The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.
 
President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling
 
— off the Mid-Atlantic coast (as Virginia, for example, wants),
 
— off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there),
 
— in the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30% below pre-moratorium forecasts),
 
— in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles Airport),

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

CALGARY • It’s been almost a decade since scores of highly skilled Venezuelan oil workers like Petro Pereira, fired and blackballed by dictator Hugo Chavez for protesting his tightening grip on the national oil company, made their way north to Alberta.
 
Today, word that an aggressive cancer may soon put an end to his dictatorship and potentially reactivate Venezuela’s once-mighty oil industry has many reassessing the future.
 
Mr. Pereira, a world expert on heavy oil who is now a scholar at the University of Calgary, is so engrossed in research to improve oil sands upgrading he plans to stay put.
 
But the state of Mr. Chavez’s health is a hot topic in the colony of expats, and many are talking about returning if there is regime change in the South American country, he said.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.

I’m lucky to be going to Fort McMurray, Alta. this weekend with colleagues from CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup. I have a great wish to see what the green Jeremiahs deem to be the greatest blot on the visage of Mother Gaia, and to meet some of the soulless folk who work there. After all, environmentalists might ask: Who would take a job on a site that threatens the destiny of the planet, except people whose souls have been bought off with oil-company lucre?
 
Outside Fort McMurray, it is impossible to escape the furor over the Alberta oilsands. Its product is routinely described, lazily and slanderously, as the dirtiest on the planet. The Premier of Ontario, a province that owes much of its prosperity to its huge automobile industry shivers when he looks at Alberta, mutters about the dark forces of the “petro-dollar,” and implied (until he was scolded and half-recanted) that somehow Ontario’s fretful financial state is Alberta’s fault.
 
It’s almost a fantasy disconnect. Dalton Mcguinty can throw billions at General Motors and urge the feds to do the same, all to save the automobile industry. He ignores that four decades or more of Ontario’s prosperity wasn’t founded on windmills: It was based on gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

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EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?” I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.

Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”

 That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

I’ll admit to sharing some British Columbians’ concerns about shipping oil from Alberta’s oilsands to Asia using tankers leaving from a port on that province’s north-central coast. The Pacific coast is a special place, with salmon, eagles and grizzlies. Befouling it with crude oil from a tanker spill would be a horrible ecological tragedy.
 
Still, it should be possible to build a port at Kitimat and run tankers in and out of the Douglas Channel without incident. The key is not merely devising the right rules for tanker operation, but also maintaining vigilant enforcement for as long as ships filled with oil navigate through the sensitive waterway.
 
The problem with the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding was not that Alaska had too few safety regulations at the time, but rather that the company had become lax in following them and government enforcers had stopped monitoring company compliance.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

While Canadians seem more concerned than ever about the costs and risks of pipelines, the Far North is feeling the pain of not having one.
 
With the Mackenzie Gas Project on ice because of low natural-gas prices, the Northwest Territories is searching for other ways to fuel its economy, while dealing with the human toll resulting from lack of opportunity.
 
As N.W.T. leaders met in Calgary this week to take stock of Arctic oil and gas activity, or more precisely the lack of it, they had this advice for Northern B.C. communities trying to kill the proposed Northern Gateway project: Be careful what you wish for.
 
For decades, the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline from Inuvik to Alberta faced many of the hurdles that are troubling the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline today: unsettled aboriginal land claims, worries that development would alter traditional ways of life, warnings about the environmental impacts, concerns that the pipeline’s fuel would be used to support the growth of Alberta’s oil sands.

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