The Greatest Grift of All (1): Single-Use Cups, EVs, and Gov't Overreach in Norway

The eventual outcome of the Cult of Stain Gretha of Climate Doom will be taxation w/o representation, climate apartheid, and the denial of choice--all real in Norway now--make for a grim future

When suicidal empathy meets virtue-signalling delusions, you’ve arrived…in Norway.

This is the first instalment of a series on how ‘good intentions’ are wrecking regular people’s minds, wallets, and lives.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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Aleksander Has Been Drinking From the Same Cup for Ten Years

By Olaug Bjørneset, NRK, 4 Jan. 2025 [source]

[caption] plastic cup has become fragile and cracked, but it still works.

When the hospital had to save a lot of money in 2014, bioengineer [sic] Aleksander Lid Berget started reusing a single-use plastic cup.

‘It hasn’t been washed that many times either’, he says with a laugh.

Just before the cup turned ten years on 15 Dec. 2025, colleagues took the initiative to have a bacteria test carried out, which surprisingly showed that it was completely clean.

‘It has dried out well, it has. But it hasn’t been a good wash’, says Aleksander Lid Berget. And he adds that he has very few sick days.

The head of the department, Joar Ulstein, has calculated that Aleksander has saved the healthcare system around NOK 1,500 in the ten years he has not used new plastic cups, and he has reduced plastic consumption at Volda Hospital by 63 kilos over ten years [sounds like a lot, but 1,500 crowns is some 125 dollars or euros today, and it’s kinda hard to tell the loss of purchasing power as the Norwegian crown lost some 50% of its value relative to either dollar or euro in the past decade, to say nothing about inflation (annualised at 4.35% from 2015-24), massively ramped up state spending (up to 64% of GDP from 50% in 2015) while the average Norwegian (based on data from Oslo) ‘produces’ some 17kg of plastic per year]

But he is still a little concerned about how much microplastic Berget ingests by drinking from the old and fragile plastic glass every time he is at work:

But for the department and for the work environment, this has been a fun case for ten years.

‘It helps to have a good working environment’

Helse Møre og Romsdal is heading for a budget deficit of almost half a billion kroner in 2025 due to the introduction of the Health Platform [this is a major, long-standing bruahahaha over here as the ‘new and improved™’ e-patient filing system simply doesn’t work no matter how much money the healthcare provider throws at it; needless to say, no politico or hospital admin suffered consequences] and major investments in new hospital buildings.

Hard cuts have been announced by the administration, but the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Blood Bank at the hospital in Volda does not have a gloomy outlook on the new year for that reason:

‘The cup is from 2014 and the focus was exactly the same then. Money must always be saved,’ says Aleksander Lid Berget [while not noticing, for a decade (or more) that this is ‘new public management’, i.e., everything is run by MBAs (still Norway’s most popular graduate degree), and every now and then, when the risk of losing elections is particularly high, the gov’t throws money into ‘da system™’ without addressing any of the issues].

He is also the department’s safety officer, and believes it is important to do his best to ensure that he and his colleagues have a good time together at work [nope, the OSHA rep’s concerns are, believe it or not, workplace safety]:

We’ve turned over every stone now, many times [looking for money to save]. And then there are new directors and bosses, and we continue to turn over stones. So it helps that we have a good time together. We just have to try to keep the mood up, otherwise nothing will work.

A Sense of Humour is Important

Aleksander’s cup has led to a lot of laughter in recent years.

His boss, Joar Ulstein, says they deliberately cultivate humour in the department to create a better working environment [nevermind wage pressures due to annual inflation at 4.35%; care to guess the rates for mortgages…?].

As department head, he looks forward to going to work every day. ‘Good colleagues are the main reason for that’, adding:

Even though it's demanding, we’ve managed to keep a positive attitude. We’re in a good mood and come up with a lot together. This makes it easier to deal with the demanding things, whether it’s patient stories, finances, or other challenges.

[caption] Aleksander calls this ‘Elevator Tetris’, which is one of the steps taken to increase efficiency and has led employees to find out how many bioengineers plus equipment can take the elevator together [this is about as useless as throwing away ‘old’ things because one wishes to ‘save the planet’ by installing, e.g., new stuff as the life-cycle footprint is never considered]

And the jokes can more often than not be directed at the boss. Like the time a gas-powered horn from Biltema [a company selling cheap(er) hardware] was placed under Joar Ulstein’s office chair, spray-painted to camouflage it.

The sound of such a horn is enough to wake up half the hospital, but nobody lost their job because of it.

‘All pranks are thoroughly risk-analysed. We don’t want the patients to suffer’, says Joar Ulstein.

New Cup

After 10 years with the same plastic cup, this cost-saving measure may now be coming to an end for Aleksander Lid Berget.

His boss thinks it's time for the cup to retire, and has bought a new genuine reusable cup that Aleksander can keep until he retires.

