Q: To what extent is the United States dependent on Canadian products?
A: Are there any comparable American alternatives to these products?
- America imports 60% of its crude oil from Canada, at an average **discount** of 15%. That discount has applied for close to 4 decades, minimum. Roughly 80% of vehicle fuels used in the US are derived from this CANADIAN-SUBISIDIZED oil. The closest substitute your refineries can handle comes from Venezuela. I’m sure the orange stain won’t mind buying from them at all.
- 50% of aluminum consumed in the US comes from Canada. There are few alternatives as aluminum takes a god-awful amount of electricity to produce. Canada has shit-tons of hydroelectric power that we use to make aluminum.
- That same hydroelectric power generation is so plentiful, that we export most of the rest to the US, which keeps the grids along the east coast and into the mid-west humming. No Canadian hydro means rolling blackouts across a third of the US.
- 80% of potash used in fertilizer is sourced from Canada. Canada is the world’s largest producer, having a full third of global production. The next two largest producers are russia and China, and put together, they produce ALMOST as much as Canada does by itself. You could try and buy half the output from both of them, or all the output from one, I guess.
- Canada exported almost 3–trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which helps keep the Midwest and Northeast states warm and generates a significant amount of electricity. According to your own sources, natural gas accounted for 43.1% of your total generating capacity last year.
- A full quarter of the uranium you use annually comes from Canada. The ore is of unusually high purity too. That’s another quarter of your generating capacity going down, and 18.6% of electricity is produced by nuclear.
In order to replace any of these would require a huge amount of work.
You could build a dozen aluminum smelters to pick up the slack from Canada alone, but you still need electricity to run them. And you can see the problems with that.
More pressing is finding new ways to heat your houses, fertilize your fields and afford to drive anywhere.
The “good guy” discount Canada has been giving the US for five decades is going to end... so you can expect your local gas prices to rise by an average of 15%, regardless of what the orange-stain does now.
M Spicer.
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