Obama's Visit to Canada

President Obama arrived in the Canadian capital for his first official foreign visit. Canadians were not deterred by snow as supporters lined the streets of Ottawa in anticipation of the passage of the President's motorcade.

The popularity of the President's plan to stimulate the US economy has seemingly spawned its own cottage industry in the nations capital, where T-shirts, coffee beans and a hamburger have all laid claim to the Obama brand. Canadians appear to be caught up in Obama-mania with extensive coverage on all the major Canadian networks, a concert, a symbolic bridge walk as well as a rally on Parliament Hill.

An RCMP honor guard and Governor General Michaëlle Jean met the President at Ottawa International Airport at 10:37 this morning. Obama will meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the two leaders are expected to discuss Energy and the environment, economy and trade, the war in Afghanistan and border security. The two leaders will also discuss a North American climate-change pact and future energy development. Obama and Harper are scheduled to hold a joint news conference at about 2:30 this afternoon.

The most contentious issue confronting the two leaders concerns Canada's oilsands, the largest deposits of crude oil outside the Middle East. Canada is the largest single supplier of energy to the US and oilsands account for almost half of the 1.5 million barrels of crude oil Canada exports each day to the US, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The oilpatch, environmental groups and the Alberta government have been lobbying both the prime minister and president. Green groups have launched an international public-relations offensive and the Alberta government has countered with its own three-year, $25-million effort to improve the Alberta "brand."

Obama needs affordable energy to create jobs and reduce America's dependence on oil from unstable regimes. Alberta's oilsands are an important part of North American energy security but also constitute a major environmental problem. Extracting the heavy crude from the sands releases enormous amounts of greenhouse gases and it has a detrimental impact on air, land, water and local communities. The production of a barrel of oil from the oilsands generates three times as many greenhouse-gas emissions as conventional crude, while using enormous amounts of natural gas and fresh water in the process.

Greenpeace activists unfurled two large banners on a bridge in the Canadian capitol one welcoming the President, the other saying "Climate Leaders Don't Buy Tar Sands."

Obama said in a CBC interview, "What we know is that oilsands creates a big carbon footprint. So the dilemma that Canada faces, the United States faces, and China and the entire world faces is, how do we obtain the energy that we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change? To the extent that Canada and the United States can collaborate on ways that we can sequester carbon, capture greenhouse gases before they're emitted into the atmosphere, that's going to be good for everybody. Because if we don't, then we're going to have a ceiling at some point, in terms of our ability to expand our economies and maintain the standard of living that's so important. Canada must partner with the US to find ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from petroleum extraction if both countries' economies are to grow in the future."

"The more that we can develop technologies that tap alternative sources of energy, but also contain the environmental damage of fossil fuels, the better off we're going to be," the president said." As reported in the Calgary Herald, "Alberta has already pledged $2 billion to kick-start capturing and storing carbon emissions from coal-power plants, heavy-oil upgraders and potentially the oilsands. Obama, meanwhile, pledged more than $3 billion toward the technology in his stimulus bill that was signed into law Tuesday."

A group of 50 prominent Canadians opposed to exploiting the oilsands sent Obama an open letter on Wednesday saying, "Costly and unproven technological fixes such as carbon capture and storage do not provide 'silver bullet' solutions to addressing emissions from tar sands."

To manage our energy we will need to make some difficult choices that will require close cooperation between the US and Canada. To make meaningful changes in our energy economies we must marry lofty aspirations to pragmatic solutions. We need an approach to energy that balances the environment and the economy, we must acknowledge the pressing importance of environmental considerations, but we also need to recognize the important contribution oilsands make to supply and the economy.