T hose hoping that consumer boycotts will derail Alberta's tar sands are likely to be disappointed. The abrupt backtracking on Thursday by one of two U.S. firms that had announced plans to avoid high-carbon-content tar sands oil is indicative.

Boycotts are tricky, particularly when necessities like oil are involved. They can also cause counter-boycotts which is why, it seems, the trendy firm Bed Bath & Beyond switched gears and announced that it wouldn't ask truckers that deliver its goods to avoid tar-sands fuel.

It appears that the home furnishing supplier was unwilling to risk a consumer backlash in Alberta.

What's more likely to kneecap the tar sands development is the same force that created it – wildly fluctuating oil prices.

Since Alberta has pinned all of its hopes on the tar sands, and since Canada seems to be pinning all of its hopes on Alberta, this would have serious repercussions here.

In environmental terms, the helter-skelter tar sands development has been disastrous. Even Albertans, most notably former Conservative premier Peter Lougheed, have complained.

Huge swaths of landscape have been destroyed; the province's scarce water resources have been commandeered; perhaps most bizarrely of all, vast quantities of non-renewable natural gas must be consumed to produce this equally non-renewable heavy oil.

All of this has been made possible by sky-high oil prices.

Without such prices, Alberta – whose conventional oil reserves are drying up – might have begun to move away from resource dependence. But the siren call of easy money was too much to resist.

For Canada, the oil sands have been the counterweight to recession. Ontario may not sell many cars in the U.S. these days. But Alberta still sells top-dollar oil.

Moreover, the spillover from oil sands construction has been felt across the country, sheltering jobs and allowing the federal government to smugly boast about its handling of the economy.

Yet as our own history shows, oil prices are a weak reed upon which to lean. Even last year's brief price downturn was enough to saddle Alberta's provincial government with its biggest deficit in history.

That government says prices have recovered and are sure to stay high. But in its budget this week, it also admitted that its record in such predictions is badly flawed. Last year, it was off by about 20 per cent.

Today's high oil scenario is based on the assumption that the Chinese economy will continue to power the world, that the current demand for oil is real rather than speculative and that, over the longer run, cheaper wells won't come into production.

Yet none of these assumptions is ironclad. Economic powerhouses invariably have clay feet (remember the Japanese miracle, the Irish miracle, the Icelandic miracle).

No one is sure how much of the current high petroleum price is fed by real demand and how much is fed by edgy speculators shifting their cash from risky currencies into oil futures.

And no one is sure about geopolitics. As long as Iraq is a basket case and Iran a pariah, the tar sands are golden. But what happens when those two countries get their acts together? At 251 billion barrels, the combined proven oil reserves of Iran and Iraq far outstrip Canada's. True, the U.S. government likes Alberta oil. It's close; it's in a friendly country. And although (contrary to the belief of U.S. ambassador David Jacobson) Alberta's oil reserves are not privately owned, they do belong to the most free-enterprise government in Canada.

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But Americans like cheap oil even better than free-enterprise oil. And if they can get that from Mexico or Saudi Arabia, they will. Failed boycotts notwithstanding, Canada's grotesque tar sands experiment is still on shaky ground.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

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