Following President Joe Biden’s veto of the Keystone XL Pipeline, one commentary on the Bloomberg business website asserted that “Alberta has only itself to blame for the pickle it’s in. If its leaders had been more willing to share their wealth a decade ago, when people were still concerned about oil running out, they might have got their pipelines built.”
Not willing to share the wealth? What about the $630 billion of net transfers that have been taken out of Alberta and shared with the rest of Canada since 1961? Or in the past decade alone, prior to 2020, during which the net transfers out of Alberta still averaged $20 billion a year? By any fair accounting, there’s been plenty of “sharing” of Alberta’s energy wealth.
Morton goes on to discuss the constitutional arguments against provinces blocking pipelines, which ends up being a bit too inside-baseball. He does get back to relevant points, a lengthy bit that covers what Ann Coulter already said in three sentences two decades back:
Julian Lee, Bloomberg’s author, is also wrong when he invokes the spectre of the “post-hydrocarbon world embraced by president Biden” and the necessity for Albertans to immediately “put themselves on the path to their post-oil future.” Yes, global oil consumption is going to stop growing in the coming years. But it’s not going to decrease, much less disappear. The rest of the world wants the same levels of public health and prosperity enjoyed by such First World economies as the U.S., Canada and Europe — all of which use energy more intensively than the global average. And Joe Biden will soon discover what his Pentagon generals already know: armies, navies and air forces run on oil.
Global oil consumption very likely will remain at or around 100 million barrels per day for several more decades. Where will this oil come from? OPEC? Russia? Iran? Iraq? Venezuela? These are not great choices. Canada — more specifically, Alberta, home to the third-largest proven oil reserve in the world — carries none of the baggage these other sources do.
I personally wouldn't bet a single GameStock share on FakePresident Biden "discovering" something, but it's Ted's article so he can indulge in any fantasies he'd like.
Julian Lee is right about one thing: “If (Alberta) can’t develop its own export system, those riches risk being left in the ground.” But that’s not an option Albertans will accept. Albertans are not going to sit by idly and let climate-change alarmists in Ottawa and their foreign-funded ENGO allies destroy what we have built.
There's a reason Albertans have been buying guns, buying ammo, and yet not having it show up in any official statistics.
Related: The Canadian Taxpayer's Federation has started an Anti-Equalization Initiative
