Foreign oil supports undesirable regimes

Re: “UVic, others probe power of fossilfuel giants,” Jan. 31.

What next? Millions of taxpayer dollars to research corporate power relations in the North American fossil-fuel industry? When are people going to realize that there is a world market for crude petroleum, and that oil is fungible so that oil from one source can replace oil from another source as long as there are viable transportation links. The largest, most powerful oil companies in the world are the state-owned companies of the Middle East, North Africa, Venezuela and Russia.

The single-issue environmental movement seems to want to shut in oil from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, including the oilsands, not realizing that if this oil is shut in, the world (including Canada) will simply purchase more oil from the state-owned companies. Much of the money received by these state-owned companies for this oil goes to support regimes with terrible human-rights records, and a considerable portion leaks into the hands of terrorist groups.

If one wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels, one must work on the demand side of the marketplace. Shutting in one source of supply will simply lead to more consumption from alternative, and often lessdesirable, sources of supply. Until environmentalists begin to understand this point, they will continue to create major tensions within the Canadian family of provinces, in continuous denial of the fact that our two land-locked provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, ought to have a constitutional right to get their products to tidewater. Brian Scarfe Victoria