This Election's about Canada's Frighteningly Near Future
Where will we be in less than a generation? The trends are alarming.
And we continue, stupidly, to look for more oil.
"Considering that western companies spend about $450 billion annually on (worldwide) exploration and development, this could be one of the worst misallocations of capital in history," wrote Anatole Kaletsky in the International New York Times Econoclast column in December. "With the global atmosphere approaching its carbon limits and technological progress gradually reducing the price of non-fossil fuels, the Bank of England warn(s) that some of the world's oil reserves could be left with no market value despite the huge sums sunk into the ground by oil companies, their shareholders and banks.
"The Saudis are well aware of this risk. Back in the 1970s, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, used to warn his copatriots not to rely forever on selling oil: the Stone Age didn't end because the cave men ran out of stones. Maybe the end of the 'Oil Age' is now approaching, and the Saudis have understood this better than western oilmen." Better, certainly, than Canadian ones.
And better, certainly, than our PM, Oil Slick Steve. Despite one estimate, by the International Labour Organization, that green jobs could constitute half the global workforce by 2030 -- that's right, just 15 years from now -- Harper has expressed zero interest in promoting renewable energy in this country. No doubt he thinks it is too "aspirational" to make the shift from fossils to renewables any time soon, if at all. ("Aspirational," a term also coined by the Harper government after it first refused to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, but finally gave its qualified endorsement in 2010, and has since done nothing to implement it -- truth and reconciliation be damned.)
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