Posted on 01/20/2009 11:22:53 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
After eight years of Republican rule, environmentalists believe they have a keen ally moving into the White House Tuesday, and Canada's oil sands are high on their list of targets.
But they'll have to deal with Gen. James Jones.
As a monumental battle over energy policy shapes up within the new administration of president-elect Barack Obama, Jones, a former NATO supreme commander who retired from the U.S. Marine Corps, may turn out to be Canada's best ally.
After Tuesday's historic presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., he will be the new president's national security adviser, and has sent clear signals that he considers energy security to be a key part of his mandate.
The fate of Canada's carbon-heavy oil sands projects hangs on the outcome of the fight over U.S. energy policy and climate change, which pits the "hawks," pushing for tough new standards to cut greenhouse gas emissions, against the "pragmatists," urging a go-slow approach to ensure nothing undermines the economy or energy security.
Jones, as it turns out, delivered a message to a closed-door meeting of business and government elites in Banff this fall that was music to the ears of his Alberta hosts.
Energy security is a critical and growing concern for American national security, Jones said in his keynote speech to an audience that included Americans and Mexicans, as well as Canadians.
His message in Banff this fall dovetails with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's pitch to the new administration for a continental climate change agreement that reflects the need for energy security and growing oil sands production.
When he accepted his role in the Obama administration, Jones was chairman of the Institute for 21st Century Energy, a business-backed think tank that has several Canadian oil companies as supporting members.
Among its lengthy list of proposals aimed at boosting supply and reducing U.S. energy demand, the group warns against aggressive climate change policies that would undermine energy security or impose undue costs on the economy.
And it advocates that the United States look to Canada and Mexico as strategic partners in providing growing sources of crude oil as it attempts to reduce its reliance on Middle East supplies.
Soon after his inauguration, Obama will travel to Ottawa to visit with Harper, his first foreign visit as president. The Prime Minister will make similar arguments to those put forward by Jones -- that Canada is a critical source of secure energy and that the two countries need to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without hamstringing either the economy or Alberta's oil industry.
But while Jones and Harper will be urging caution in Obama's right ear, the new president will be getting a very different message from environmentalists in his left.
Obama has promised aggressive action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by boosting low-carbon sources of energy, improving energy efficiency and adopting national emissions standards that could penalize high-carbon sources like oil sands projects.
He has loaded his cabinet with advocates of action, including former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol Browner in a new post as adviser for energy and climate change, and his energy secretary Stephen Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has urged adoption of national emission caps.
But Jones and several economic advisers are expected to urge caution in moving ahead with costly regulations that could weaken an already fragile economy or interfere with the country's energy security agenda.
Jones's Institute for 21st Century Energy is part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and has provided one avenue for Canadian oil companies to use to help counter the opposition in the United States to oil sands development. At the same time, Canada's Ambassador Michael Wilson and Alberta's representative Gary Mar have aggressively lobbied senior members of the U.S. Congress and senior advisers surrounding Obama.
This week, a group of Canadian and American environmental groups wrote to the president-elect and key members of his cabinet, urging them to resist Ottawa's push to grant "a pass" to the oil sands in meeting greenhouse gas emission targets.
Congress is expected to tackle climate change legislation in the first half of this year, after Obama's stimulus package and a broader energy bill, says Liz Barratt-Brown, a senior attorney at Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, whose group was a signatory to the letter.
She expects the new president to rebuff any Canadian effort to water down emission targets to protect the oil sands.
"This is a president who instinctively gets how serious the climate change threat is," Barratt-Brown said.
Let’s not forget the Saint Helena gun control advocate community as well.
Translation, let's kill the Canadian economy, (particularly Alberta) so that Canada can experience the same financial troubles as the rest of the world.
Then Ontario and Quebec will assume their rightful place again as the leaders of Canada.
Even if it means an igloo heated by a blubber lamp
Do they have a “site” to celebrate their attitude?.
That’s some expectedly twisted speech from the Toronto Globe and Mail. The truth is that certain Ontario interests are wanting to shut Alberta oil sands work down for the main purpose of keeping the Canadian dollar low and their export volumes high for other products. There are also importers in the US (our northeast and California, mostly), who want to keep their margins high with a lower Canadian dollar. Canadian oil exports raise the Canadian dollar. ...see?
Well, there’s much more to it than that, but generally there are US and Canadian interests (mostly the east in Canada) that want to kill oil sands production. But for national security, we may well need oil from there very much in the near future.
I do not know, probably in Toronto if their was one.
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