When former U.S. Vice President Al Gore told Rolling Stone magazine last month that using Alberta's tar sands to supply the U.S. with oil was "truly nuts," Albertans in general shrugged. So another American flake was talking nonsense in some flake magazine. So what?

But when their former premier Peter Lougheed expressed some of the same concerns, that was a very different matter. For Lougheed back in the '70s was the chief political architect behind Syncrude, the second tar sands developer and for years by far the biggest.

Gore's comments were off-the-cuff, inaccurate and sounded frivolous: "They have to tear up four tons of landscape for one barrel of oil. It is truly nuts. But you know, junkies find veins in their toes."

"I don't know what he proposes the world run on," replied Alberta's current premier, Ralph Klein. "Maybe hot air. The simple fact is America needs oil."

The Gore remarks were part of an interview on "green" issues, doubtless made to promote Gore's new "green" film, "An Inconvenient Truth." While the left swoons in admiration over it, the right renames it "A Convenient Untruth" – convenient, that is, to another Gore run at the White House.

In any event, Gore's remarks came at an inopportune time for Klein, in fact during the very week when Alberta took over a segment of the Mall in Washington as part of the Smithsonian's "Folklife Festival" to demonstrate and promote the Alberta tar sands as a solution to U.S. energy problems.

Included in the display is a 200-ton, 17-foot-tall Caterpillar 777F truck, a downsized version of the vehicles used to transport bitumen from open-pit mines in the tar sands to the facilities that begin converting it into crude oil. The trucks that do this are about the size of a two-story house, and their dwarf replica on the Mall has been particularly targeted by environmental groups, accusing the Smithsonian of selling out to Big Oil.

The Alberta oil sands are estimated to contain 179 billion barrels of oil, the world's second biggest reserve, coming after Saudi Arabia. Shell, Exxon, Mobil and Chervon have announced plans to spend $76 billion in the next 10 years developing tar sands oil production. Already, the activity has heated up the Alberta economy to the point where Lougheed, who was premier of the province when tar sands development exploded into reality, has been calling for a temporary moratorium on further projects.

In Canada, the provinces, not the federal government, "own" the natural resources, so that the bitumen is in fact the property of the people of Alberta, says Lougheed. Yet the royalty they receive on it amounts to 1 percent of the selling the price of the oil it produces, barely enough to cover the enormous infrastructure services the tar sands projects are occasioning.

Under the contracts with the province, this 1 percent increases to the range of 20-25 percent once the capital facilities are paid for. But since the planned facilities are constantly expanding, setting the time at which they can be considered "paid for" is difficult, and Lougheed argues that the "waiting time" for adequate royalties is turning out to be far too long.

He's calling for a study on the environmental impact of the massive projects, which will cover an area about the size of Florida. Where the interests of continental oil supply must be weighed against the interests of environmental integrity, he proposes that such issues be settled by popular referendum.

Talk like this makes oil executives shudder. It amounts to changing the rules in the middle of the game, they say. They are reminded, however, that Lougheed has done this before. After he became premier in 1971, and the OPEC cartel began wildly escalating the price of oil, Lougheed arbitrarily escalated the Alberta royalty scale, infuriating local oilmen.

Lougheed questions in particular the use of natural gas to fuel the conversion of the bitumen into crude oil. Natural gas might better serve Alberta's long-term benefit if it were used to make petrochemicals, he argues.

It's significant too that Klein is now a lame-duck premier, having announced he will retire in the fall. Both he and Lougheed are Conservatives, but when Klein became premier in 1992, he overwhelmed the "Old Guard" of the provincial Tory Party that Lougheed had created. So the two have never been endeared to one another.

Lougheed's current contentions imply that Klein has mishandled the tar sands resource, creating an opportunity for the Old Guard's return, re-born with younger members and perhaps surprisingly clothed in an unaccustomed green.

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