Q: What’s more valuable fresh water or heavy crude oil?
A: We can’t survive without water.
Although my, ‘Well Duh,’ answer is obvious, I’m writing it here because most people aren’t factoring future generations into their valuations.
Canada’s most valuable resource is an abundance of fresh water. Bitumen, heavy crude oil, is not even close.
California is currently experiencing the worst drought in at least a hundred years. If this drought is related to ‘Global Warming,’ it’s clearly a very big deal. If linked, the worst is yet to come. What happens when the drought moves north? Are Alberta and Saskatchewan at risk? Will the oil sands’ provinces come to regret:
- wasting millions of gallons of fresh water to extract bitumen from sand
- poisoning precious fresh water supplies?
Q: What’s driving oil sands’ development?
A: Asia’s demand for fuel and Big Oil’s bottom line.
Short-term thinking and greed are scary things. Folks, who aren’t part of the financial class, may not realize that almost all oil sands’ profits go directly to multinational corporations and their shareholders. Very little money stays in Canada. Will these same folks be shocked when the proposed pipelines come online and cause domestic gas prices to rise? The current tar sands’ economy has never made sense for the vast majority of Canadian families.
Q: What will happen if we don’t change direction?
A: In not much more than a decade, or two, our children will be saying, “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they heed the environmentalists’ warnings? Why did they listen to the Harper Government and Big Oil?” and they would be justified to conclude that “Our parents were short-sighted assholes.”
It’s time to get off of the Conservative Liberal teeter-totter.