‘I'm considering putting the plastic cup on display’, says the bioengineer.

[caption] Aleksander Lid Berget has gotten a new cup that he can use until he retires [which is funny as he looks around 40-ish and that means it’s some 30 years until then…]

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Bottom Lines

You might think this is a silly story, and in many ways it is extra-stupid—but here’s why I put this up:

It goes a very long way of showing the amount of brainwashing that has been going on in Norway for some time now.

Every year in autumn, school kids all over the country do a project week focussed on the United Nations (it’s called ‘solidarity week’).

Every spring, they take half a school-day off and go collect garbage thrown out carelessly by grown-ups (I’m kinda in support of this, but then again, I also pay municipal fees to do that—on top of high taxes that go, among other things, to the local school district).

Then there’s the entire EV scam, which is a massive grift as the gov’t since the early 1990s massively intervenes in vehicle sales by subsidising EVs (with tax credits and many other perks) effectively choosing winners and losers. On top of it, while this may or may not be a good thing (at least for esp. top-selling brands like VW and Tesla), putting electric cars on Norwegian roads does nothing to address the underlying issues—and it arguably exacerbates many others, including, but not limited to:

• deficient charging infrastructure, which is related to the entire ‘we need to produce more electricity and spend gazillions to upgrade the grid’, on which see this piece from December.

• EVs are significantly (30-40%) heavier than ‘regular’ cars, which is to say that most, if not all, roads will require significant investments to simply keep them (and no-one is talking about that)

• the most problematic aspect, however, may be the virtue-signalling component as driving an EV—or choosing to re-use a single-use plastic cup for a decade—confers both a false sense of ‘I’m doin’ something here’ (which always implies: ‘and you scumbag are doing nuthin’) without doing so ever leading to any kind of solution.

In fact, doing these things without changing one’s attitudes (consumption patterns) might be the true reason why this stance is recommended/advertised.

Please let me explain: ‘OMG, Saint Gretha of Climate Doom told us that the world’s going to end if I don’t buy an overpriced EV from Mr. Musk (whom I dislike now because he sided with the Orange Man)’.

And once you bought one of these—typically with a car loan, which makes the EV technically the bank’s car with your income = labour pledged to the bank (hi there, wage slave)—you can go back to your day-to-day things plus you get to feel like Saint Gretha, 97% of Climate Scientists*, and the gov’t patting your back for ‘doin’ something’. (*needless to say, these 97% numbers are about as fake as a third of the UK’s weather stations’ data)

Recognition thereof brings us to the tentative conclusion here: re-using a single-use plastic cup for a decade is pointless, that is, if one disregards the many jokes and jabs at Aleksander’s workplace.

‘Buying’ (with loaned money) an EV to ‘save the planet’ while also driving more kilometres per year—which is the result of the paper ‘Electric vehicle adoption in a mature market: A case study of Norway’ by Anni Yang et al. that appeared in the Journal of Transport Geography, vol. 106 (Jan. 2023)—is not going to help:

With the annual average travel distance increasing by 1000 km, the BEV [battery EV] adoption rate would increase by 11.4%. This finding aligned with several studies that have suggested that BEV consumers have more potentials for saving money due to the high vehicle mileage traveled…

Translation from the academese: as EV owners get more mileage out of the same amount of money spent relative to ‘regular’ cars, they also drive more.

There’s no cradle-to-grave analysis for Tumbler Cups either, by the way (and what I don’t get about Aleksander’s boss is why didn’t he buy a stainless steel cup or the like?), to say nothing about another important finding of that paper:

When the median household income increases by 100,000 Norwegian Krones (around $11,000), the BEV adoption rate would increase by 26.3%.

So, EV owners earn much more annually than ‘regular’ car owners. Figure that.

(That study isn’t freely accessible; I do have access as I work at a university, so if you’d like to read it, drop me an email.)

Joe Q. Public, taxed to the hilt by the predatory gov’t of Norway (and it doesn’t matter if ‘the Right™’ is in power as they are similarly statist), finances all these accoutrements, such as charging stations, upkeep of the roads, utility and grid expansion, and the like.

Nevermind the fact that while, e.g., Oslo municipality had announced the construction of 100 new charging stations in 2024—only to beunable to tell the public how many were actually built.

At the same time, Joe Q. Public’s taxes are funnelled towards massive EV subsidies while the same Joe Q. Public is about to be denied use-rights of public infrastructure by means of institution of a ‘zero emissions zone’.

Basically, we’re looking at the creation of a two-tier system of governance and legal status, which is based on ‘laws™’ instituted based on the hypothesis that zero (carbon) emissions must be achieved at all costs.

The result will be taxation without access to publicly-funded infrastructure coupled with denial of access to the public sphere.

It’s going to be wild, as the climate scam combines abrogation of equality under the law (apartheid) with restrictions on individual liberties based on consumer choices.

There’s but one solution: ready the pitchforks.