| The Gazette |
In some ways, shipping 61 per cent of our oil and gas production to a foreign country while both Canada and the world is running out of the stuff might be considered a good thing, but you would have to be fairly twisted – or just plain stupid – to go along with the reasoning.
Which just about sums up where Canadians are today when it comes to managing their most vital resource: fossil fuel energy.
In a nutshell, we continue to expand our fossil fuel exports into the United States while our conventional natural gas and crude oil supplies begin to dry up.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, which keeps track of world supplies, at its present rate of production Canada could be out of conventional natural gas in six years. That doesn’t mean every well will have run dry by 2014. That just means we will no longer have enough production to supply our needs. That will pose a horrendous situation both for the millions of Canadians who rely on natural gas to heat their homes and for the industrial sector that uses it to manufacture a wide variety of products, including fertilizer to help grow the cheap food to which we have become perhaps too blithely accustomed.
