these sources, you just cant replace them cheaply (yet). Regarding "the most subsidized industry worldwide", this wikipedia article does not mention any tax revenue and taxation of these companies. Which are stil very often government cash cows and often pays much more taxes than other corporations. The subsidies are straight to citizen's gas tanks and heating bills. "Subsidies are mainly on consumption,[3] such as a lower sales tax on natural gas for residential heating; or subsidies on production, such as tax breaks on exploration for oil." In my country Norway for example, we have tax breaks on exploration to incentivize investment in exploration, but you have to take into account that these companies have an 80 corporate tax rate! In many petro states they are straight up nationalized companies.
  - haaz 4mo ago
    [flagged]
pipes 4mo ago
Given the Russian threat to Europe and the fact that we are actively sending arms to Ukraine, investing in manufacturing arms doesn't seem like an imoral thing to do. Quite the opposite.
lukego 4mo ago
IANAeconomist but may I ask, tongue firmly in cheek, if they also only pour water into the shallow end of swimming pools to avoid contributing drownings?
CamperBob2 4mo ago
You might want some of those weapons, once our faithless, perfidious country (meaning the USA) decides to leave you to the Russian wolves. Don't depend too much on alliances. And where would Norway be without fossil fuels, exactly? That's basically the sole source of your nation's wealth. As for Tesla and other companies led by Elon Musk... well, yeah, F that guy. But don't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
thomasfl 4mo ago
As a Norwegian I envy your ethical pension fund. Our Norwegian pension fund goes by the name the oil fund, and was financed solely by fossil fuel production.

petterroea 4mo ago

In Norway the oil fund are actively arguing against boycotting these kinds of companies saying, and I paraphrase: "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals" Good to see it isn't necessarily the case.

