clasper said:
That's an amazingly ridiculous statement. There's exploration going on all over the world (including in Saudi Arabia). If world production is at 100% capacity, how did we manage to produce more oil today than we did yesterday, and more oil this month than last month? Rightly or wrongly, this trend will continue for some time.
Clasper
World production capacity is not a measure of how much oil there is in the ground, it is a measure of how well we are exploiting the oil that we have already discovered, and the percentage of active wells we have producing at 100% capacity. As the world is considered by most exploration experts to be approximately 98.7% surveyed for oil and gas reserves, this is not an "amazingly ridiculous statement" it is a fact, agreed upon by all of the major oil companies and geological scholars. A quick peruse of the Economist's last two editions will clue you in.
As world oil refining capacity is finite, this is also an issue, as no new refineries are being built in North America due to the powerful environmental lobby.
As to your question about how "we produced more oil than yesterday". We (as a global economy) were not operating at 100% capacity a month ago. Now we are. Please familiarise yourself with some of the terms I am using before referring to them as "ridiculous".
As to your statement about propping up genocidal governments, we do it accross the Middle East, in all of the oil producing nations, we bought Iraqi oil two years ago and we buy Iranian oil now. We buy oil from Hugo Chavez (venezuela) and have troops at a logisitcal base in Tashkent, Tajikistan, where the president is busy killing and jailing all his political rivals. We maintain friendly relations with Syria, Jordan and Morocco, all of whom have massacred dissident ethnic groups in the last twenty years. Why was Sudan so different, and why was only Talisman forced out? If the Sudanese government was so "genocidal" why did the Canadian government just give it 170 million $ to help "develop" the country, but no troops to ensure it was used properly?
Zipper,
If we choose to embrace global free trade we are OBLIGATED by treaty to sell to the highest bidder. Taking a lead in the WTO will cement this. Or we can pursue nationalisation of resources and face impoverishing ourselves.
We should have environmental protection, but the Kyoto accord only gurantees that our industries will send money abroad, making us less competitive, and our goods more expensive.
As fr getting rid of labour law, not getting rid of it, maybe just reign it in a little. When 35$/hr unskilled auto assemblers in Windsor strike for even better wages and benefits, and ford shuts down and moves the plant to Mexico, everyone loses. Most rational people would agree that big unions have become too powerful.
We do supply other industries with resources, but because these are far more marketable, and easier to sell as such. In addition to this, the unions and environmental regs fight the creation of most manufacturing plants and jobs, and thus make it more profitable to assemble elsewhere. In addition to this, there is not enough manufacturing capbility in Canada to finish all of the raw materials harvested in Alberta alone, so it is really a moot point.