An open letter to the Canadian Government:

My dear Canadian Government,

Re.: Planetary resource management

The situation today is that a significant portion of our planetary resources are being consumed to destroy what we build using those same resources.

I am speaking about war and war-like activities.

In terms of planet management this is just plain stupid.

Western Canada has huge supplies of energy in the form of hydrocarbons and uranium. Estimates give 600 years of hydrocarbon resources can be available at current consumption rates. However, these are being developed such that they may be all gone in 60 years.

Our energy is sold to the USA, and others, much of which is being used to destroy what has been built in various places on the planet.

What we see then is resources are used to advance civilisation and at the same time resources being used to destroy parts of civilisation.

Given the drain of resources for these two opposing activities we will be, at minimum, not as advanced as we could be, and at worst, poor in 1 to 2 generations with no significant energy resources and nothing having been developed to carry on with providing our energy needs.

We should be using our energy resources to develop means to continue progressing as a civilisation.

As a general example we used fire for a long time which let us develop technologies to get coal. Coal burns hotter which let us develop technologies to acquire hydro carbons which further gave us the ability to get atomic energy.

But now we realise a resource limit. We need to think how we will use the limited resources to advance to possibly: fusion energy, solar, etc. I can speculate that these energy supplies will let us develop in to an antimatter age then perhaps on to singularity and zero point energy possibilities. But those are a long way off and we have to manage to not run out of resources until we get to these ever advancing stages of development.

The immediate problem is to manage the resources to get us to the next stage, whatever that may be. We should make a plan for that.

This concept applies equally to water, food and other non-energy resources. There is a fixed amount of resources that we have. If we use resources up without applying enough of what we have today to build to get to the next stages of development, then that development will be hindered, perhaps even impossible. We will not be as great a civilisation as possible, if ever, and certainly not as soon as possible. This prolongs individual suffering.

One of the most immediate of these problems is the selling of vast Canadian resources to the USA. These resources are ours! We must direct how they are used.

Right now we are to a large extent letting our resources be wasted.

And I don’t see enough of the meagre compensation received allocated to the future.

Our compensation for our resources needs to be much much higher or, better yet, lets save a lot of our resources until we become smarter as a civilisation in using them.

Thank you for reading,

Dennis G. Dahl