Prime Minister Stephen Harper is basking in the uncritical media reporting of his state visit to China. His "open for business" message has been very well received in Beijing where he has just signed a slew of trade and investment deals in energy, agriculture, and natural resources. Small wonder. The world is running out of conventional energy, land, water, and natural resources. China, as the emerging superpower, needs unfettered and unconditional access to all of these.

With the spotlight on the federal government's aggressive push to export tar sands bitumen via the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat, and from there by tanker on to China, the B.C. government reclaimed some attention on the energy file when it released its Natural Gas Strategy last week. With lots of glossy pages, but little detailed content, it is reflective of Premier Clark's signature style. The short of it is that shale gas from B.C.'s Northeast is to be pipelined to Kitimat and loaded onto tankers in liquid form (LNG) to be exported to China.

A notice in my mailbox last week told me that smart meters are going to be installed in my neighbourhood. I'll admit that the geek in me would like to see real-time information about my energy usage, but as an economist I'm interested in costs and benefits of the program. So far we have seen lots of bold claims in their favour -- they're called "smart" so they must be good for us. But just like the promises of the paperless office and more efficient workplaces from computers, the lived reality tends to be different, and may even have unintended consequences.

We are living in a market economy, but that doesn't mean there aren't choices to be made.

We could be living in a smart market economy. One that invests in education and training, in innovation, in new ideas. That competes at the high end. That makes sure, in many ways, that it leaves no one behind. One that shares its benefits more equally -- much more equally. There is much to say about that. We'll get to it.

And then there's the dumb market economy we're living in instead ... increasingly, courtesy of the Harper government. Exhibit A: the Keystone XL pipeline.

The headline in the Globe was certainly ominous -- "Clark's Hydro policy threatens to collapse B.C.'s climate change progress, scientist says."

The purported policy change seemed scary -- the government might roll back the requirement for BC Hydro to be able to meet domestic electricity requirements in drought conditions. And the scientist's description of the consequences is also quite a fright -- BC Hydro will be forced to rely on coal-fired electricity if the policy change goes through.

On one level, the B.C. government's new Review of BC Hydro marks an about-face by the Liberals under Christy Clark, calling quits to Gordon Campbell's fantasyland of a "green energy powerhouse." On a deeper level, however, it represents a deepening of the Campbell agenda to privatize the public utility. Campbell's fantasy was that we'd become massive exporters of clean electricity mined from our rivers and wind, sold at a premium into the power-hungry California market. This represented a major shift in the mandate of BC Hydro.