Canada's energy plans make no sense for the future

Why is it that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's designation of Canada as a "new energy superpower" does not evoke thoughts of a comfortable energy future here in the Great Lakes basin?
The prime minister marketed western Canadian natural gas, oil and coal at a meeting of the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce in London last week and continued to extol the security of Canada's energy resources at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, after having pointed up the advantages of "the free exchange of energy products based on competitive market principles," as opposed to Russia's "self-serving, monopolistic political strategies."
The "exchange" of energy resources has really been a cyclonic movement of western oil, natural gas and coal to the south and the Pacific Rim, while bringing oil to eastern Canada from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and coal from the Ohio Valley.
The pipeline carrying natural gas from the west -- that's the one that revolutionized heating for Ontario in the 1960s -- will not be expanded. Western natural gas that does not go into the United States will not make it out of the Alberta oil sands, where they are about to expand its use as they go after the deeper deposits that constitute four-fifths of the sands' reserves.
Even Peter Lougheed, Alberta's former premier, objects to the use of a relatively clean natural gas to extract dirtier oil from the sands.
In fact, there is talk in the oil patch of bringing liquefied natural gas to Alberta's oil sands to back up the Arctic natural gas that's slated to come down the Mackenzie Valley -- if First Nations and Esso (Exxon) people can agree. The liquefied stuff would likely come to a British Columbia port from Siberia, or from Australia, which has just signed a large contract to supply China for the next quarter-century.
Eastern Canada's new source of natural gas is going to be Russia. President Vladimir Putin thanked Canada for the help given by Petro-Canada in developing the technology to provide liquefied natural gas.
Enbridge, at least, has said it is building a depot on the St. Lawrence River in the vicinity of Sherbrooke, Que., to supply both its eastern Ontario market and the New England states. And this busy pipeline company is also determined to build a 1,200-kilometre oil pipeline from the Athabasca Basin in Alberta to Kitimat, B.C., as well as another pipeline from the sands to supply crude oil to Houston, Texas.
Duke Energy Corp. has announced it will spin off Union Gas facilities comprising 29,000 kilometres of pipelines serving 1.3 million homes and businesses in southwestern Ontario, creating a separate, publicly traded company, early next year. Questioned in 2005 about future supplies, Union Gas representatives said only that western sources would continue to be relied on. Exceptionally cold winters in the past have taxed the company's storage capacity.
This emerging "energy superpower" -- at least its eastern half -- will, like the cobbler's kids that went shoeless, be very reliant on continued goodwill from Russia.
Britain has decided not to grow more dependent -- as have others meeting at the G8 -- and decided to go heavily into nuclear power, meeting both a target for independence and its Kyoto commitment to lower carbon dioxide emissions.
The energy house-of-cards being constructed for Canada's two economies, east and west, should be seen as a sign that the world has, in fact, just about reached peak fossil-fuel development, and that it's past time to begin planning for a post-fossil-fuel world.
A Putin of the future will someday have to turn off the energy tap and save the dregs for whatever the Russian bear has developed with its sale of resources.
Are Ontarians now expected to go quietly into those winter nights, depending on the good will of our polar neighbours? Is the (winter) sky blue?
George Burrett of Cambridge has worked as an energy adviser and was the first chairman of the Kitchener-Waterloo chapter of the Solar Energy Society of Canada Ltd. in 1979. Second opinion articles reflect the views of Record readers on a variety of subjects.