Kissing Off Canada What country has the world's largest oil reserves? Saudi Arabia? Iran? Nigeria? Venezuela? Wrong on all counts. The answer is Canada. And our neighbor to the north is worried we don't want it. Canada has an estimated 1.6 trillion barrels of oil on its territory, much of it locked in tough-to-excavate tar sands in the province of Alberta. By comparison, oil-rich Saudi Arabia has an estimated 270 billion barrels left. It isn't even close. Yet, according to the Financial Times of London, Canada's government recently sent U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates a letter of warning that it might not be able to sell the U.S. any of its oil, which the Pentagon desperately needs for national defense. For that, you can thank the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, passed with great gusto and self-righteousness by the Democratic Congress. Under Section 526 of that law, tar sands are considered to be an alternative fuel. But the law requires oil sold to the U.S. government and produced from alternative sources to emit fewer greenhouse gases than oil produced from conventional crude sources. That's a big problem. Estimates show that removing the highly sticky, coagulated oil found in tar sands produces as much as five times the amount of greenhouse gas as pumping from a conventional well. "Classifying the oil sands as a nonconventional fuel," said Tristan Landry, a spokesman for Canada's Embassy in Washington, "would unnecessarily complicate the integrated Canada-U.S. energy relationship." "Unnecessarily complicate" is putting it politely. Really, it's like someone dying of thirst but refusing to drink from a burbling spring just feet away. It makes absolutely no sense....