Invest it now while you can

As you may or may not know, Alberta's government gets a royalty from non-renewable resource revenues (oil and natural gas). This money has been used for everything from investing in the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, to filling the general revenue coffers for the province. I wish I could recall exactly what kind of numbers we're talking about here, but I'm pretty sure it's in the hundreds of millions per year, probably more. Does anyone know?

I was discussing this little benefit of living in Alberta and I got to thinking - this perk isn't going to last forever. Some day, oil and natural gas will be a rare resource and the royalties it generates will become a thing of the past.

In light of this fact, I think it would be a better idea to invest at least some of this money in developing new, renewable forms of energy for the time that we can no longer depend on fossil fuels. To me, the concept is logical - use the money generated from fossil fuels to explore the next alternative, while we still have the fossil fuels. The thing I fear most is that once this stuff becomes rare (and therefore exorbitantly expensive), only then will we look at each other an ask, "Now what?".