David Suzuki says, in his article 'Canadian Government Continues to Choose Dirty Energy Over Democracy', it's our dear leader's fear of shifts from wastefully burning fossil fuels to conservation and renewable energy making tar sands bitumen soon becoming uneconomical and curtailing demand that drives them. Hopefully Suzuki's right, conservation will win, but it's not the Alberta Tar Sands only competition. There's tar sands in the US too and shale oil, lots of that. There may be as many as 503 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken Formation that runs under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota and Montana, 4 times the size of Saudi Arabia's reserves.
Same can be said about B.C. who is basically giving away the resource right now, the North American market is flooded.with supply from all the friggin fracking. This oversupply and the near panic selling of resources is, in addition to the addicted profiteers, because our governments are addicted to charging minuscule royalties, getting by on unsustainablely high extraction. A great article this past week 'In an oil world, we need more Chavez, less Harper', contrasted socialism's solutions along side the neo-liberal alternative, gotta love Chavez eh.
Why's Alberta's oil industry in sucha the hurry? Alberta is landlocked, pipelines full of bitumen.and deadly chemicals don't make new friends easily. Alberta's oil magnates figure they gotta 'go big or go home' . Alberta's oil industry, still steadfastly refusing to look east, along with their faithful boy Harpo, are going 'all in' to retain some hold on the US jugular. Meanwhile, the grass looks a lot greener in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Soon, 'Go East Giant, Go East' could be the chant of BC's anti-pipeline protesters.
