Canadas Minister of Natural Resources is running scared. He knows the truth is out there. by robertjb
(libertarian)
Sunday, January 22, 2012
It is human nature that when someone is hiding the truth they often resort to overstating their case. Joe Oliver claims in an open letter to Canadians that our regulatory system is broken. It has been hijacked by radicals and we cannot afford, “slow, complex and cumbersome hearings.”
But what if Oliver’s real fear is that hearings and the ensuing controversy surrounding the Northern Gateway pipeline might take a different course and reveal the real truth that Canada is not an “energy super power” as the Prime Minister claims and that we can ill-afford to liquidate our energy resources in a reckless manner.
Oliver would no doubt like to suppress the fact the tar sands are our last major oil reserve; that the easily extracted tar sands oil has been cherry-picked and the remaining reserves are subterranean and will be even more expensive to extract.
Eastern Canada is already heavily dependent on foreign oil imports.
Canada has exhausted most of our conventional oil reserves.
What Oliver and a lot of other politicians no doubt fear is that the focus might turn on the even larger and more critical issue. We, like all countries are rapidly approaching “peak oil”( the point at which all known reserves have been identified and the supply is diminishing.) This will inevitably be followed by the “end of oil.”
To date our energy crisis has been kept outside the realm of public debate but it has for years been written about, discussed and researched. Politicians by their silence, in collusion with corporations and a corporatized mainstream media, have managed to stall this debate.
But when it comes to the end of oil we have two choices: Hit the wall or manage the descent. Denialism reigns supreme and it appears we are determined to hit the wall dead on. Managing the descent first of all requires that we face the stark reality the end of oil is coming. Subsequently, we must rigorously manage the remaining reserves which means cutting consumption as a starting point.
Oil producing countries list their reserves in billions of barrels. But in a world where global consumption is almost a hundred million barrels a day and demand is increasing a billion barrels does not go far.
As numerous experts have pointed out there is a lot of dishonesty when countries state their known reserves as it is in their best interests to overstate them. Therefore, we don’t really know just how much oil is left.
That pipelines leak is not some fatuous claim but a fact of life. As oil becomes scarcer and less accessible the environmental impact of getting it out of the ground and from under the oceans is going to grow dramatically.
Are we willing to recklessly devastate the environment to extract a resource that is non-renewable and will be scarce by the end of this century?
There are four thousand interveners scheduled to testify at these hearings. This number testifies to the urgency these interveners feel. Mr. Oliver’s open letter is a scurrilous attempt to vilify the process and the very legitimate concerns of the interveners.
He is about to be clobbered with some inconvenient truths.
By his open letter Oliver has been so foolhardy as to undermine his integrity as a minister of the Crown, shown himself to be an insolent corporate toady and unwilling to address Canada’s energy security on a sound and factual basis.
This is a government trying to out run it critics, the truth, and suppress due deliberation on very urgent issues.
Robert Billyard Mission BC
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