Like much of the world Canada exports oil. It gets this oil by drilling wells and pumping it out of the ground. Oil that can be recovered in this way in Canada will last another 2 years. The rest of the world's similarly recoverable oil reserves will last until around 2025. Remember this is just oil that you can easily pump out of the ground.

There is another source of oil: tar sand & shale. This oil is recovered in a much more destructive manner. Millions of cubic yards of earth are excavated (strip mined) and the oil is washed out of it. The earth is then put back where it came from. This process is energy intensive and we only get about 5-10% more oil out of it than we burned, eg. for every barrel of fuel that we burn we get 1/10th of a barrel of reserves. In contrast we get 9 barrels of pumped oil for every barrel burned. It has been estimated that Canada has enough tar sand & shale to supply oil at current consumption levels for about 130 years. But the damage !

If we invested dollar-for-dollar in renewable fuel manufacturing then we might get out from under this oil problem. The difficulty in doing this is that by lowering demand for oil also lowers its price, and so we can't win. It seems the environment is doomed as long as oil supplies exist.

The consumer is the only one who can change this trend. The consumer has to choose the environmentally-friendly product, even though it is a little more expensive. It's not a situation you would bet money on. So the government has to do it - act in the public's interest in the absence of profit-making potential.