This weekend, the Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson wrote yet another column praising Premier Gordon Campbell's carbon tax.

To Simpson, it sometimes seems that B.C.'s premier can do no wrong.

Simpson never demonstrated a great deal of interest in climate change until the past couple of years—most notably, when he hooked up with SFU professor Mark Jaccard and researcher Nic Rivers to coauthor Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge.

The authors advocated a carbon tax, long a favourite of Jaccard, a former chairman of the British Columbia Utilities Commission.

In the mid-1990s, Jaccard promoted integrated resource planning, which means full social and environmental costing of electricity generation. More than a decade ago, Jaccard was talking about a $25 per tonne tax on carbon—which demonstrates how far ahead he was of everyone else on climate change.

The premier took on Jaccard as an energy advisor last year. Then came the modest carbon tax in the last budget. And since then, Simpson has been heaping praise on Campbell and his finance minister, Carole Taylor.

However, there's a small problem here. Simpson hasn't always disclosed his connection to Jaccard, and Jaccard's connection to Campbell.

There's a bigger problem, too. Jaccard has never made a big deal of oil depletion and peak oil, even as the price per barrel has increased fivefold in five years when measured in U.S. dollars.

Last year, Jaccard told the Georgia Straight that he expects oil prices to average less than US$100 per barrel over the next 20 years.

And because Jaccard, an economist, hasn't been raising hell about the potential consequences of the world running out of cheap oil, this issue has slipped under the radar screen of Simpson, the most important public-policy columnist in the country.

If Simpson doesn't write about it, the bureaucrats in Ottawa will continue ignoring it.

If oil prices cross US$200 per barrel, Canadians are going to start dying as a result of this peak-oil thing that Simpson and Jaccard don't appear to be overly worked up about.

If you think US$200 per barrel is unreasonable, then check out what energy investment banker Matthew Simmons told the Georgia Straight in 2005 about the Saudi Arabian oil fields.

Unlike Jeremy Leggett's brilliant 2005 book on climate change, The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Global Financial Crisis, the Simpson-Jaccard-Rivers book Hot Air did not devote a huge amount of attention to declining oil supplies.

It's worth noting that Premier Campbell hasn't demonstrated that he has a clue about the peak-oil issue. Because if he did, he wouldn't be so favourably inclined toward the Gateway Project and the massive expansion of the Vancouver International Airport.

And there's no hope that the premier will understand if Jaccard doesn't start whispering about this in his ear.

If the premier did have any awareness of peak oil (yes, the first article on this topic appeared in the Georgia Straight in 2003), he also would have fired his energy minister, Richard Neufeld, who has been giving away B.C.'s precious natural-gas fields for a song.

There are some right-of-centre politicians who are aware of the peak-oil issue. North Vancouver District Mayor Richard Walton has educated himself in this area. West Vancouver-Capilano Liberal MLA Ralph Sultan has brought the issue up in the legislature. Vancouver NPA councillor Suzanne Anton has also started to wrap her mind around the issue.

But our premier isn't always interested in hearing other people's opinions when he's certain he's right about an issue. Sultan speaks his mind and he's very smart—and those are probably two barriers to him ever getting into Campbell's cabinet.

There could be a couple of vacant seats on the North Shore in the 2009 election. Katherine Whittred and Dan Jarvis are both overdue for retirement.

Perhaps Walton will run for provincial office as a B.C. LIberal in one of those two seats.

If he got elected, perhaps he could educate members of Gordon Campbell's cabinet about the peak-oil issue because they're not likely to read about it anytime soon in Jeffrey Simpson's columns in the Globe and Mail.

Either that or Anton could run in Vancouver-Langara, a safe Liberal seat that will soon be vacated by Carole Taylor.