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Can Technological Innovation in Clean Technology Save Canada’s Sovreignty?

By crooky | April 28, 2008

Many a pundit of late has declared that the era of fighting over oil is over and that the new hotness is going to be water. Less than 1% of the water in the world is potable and available (ie. not frozen solid in a glacier or deep underground) but Canada has almost 10% of it. Our neighbours to the South are already on the verge of a water crisis and we know what they do when their natural resources are threatened… they bomb their suppliers into compliance. We need to beat the US to the punch by giving them the answer to their water crisis before they do something stupid.

The US is already re-arming the division of the navy that used to patrol South America that was decommissioned in 1950. That and their aggressive moves towards the Northwest Passage should be enough to make any Canadian uneasy.

While I am now the proud owner of a 911truth.org t-shirt (thanks Uncle Joe!), I am normally a “Real Politik” kind of guy (not that I endorse most of what the US Government does - I just understand why they do it). My stance on this water issue is that we as Canadians should assume that at some point in the near future, the United States Government is going to make aggressive moves on our fresh water supply.

My suggestion is this: Canada is already working hard on Clean Tech and we should push harder on this front because the sooner we can solve the potable water problem, the sooner we can stop worrying about Americans coming to take ours with force.

The kinds of technology that I think we should focus on are nanotechnology as an enabling technology in water filtration and desalination, clean and renewable energy sources to power conventional desalination technology as well as distributed water purification over centralized models.

We’ve got the technical know-how in Canada to make a real impact on the world stage in terms of clean technology and now we’ve got the motivation to get our butts in gear. Let’s get going, people!

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Policy, Technology |

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