The National Energy program harm was debunked years ago! At the time interest rates were allowed to go up to above 25%. At the same time the price of oil dropped to an equivalent of 20 dollars per barrel today's money.

House mortgages were above 25%. Companies and individuals went bankrupt – not that different than right now.

The NEP was agreed by Laugheed Premier of Alberta! The design was to increase Canadian ownerships of the resources which, it did. Canadian ownerships went from 15% to close to 30%/

The Conservatives managed to spin off all the bad business breaks as being the product of the NEP.

Two other Points:
The Idea that this was a plot to rip of Alberta by the east is BS!
There are still many of our backwoods Conservatives who believe as you do.

What's your take on nuclear power Jeff? Based on what I've read I'm in support but interested to see a post from you on this topic.

There are already rumours at Toyota and Honda that they will shift more production of their cars to the US. They only advantage now is the lower health care costs here and that may not be enough to justify production in canada when over 90 percent of the cars go to the US anyway. Lots of talk that our manufacturers can get leaner and buy more technology with the higher dollar. But lets face it those plants were here originally to benefit from our historically low Canadian dollar. Everything else was secondary.

Even gas is too expensive and conventional production is flat or in decline – Screw gas/oil, Ontario should be burning coal to meet immediate/peak electricity demand!

Energy illiterate greenies will be the death of the developed world!

sorry for the double post, please delete.

A Nice Revelation………..

Unsustainable cow manure

Sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly renewable energy, my eye

Paul Driessen, 21 September 2010

Seek a sustainable future! Wind, solar and biofuels will ensure an eco-friendly, climate-protecting, planetsaving,

sustainable inheritance for our children. Or so we are told by activists and politicians intent on

enacting new renewable energy standards, mandates and subsidies during a lame duck session. It may be

useful to address some basic issues, before going further down the road to Renewable Utopia.

First, when exactly is something not sustainable? When known deposits (proven reserves) may be

depleted in ten years? 50? 100? What if looming depletion results from government policies that forbid

access to lands that might contain new deposits – as with US onshore and offshore prospects for oil, gas,

coal, uranium, rare earth minerals and other vital resources?

Rising prices, new theories about mineral formation, and improved discovery and extraction technologies

and techniques typically expand energy and mineral reserves – postponing depletion by years or decades,

as in the case of oil and natural gas. But legislation, regulation, taxation and litigation prevent these

processes from working properly, hasten depletion, and make “sustainability” an even more politicized,

manipulated and meaningless concept.

Second, should the quest for mandated “sustainable” technologies be based on real, immediate threats –

or will imaginary or exaggerated crises suffice? Dangerous manmade global cooling morphed into

dangerous manmade global warming, then into “global climate disruption” – driven by computer models

and disaster scenarios, doctored temperature data, manipulated peer reviews, and bogus claims about

melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Shouldn’t policies that replace reliable, affordable energy with

expensive, intermittent, land-intensive, subsidized sources be based on solid, replicable science?

Third, shouldn’t inconvenient sustainability issues be resolved before we proceed any further, by applying

the same guidelines to renewable energy as courts, regulators and eco-activists apply to petroleum?

Most oil, gas, coal and uranium operations impact limited acreage for limited times – and affected areas

must be restored to natural conditions when production ends. Effects on air and water quality, habitats and

protected species are addressed through regulations, lease restrictions and fines. The operations generate

vast amounts of affordable, reliable energy from relatively small tracts of land, and substantial revenues.

Wind turbines generate small amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity from gargantuan installations

on thousands of acres. Turbines and their associated transmission lines dominate scenic vistas, disrupt

habitats and migratory routes, affect water drainage patterns, impede crop dusting and other activities, and

kill bats, raptors and other birds, including endangered species that would bring major fines if the

corporate killers were oil or mining companies. And yet, wind operators receive exemptions from

environmental review, biodiversity and endangered species laws that traditional energy companies must

follow – on the ground that such rules would raise costs and delay construction of “eco-friendly” projects.

Kentucky’s Cardinal coal mine alone produces 75% of the Btu energy generated by all the wind turbines

and solar panels in the USA, Power Hungry author Robert Bryce calculates. Unspoiled vistas, rural and

maritime tranquility, and bald eagles will all be endangered if 20% wind power mandates are enacted.

The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station near Phoenix generates nearly 900 times more electricity than

Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base photovoltaic panels, on less land, for 1/15 the cost per kWh – and does it

90% of the time, versus 30% of the time for the Nellis array. Generating Palo Verde’s electrical output via

Nellis technology would require solar arrays across an area ten times larger than Washington, DC.

