If Canada could simply apply the basic principles of sustainable development, such as the internalization of costs and 'polluters pay,' it would have long-term beneficial effects, both environmental and economic.
Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers.
Canadians need to start thinking of themselves as a petrostate, and they need to start thinking of the kinds of controls needed to protect the country from the excesses of oil.
Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?
The destructiveness of the tar sands is not inevitable. But Canadians and Albertans have become too tolerant of the politicians who compromise the nation's energy security as well as the next generation's future.
The problem with cap-and-trade and programs such as carbon capture and storage is that they all assume that business as usual can continue. The financial meltdown and peak oil has pretty much demonstrated that business as usual's not going to work.
There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources.
When governments run on petro dollars or petro revenue instead of taxes, then they kind of sever the link between taxation and representation, and if you're not being taxed, then you're not being represented.
When you've got a lot of slaves at your command, you tend to get a little bit fat. You tend to get a little bit lazy. You tend to get a little incompetent because there's not much that you do for yourself anymore.