petesergeant 4mo ago
That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit. In turn you also want democratically elected politicians above that saying “yes, but the people want their money made ethically, so you can’t do that”.
- Natfan 4mo ago
  sorry, but i wouldn't want my money manager to attempt to engage in unethical or illegal practices in order to turn a profit...
  - chabska 4mo ago
    The point is that it's the job of the democratic legislature to codify what you just stated here into law, so that all money managers have to abide by this standard, not just those that have a personal conviction for it. That's the essence of rule of law.
    - DangitBobby 4mo ago
      You can't have a functioning government if it's elected by a corrupt society. Exhibit A, current US situation.
    - s1artibartfast 4mo ago
      There is room for both. Not every aspect of morality needs to made law, as significant portions are subjective and debated. Law should be a least common denominator. This leaves room for individuals to act in accordance with their morals above and beyond the law.
- petterroea 4mo ago
  Of course, some back-and-forwards is healthy. In a good system both sides fight for their interests, and the outcome is some middle road compromise that optimizes for everyone's benefit.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit. The job of the police is arresting people who break the law, but similarly to your money manager, you really don't want them to do this regardless of anything else, there is more things to consider than just "do everything you can to arrest people", and hopefully the same for your money manager. But also, I might be too European to understand the true value of "money grow regardless of society cost at large".
sgt 4mo ago
[flagged]
- notarobot123 4mo ago
  I've always wondered, do people who complain about virtue signaling just simply not believe in the concept of virtues or integrity at all? Human nature is pure vice mediated by violence and contract law, that's it. I get the cynicism about performative acts vs. authentic values but where's the line? Putting your money where your mouth is has to count for something.
  - sgt 4mo ago
    You have a point. I'd hope most of us actually do care about virtues and integrity, but 90% of the time it doesn't need to be said. It's how we were raised. Now, true virtue signalling is saying X to change the perception but yet doing 100 evil things in the background.
    - youngNed 4mo ago
      > Now, true virtue signalling is saying X to change the perception but yet doing 100 evil things in the background. No, thats hypocrisy.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes. How would you know if they are doing those moves because it's what they believe in, vs it's just a position they'd like to broadcast publicly? In my mind, a symbolic gesture would be to speak against Tesla and SpaceX without actually doing something, that'd be "virtue signaling" in my mind, but since they're actually doing something, a practical action to not just speak but also not invest into those companies, doesn't it stop being "virtue signaling" at that point?
  - Swenrekcah 4mo ago
    Railing against virtue signalling of some people is the preferred virtue signalling for some other people.
petterroea 4mo ago
For some context, this Norwegian cartoon by a group that used to make satire for the government run news agency is a pretty decent summary of how things were discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs. The old man is a caricature of Jens Stoltenberg (who seems to be running the Norwegian economic machine rather well nowadays, controversial or not)
SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
It's maddening how quickly ESG and similar programmes have been thrown in the dumpster once the political climate in the US swung back to "anti-woke". > "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals" What these clowns conveniently forget is that their job is not just "to make money" but to make money over a span of decades and centuries in the case of the sovereign funds. A long term investment fund that optimizes for the next quarter at the expense of the long term is a bad fund. And so the ESG and woke "hippie bullshit" is nothing more than the basic capitalism of maximizing your gains by 2100 by not destroying the one planet all your companies are on. Long term funds do not have the luxury of being passive owners. If they take no role in management, that role will instead by taken by whatever short-term owner walks in next. They don't care about the value by 2100, they just want the company to tear the copper out of it's own walls so they can sell with a profit by next quarter, retail even sooner.
- tordrt 4mo ago
  [dead]
- Geee 4mo ago
  How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index. ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways. And that's why no one takes it seriously any more.
  - SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
    > How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index. ESG is more than just the environment. In Tesla's case, Elon Musk's governance is a serious risk to the corporation. > ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways. Right now as we speak, a bunch of "arbitrary opaque committees" are deciding to rush SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI into the major stock indexes. Even completely passive investment leaves one at the whims of said committees.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
jcoyne 4mo ago
> our job is to earn money Which is exactly why you wouldn't put it in a company with a ridiculous valuation.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- kyleblarson 4mo ago
  I don't know the AUM of this pension fund but if the managers were doing their jobs they should have had at least a tiny bit of exposure to SpaceX years ago.
mejutoco 4mo ago
The sovereign fund of Norway also researches a lot of the state of the companies and then invests into the whole market vs the ones they dont consider good according to some metric. Sounds like this Danish example.
davedx 4mo ago
If you want to make money, buying SpaceX stock isn't the way to do it This is about valuation not ESG
- xorcist 4mo ago
  ESG is supposed to be about valuations, long-term. People conventiently tend to forget that when it doesn't suit them. It has been shown over and over again that it is a working predictor of valuation, in which it is not alone of course. Economy students regularly invent such predictors. And the dirty little secret about ESG is that it is probably G that is doing the heavy lifting. Companies without good governance seldom survive the first change of leadership. No one in the green movement ever spoke about "ESG" as if that was a thing. It is an investor thing. Invented by bank economists, to sell financial products. It's not like your local environmentally concious hippie type figure would suddenly start investing in Shell, just because they improved their ESG score. Does it work as a predictor for company valuation? It seems so. But it would probably have worked better if you separated E and G, because they have nothing to do with one another. Will it work in the future? No one knows. Once you start gaming these things, all initial bets are off by a lot. Just don't say "valuation, not ESG". It does not make sense. If you mean "short term valuation, not long term", then just say so.
__Joker 4mo ago
Yeah, there is lot talking out of both sides of their mouth here. If nothing else, at least these should be choice of users to let them choose based on their values and requirements.
- ImPostingOnHN 4mo ago
  The pension fund is the user of the stock here. Pensioners should get the same amount regardless of investments, as long as there is enough funding, which it seems there is for the moment. Of course, if someone wants to risk their own money, they can invest in whatever they want. They can even sell their pension for a cash lump sum and invest that.
- intended 4mo ago
  By who exactly ?
scoofy 4mo ago
The secondary market isn’t where morally dubious choices get made. There is a huge difference between funding oil extraction that is happening anyway, and funding a company to start extracting oil. However, this is the intersection of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue theory.
- lefra 4mo ago
  Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.
  - scoofy 4mo ago
    The point is that in the secondary market, the oil will be extracted regardless. By you not participating, you actually increase the return on equity for others, making it more profitable. Buying the stock does not add money into the business. The area for disincentivizing oil production is the political sphere, not the financial sphere. Refusing to participate in secondary market ownership does almost less than nothing to disincentivize the extraction. At least with ownership, you get a say in the firms harm mitigation.
    - lefra 4mo ago
      To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company". I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects. The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
      - scoofy 4mo ago
        >Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong. I mean that's fair, but it's also why I brought up the three major schools of ethics. The consequentialist likely won't care if it's going to happen anyway. The virtue ethicist will.

ifwinterco 4mo ago

How does Tesla fit with the rest of those? I'm not a huge fan of Elon Musk but Tesla is a company that produces electric cars (mostly in western countries with half-decent labour laws), it's not associated with any of those things. I guess one could argue with some merit that the governance is bad enough to exclude it on that basis alone?

