The Oil Drum: Canada

I am sure Mr. MacKay is on the same intellectual level as many politicians in the United States. However, I agree with the invasion thing. My choice of occupier would be Switzerland.

HSF,

That isn't a Canadian, minister of foreign affairs, that guy and his government are just Yankees in muck lucks, I think he studied his malapropisms under Quayle, or was that Regan or maybe Bush?

The bet? Okay, I'll take Putin.:)

Here is something that I found more interesting than any of Harpers goons, it is from the Union Farmer Monthly, sorry to put full bit in here as I can't give a link, it came by ground mail:

RENEWABLE FUELS?
Advocates of ethanol and biodiesel like to call their products "renewable fuels." These fuels are admittedly, renewable, but are they sustainable? The distinction is critical.
At one time, the houses of Europe and America were lit, largely, by biofuels. A vast industry existed to hunt and slaughter whales, cut up their flesh and squeeze out a flammable lamp oil. Whale oil production rose rapidly during the first half of the 1800s, peaked around 1850, then fell off rapidly as whales become increasingly scarce. The whale oil industry was largely finished by the late-1800s.
Whales, as a biofuel source, were renewable-whales could reproduce and maintain their numbers, under a certain range of conditions. But the rate at which we harvested that renewable resource was unsustainable - our source of whale oil could not renew themselves as fast as we chose to extract that resource.
Similarly (though a food issue rather then energy), our harvest of cod, a renewable resource, was not sustainable. All renewable resources - food, energy, fiber, etc. -- become unsustainable at some point as our rate of consumption increases.
Wood is a renewable fuel, the original biofuel. The owner of a small cabin in a forest clearing could harvest and burn wood for heat and never degrade the surrounding forest. Perhaps the same is true of a small village. But you couldn't fuel modern civilization with wood without very quickly creating an Easter Island landscape. In fact, the transition from a wood-fuelled European civilization to a coal-fuelled one was spurred, primarily, by deforestation and wood shortages that resulted from the vast quantities of fuel needed for iron smelting.
Petroleum is a renewable fuel: the Earth creates a bit more each year. And petroleum use could even be sustainable, under certain conditions - if we pumped it more slowly then the biological and geological processes of the Earth renewed it. In very rough figures, our petroleum supply was created during various periods over the past 500 million years We will use up the bulk of it, however, over a 110-odd year period stretching, very roughly, form 1940 to 2060. The period in which petroleum was created is about 5 million times longer than the period in which we will use it up. Thus, our renewable petroleum supply could be a sustainable petroleum supply if our extraction rate was approximately one-five millionths as rapid as it is now.
Ethanol and biodiesel are, certainly, renewable fuels. Plants renew themselves, growing every year from seeds water nutrients and sunshine. One can imagine walking to a stand of corn, taking a bit of the seed, and making ethanol in a process fuelled by wood from a field-edge fluff of frees. Backwoods moon shiners and their stills produced their ethanol just this way. In such a scenario corn-ethanol would be renewable and sustainable.
The problem is that as scale and rate of production increase, sustainable renewable processes become unsustainable Early forestry whale oil harvesting, and ethanol production were all sustainable. As these activities expanded, intensified and accelerated all became unsustainable.
Large-scale (and even medium-scale) renewable fuel production is unsustainable. This is partly because it is built atop and draws from our unsustainable food production system. Our food supply-now scaled up to feed 6.5 billion people and their livestock - is increasingly a product of fossil fuels. Nitrogen fertilizer, the main feedstock for our foodstuffs, is created directly form fast-depletinq natural gas (see box at end of article). Gas provides the feedstock chemicals as well as the energy to drive the reactions that make nitrogen fertilizer. Similarly, our farm chemicals are made primarily from fossil fuels. Likewise, our processing and distribution systems run on fossil fuels. The fossil fuel inputs into our meals are huge. We are, as many have observed eating oil Thus as goes oil, so goes our food supply. And so goes our supply of grain and oilseeds from which to make ethanol and biodiesel.
The problems with the sustainability of our food supply do not end with fossil fuels: As we move form our current population of 6 5 billion people toward a probable 9.5 billion, we are encountering limits to our irrigation water supply. We are drawing down fossil aquifers. Our water use is unsustainable, and it will become even more so as we move to increase food production for humans by 50%.
We are losing soil to erosion and cropland to urban sprawl, salination and desertification. Our use of the Earth's soils is probably unsustainable.
Thus, if the energy and fertility sources of our food supply are unsustainable, if our use of soil and water is unsustainable we can be pretty sure that the food system overall is currently unsusustainable. It naturally follows that any corn or soybean or canola biofuel source taken out of that food supply will be similarly unsustainable-renewable, but unsustainable; think whale oil.
In the face of such chilling facts about our food and grain supplies, biofuel proponents often stage a tactical retreat and begin talking about cellulosic ethanol -- ethanol made from the fibrous cellulose found in wood and straw. The idea here is to take wood chips and crop waste and to turn them into fuel with the help of exotic processes or yet-to-be-discovered bacteria. It's not a bad idea to turn wood waste into usable fuel. And we can even imagine that it could be sustainable to capture the sawdust and chips currently rotting in heaps around a sawmill and use them to create a bit of ethanol. Where such a scheme becomes unsustainable is when we pretend that we could replace a significant part of our global motor fuel supply with ethanol derived from wood or straw.
Such a scheme would require removing mega-tonnes of plant materials from the land. This plant material would then be vaporized along with the nutrients it contains. Removing those nutrients, however, will only make our unsustainable system even less sustainable. If you remove the straw, you remove the raw material of tomorrow's soil. You also accelerate wind and water erosion Running the global car feet, even partly, on energy extracted from the land will deplete that land. We will replace the problem of Peak Oil with one of Peak Soil. By depleting our soils as well as our fuel sources, we will reduce not only the capacity of future civilizations to fuel themselves, but also even to feed themselves. Biofuels made from unsustainably produced grains, oilseeds or cellulosic feed stocks mean using tomorrow's food to make today's fuel.
When thinking about so-called renewable fuels, the bottom line is this: Sources of renewable energy are plentiful - wood whale cow dung, a horse fuelled by a bale of hay and a handful of oats. Sources of sustainable energy are much rarer Moreover it is almost certain that there are no sustainable ways to fuel this civilization. That is true simply because the energy draw of this civilization is too large relative to the capacity of the Earth to create usable energy. Further, our energy use is too large relative to the Earth's capacity to reintegrate the emissions from that energy conversion back into the biosphere -- instead, the energy conversion by-products

The lie implicit in the promises made by biofuel proponents is that their energy fixes are not only renewable but also sustainable They are not. Using such fuels will empty the Earth of resources and fill the atmosphere with bi-products. Using such products will degrade the very possibility of our grandchildren and their grandchildren living lives as comfortable as ours. Biofuels like all unsustainable energy sources, benefit the present at the expense of the future. The major questions surrounding Biofuels are neither technical nor economic; they are ethical.
-nfu- Union Farmer Monthly / Volume 57 Issue 4 June / July 2007

Not bad for a farmers mag eh? But watch out though, this might be one of those Survivalists front organizations.

Possibly like this one? http://wtdwtshtf.com/index.php