Re: Will we ever be proud of our oil sands?

Konrad Yakabuski’s appeal for Canada to spend billions of dollars innovating in the 19th-century fossil fuel industry (with “a singularity of purpose and a sense of urgency”) rather than the 21st-century renewable energy and clean-tech industry reminds me of the U.S. Republicans’ rallying cry of “drill, baby, drill!” in 2008.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued at the time, absurdity of this kind is akin to someone on the eve of the Internet revolution calling for more typewriters and carbon paper. Similarly, all I could think about while reading Mr. Yakabuski’s column was “typewriters, baby, typewriters!”

______

Note: This appeared as a letter to the editor in The Globe & Mail.