sgt 4mo ago
Agreed - Tesla has been an insanely good investment. I'm not sure about the next 10 years, but people have continuously underestimated them (and Elon Musk). The Norwegian so called Oil Fund owns more than 1% of Tesla.
- RugnirViking 4mo ago
  has it been an insanely good investment because of changes to profit and loss, or because of other factors? (of course, building a car company of the scale they have is impressive. But by looking at tesla's financials vs stock price, youd conclude basically any other car company ever was a great buy by any reasonable metric)
- Gomotono 4mo ago
  Tesla is not and never has been a good investment. Its a gamble. The current evaluation of Tesla is still higher than real car companies + robot companies + robot taxi companies.
  - sgt 4mo ago
    Fair enough I guess, it has been a gamble. But risky investments are still investments that paid off well. Or they can drop like a rock.
  - derektank 4mo ago
    Never is a strong statement. Tesla’s price to sales ratio wasn’t absurd prior to 2020.

apexalpha 4mo ago

Defensive weapons are very much needed in Europe…

embedding-shape 4mo ago
Indeed, hence most European defense companies experiencing somewhat incredible growth recently, with no signs of stopping. Do we need Americans weapons? Unlikely and probably counter-productive long-term. Do we need European weapons? Hell yeah!
CuriouslyC 4mo ago
The new asymmetric reality is mostly short/medium range drones, ECMs and hypersonic missles. Loitering munitions are going to make tanks mostly obsolete and Jets are too expensive to risk over enemy territory that still has working radar/anti-air except for large shock&awe actions. A lot of this stuff is hard to stop and too cheap to effectively stop economically anyhow, the best solution is distance and preemptive strikes at staging areas.
- burnerRhodov3 4mo ago
  we have seen .005 radar ap is the most important because drones aren't long range enough in a real war. Ukraine and Russia should be looked at as a local conflict and not indicative how a real "war" would be fought now.
Gomotono 4mo ago
No they are not. The amount of military spending europe has, is already higher than russia. Russia clearly showed how incapable they are, they are not even able to present modern war technology at their freedom parade. And china we don't fight china.
- dijit 4mo ago
  we have about 30 years of catching up to do, better defense spending: 1) Saves our lives in Europe, by having access to better training and force multipliers. 2) Seeps into the economies of every country in the union through research spending. Defence is unambiguously a good thing, it becomes a problem if you put an expansionist cunthead at the helm of it.

tordrt 4mo ago

The fossil fuel part doesn't seem like a rational decision to me. Why are we pretending that fossil fuels dont provide an immense amount of value for humanity, and that its horrible to invest or support building out any fossil fuel production whatsoever. Lets not do produce it ourselves, lets just instead outsource it to the gulfs and Russia…

pietervdvn 4mo ago
The fossil fuel industry is both the most subsidized industry worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies) and the second most expensive source of energy (at least for electricity production). The only energy source that is more expensive is nuclear (!).
- tordrt 4mo ago
  The second most expensive source of energy is misleading in terms of whole picture. They are using a theoretical cost per kwh generated. You have to account for the much higher infrastructure and systemic cost of electricity generation you can not control (wind/solar). You cant simply use wind or solar without pairing it with an controllable source like hydro, gas, coal or batteries. Which is why the world is still very much using gas and coal (and still building more). Renewables are a cheap and good supplement to these sources, you just cant replace them cheaply (yet). Regarding "the most subsidized industry worldwide", this wikipedia article does not mention any tax revenue and taxation of these companies. Which are stil very often government cash cows and often pays much more taxes than other corporations. The subsidies are straight to citizen's gas tanks and heating bills. "Subsidies are mainly on consumption,[3] such as a lower sales tax on natural gas for residential heating; or subsidies on production, such as tax breaks on exploration for oil." In my country Norway for example, we have tax breaks on exploration to incentivize investment in exploration, but you have to take into account that these companies have an 80 corporate tax rate! In many petro states they are straight up nationalized companies.
- haaz 4mo ago
  [flagged]

pipes 4mo ago

Given the Russian threat to Europe and the fact that we are actively sending arms to Ukraine, investing in manufacturing arms doesn't seem like an imoral thing to do. Quite the opposite.

lukego 4mo ago

IANAeconomist but may I ask, tongue firmly in cheek, if they also only pour water into the shallow end of swimming pools to avoid contributing drownings?

CamperBob2 4mo ago

You might want some of those weapons, once our faithless, perfidious country (meaning the USA) decides to leave you to the Russian wolves. Don't depend too much on alliances. And where would Norway be without fossil fuels, exactly? That's basically the sole source of your nation's wealth. As for Tesla and other companies led by Elon Musk... well, yeah, F that guy. But don't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

thomasfl 4mo ago

As a Norwegian I envy your ethical pension fund. Our Norwegian pension fund goes by the name the oil fund, and was financed solely by fossil fuel production.