Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
The bigger issue is that the oil and gas royalty game is not going to be around forever. Conventional gas reserves will be completely depleted by 2045 in Alberta. What will albertans have to show for those royalties? Nothing.
look at what a mature and honest jurisdiction does with its fossil fuel revenues in Norway. It actually saves them for an endowment that will help fund education, health, and the like for future generations when that resource is gone. Albertans, they get lower taxes, so they can consume crap now, immediately, and completely foregoing the livelihood of the future. Couple that with the fact that fossil fuel development will have huge net costs in the form of GHG emissions, then there's no way that there's a moral argument to be made for the way Albertans are handling this source of revenue.
Rant over.
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You're right, let's look at what Norway has done vis-a-vis Alberta. They started their equivalent of a Heritage Fund at the same time as we did. They have almost enough to run their government and provide services on the returns that chunk of money brings in, conversely our fund is depleted.
If I'm not mistaken, the Wildrose ran on doing the exact same thing, but I doubt you'd ever vote for them.
Defending going into debt does nothing to reaching the goal you've outlined above, but in previous posts you don't seem to think going into debt is a big deal.
Also, I'm not sure where your numbers are from. I go back and forth to the Oil Sands on business once or twice a week. I attended a CAPP presentation last week that indicated we could mine in the oil sands at our current pace for 250-300 more years.