[Fozzie_DeBear]

Albertan's need to remember Peter Lougheed's philosophy that we need to turn our non-renewable resource (hydrocarbons) into a renewable resource (a ton of cash in our Heritage Fund, a diversified economy).

The Oil and Gas sector has a best before date, a date when essentially that sector is unprofitable...we need to use innovation to 1) push that date back (by making the oilsands as cheap and clean as we can) and 2) by transforming the capabilities of the current energy sector into non-oil and gas sectors and are profitable.

Personally, I like the idea of taking Alberta's talents in:
-Mega project management
-Drilling
-Understanding in-situ steam and thermal processes

And seeing if we can't make large scale geothermal energy economic

It took 50 years of (haphazard) research to get Oilsands technologies where they needed to be...and a lot of Alberta Government money...money that was VERY well invested, in my opinion (the Energy companies would have taken a looong time to get to SAGD etc on their own).

So to me, Climate Change is a bit of red herring (not that it isn't real..it is)...but in Alberta its a very important economic argument that gets us to the same place...what are we going to do when markets won't buy our oil?

PS This is one of the reasons why the Wildrose fiscal austerity mantra is really dangerous to Alberta...we HAVE to be entrepreneurial and expect our Government to be as well. The Alberta economy of 2060 depends upon Government/Univeristy/Industry projects we need to plan now...