Building enough photovoltaic arrays to power Los Angeles would mean blanketing thousands of square

miles of desert habitat. Once built, solar and wind systems will be there just this side of forever, since

there will be no energy production if we let them decay, after shutting down whatever hydrocarbon

operations aren’t needed to fuel backup generators that keep wind and solar facilities operational.

Wind and solar power also mean there is a sudden demand for tons of rare earth elements that weren’t

terribly important a decade ago. They exist in very low concentrations, require mining and milling

massive amounts of rock and ore to get the needed minerals, and thus impose huge ecological impacts.

If mountaintop removal to extract high quality coal at reduced risk to miners is unacceptable and

unsustainable – how is it eco-friendly and sustainable to clear-cut mountain vistas for wind turbines?

Blanket thousands of square miles with habitat-suffocating solar panels? Or remove mountains of rock to

mine low-grade rare earth mineral deposits for solar panel films, hybrid batteries and turbine magnets?

Since any undiscovered US rare earth deposits are likely locked up in wilderness and other restricted land

use areas, virtually no exploration or development will take place here. We will thus be dependent on

foreign suppliers, like China, which are using them in their own manufacturing operations – and selling

us finished wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid car batteries. The United States will thus be dependent

on foreign suppliers for renewable energy, just as we rely on foreign countries for oil and uranium.

To claim any of this is ecologically or economically sustainable strains credulity.

Green jobs will mostly be overseas, subsidized by US tax and energy dollars – other people’s money

(OPM). Indeed, Americans have already spent over $20 billion in stimulus money on “green” energy

projects. However, 80% of the funding for some of them went to China, India, South Korea and Spain,

and three-fourth of the turbines for eleven US wind projects were made overseas. This is intolerable,

indefensible and unsustainable. But it gets worse.

Denver’s Nature and Science Museum used $720,000 in stimulus money to install photovoltaic panels

and reduce its electricity bills by 20 percent. The panels may last 25 years, whereas it will take 110 years

to save enough on those bills to pay for the panels – and by then four more sets of panels will be needed.

As to biofuels, the US Navy recently waxed ecstatic over its success with camellia-based eco-fuel in

fighter jets. But the PC biofuel costs $67.50 per gallon, versus $5.00 per gallon for commercial jet fuel.

To meet the 36-billion-gallons-a-year-by-2022 federal ethanol diktat, we would have to grow corn on

cropland and wildlife habitat the size of Georgia, to get 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol – plus

switchgrass on farmlands and habitats the size of South Carolina, to produce 21 billion gallons of

“advanced biofuel.” By contrast, we could produce 670 billion gallons of oil from frozen tundra equal to

1/20 of Washington, DC, if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge weren’t off limits.

OPM-subsidized ethanol also means a few corn growers and ethanol refiners make hefty profits. But

chicken and beef producers, manufacturers that need corn syrup, and families of all stripes get pounded

by soaring costs, to generate a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per tank than gasoline.

Hydrocarbons fueled the most amazing and sustained progress in human history. Rejecting further

progress – in the name of sustainability or climate protection – requires solid evidence that we face

catastrophes if we don’t switch to “sustainable” alternatives. Computer-generated disaster scenarios and

bald assertions by Al Gore, Harry Reid, John Holdren and President Obama just don’t make the grade.

We need to improve energy efficiency and conserve resources. Science and technology will continue the

great strides we have made in that regard. Politically motivated mandates will impose huge costs for few

benefits. Sustainability claims will simply redistribute smaller shares of a shrinking economic pie.

“Renewable” energy subsidies may sustain the jobs of lobbyists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats and

politically connected companies. But they will kill millions of other people’s jobs.

Let’s be sure to remind our elected officials of this along their campaign trails – and on November 2.

_____________

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of

Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death

agreed – too bad Mr . Rubins book is tainted in that way

Carbonman, who are you to say who is and who isn't a “Patriotic Canadian?” I'd like my grandchildren and their grandchildren to inherit this country as a greener and more pleasant land than the way it is heading right now.

As for calling the area around Fort McMurray the Tar Sands, I always have and always will. From the 1930s, when the Tar Sands were first projected for economic development, they have been called the Tar Sands. Since the 1960s they have been referred to equally as the Tar Sands and the Oil Sands. More recently, “Oil Sands” has become the greenwashed term for Tar Sands.

Don't believe me? Personally I don't give a rat's you know what whether you believe me or not. Janet Annesley, VP for Communications of the The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has personally labelled me as a terrorist (Google: Janet Annesley Unabomber) for drawing attention to some of their members' funding of the Tea Party. CAPP, and also the Alberta Enterprise Institute, were extremely uneasy about that revelation.

However, being reasonably intelligent and always willing to give credit where it's due, here's a link I found on the CAPP website, accurately detailing the terms Tar Sands and Oil Sands.

http://www.capp.ca/canadaIndus…