# [[Energy Blindness Is a Bliss]] ###### August 9, 2023 ##### I visited the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger and learned something about Energy Blindness. # ![[Norwegian Petrol Museum.jpeg]] *The Norwegian Petrol Museum in Stavanger* Yesterday I spend a rainy afternoon in the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger^[https://www.norskolje.museum.no/en/home/visit-the-museum/]. Norways oil production started in the late 1960s with the discovery of a large oil field in the North Sea, got accelerated with the big oil crisis in the 1970s and grew constantly until the 2000‘s with a recent boom caused by the war in Ukraine. The museum in Stavanger is sponsored by the big Norwegian Oil companies and it is no surprise that it‘s perspective on the topic is more of a heroes story than a critical assessment of oil production and it‘s environmental impacts. The exhibition features a short movie about a man finding closure with his father who was working on a Norwegian oil rig. Son and father argued a lot about the fathers job and its implications for the environment, but in the end of the story, probably to the liking of the museums sponsors, the son finds understanding for the fathers decisions. He starts to appreciate the Ford Mustang he rejected as a present in his youth and agrees that the Oil industry has managed rough times before and will be able to manage the rough times ahead as well. I am used to exclusively critical discussions about fossil fuel production and our dependency on it, so the (obviously petrol company-funded) Norway Petroleum Museum provided an interesting experience, as it was largely positive in its portrayal of the topic. Even though the heartwarming father-son-reunion did not turn me into a Shell fanboy, I realized that the story of Norways exponential growth in wealth started in 1969 is not mere ideological fiction, but history that actually happened and it is shaping the infrastructure and lifestyle of Norwegians to the very day (for example you can see an „energy is cheap“ attitude everywhere, even in 24/7 heated dish washing booths on camping grounds). Going further, I think the extraction-based wealth explosion of Norwegian history is actually just a more pronounced version of the extraction-based wealth explosion that has happened everywhere in the US and Europe during the last 60 years. In a way, the Norwegian obsession with their oil rigs seems like a more honest version of the same ideology post-war Germany was built on. Maybe it is the fact that Germany never had strong national resources of fossil fuels that allowed us to believe that everything positive that happened economically in the last decades was enabled by human ingenuity. We tend to forget that in the same time, our consumption of non-renewable resources increased exponentially, fueling everything that happened economically with “free-of-charge“ energy and materials. From a bio-physical point of view, oil is an extremely expensive resource, as it took billions of years and the extinction of entire species to produce it. But these costs are not a part of any financial model that is guiding governmental or private decision making. The ignorance towards cheap fossile fuel being the enabling factor for all currently existing economic models is called „Energy Blindness“^[see [Nate Hagens on Energy Blindness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhluhhxU0p0)] - a negligence of pre-existing effort and resources that is at the core of our Terra Nullis/frontier/settler ideology and the currently dominant definition of „progress“. In a way, the Norwegian attitude towards fossile fuel is more honest than the one I am used to from Germany. The wealth of both countries is based on the same exploitation of resources and the extractivist ideology attached to it.