5 Questions Stephen Harper Might Want to Ask President Obama at the White House Today
Today, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet with President Obama at the White House to discuss ways in which our nations can build on the strong economic and strategic relationship we have in place, and help one another emerge from the current economic downturn in a stronger, more secure position than when we entered it.
Among the many topics expected to be considered, energy figures to be the most prominent – the United States relies more on Canada for its oil than it does any other country. Unfortunately, as Congress considers a nationwide Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) that explicitly targets and seeks to punish Canadian oil, the future of that partnership finds itself today in serious doubt.
Ahead of today’s meeting, Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) released a list of five critical questions that Prime Minister Harper might consider asking President Obama during his visit:
1) Mr. President, last year the United States imported 1.5 million barrels of oil a day derived from the Canadian oil sands, and that number is expected to climb to 4.3 million barrels a day over the next two decades. Do you consider this good news or bad? And do you see the value in using this secure Canadian energy as a tool to confront your country’s growing dependence on foreign, often unstable regimes?
2) Mr. President, as a member of the Senate last Congress, you introduced S. 1324 – legislation to impose a nationwide Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, even though your home state of Illinois relies on Canada for 55 percent of its daily oil. Can you recognize now the extent to which an LCFS would prevent secure, affordable Canadian energy resources from crossing the border – potentially forcing your country to fill that vacuum with additional energy imports from overseas?
3) Mr. President, the U.S. State Department’s recent decision to grant a permit to the Alberta Clipper pipeline project, an $8 billion project, will only serve to strengthen our countries’ economic and strategic relationship in the years to come. Have you considered how passage of a Low-Carbon Fuel Standard policy might impact that investment, the jobs that are tied to it, and the direction of that relationship?
4) Mr. President, perhaps you’ve seen recent reports from my home province of Alberta of China’s $1.7 billion investment of our oil sands region. It’s been widely assumed for a number of years that the preponderance of Canadian oil reserves from Alberta would be sent to the United States. Has the fact that China is now an active player in our oil sands region changed your thinking at all regarding imperative of, and potential competition in, obtaining this energy?
5) Finally, Mr. President, protesters outside these gates today continue to claim that energy derived from the Canadian oil sands has a higher carbon content than other energy sources, and have based their support for a Low-Carbon Fuel Standard policy upon that supposition. But are you aware that several respected sources have found that an LCFS policy imposed by Congress might actually increase the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the air – a function of the added emissions from sending these resources to China instead of the United States?
Read More:
