Perverse environmentalist oil sands ethics
Opposition to the Canadian oil sands and Keystone Pipeline reflects debased moral code
By: Paul Driessen
The
duplicity and hypocrisy of environmental pressure groups seem to be
matched only by their consummate skill at manipulating public opinion,
amassing political power, securing taxpayer-funded government grants,
and persuading people to send them money and invest in “ethical” stock
funds.
In the annals of “green” campaigns, those against biotechnology, DDT and Alar are especially prominent. To those we should now add the well-orchestrated campaigns against Canadian oil sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Oil
has been seeping out of Northern Alberta soils and river banks for
millennia. Native Americans used the bitumen to waterproof canoes, early
explorers smelled and wrote about it, and “entrepreneurs” used it in
“mineral waters” and “medicinal elixirs.”
Today, increasingly high-tech operations
are extracting the precious hydrocarbons to fuel modern living
standards in Canada and the United States. Enormous excavator/loading
shovels and trucks used in open pits during the early years are giving
way to drilling rigs, steam injection, electric heaters, pipes and other
technologies to penetrate, liquefy and extract the petroleum.
The
new techniques impact far less land surface, use and recycle brackish
water, and emit fewer air pollutants and (plant-fertilizing) carbon
dioxide every year. Water use for Alberta oil extraction is a tiny
fraction of what’s needed to grow corn and convert it into ethanol that
gets a third less mileage per gallon than gasoline. Affected lands are
returned to forest and native grasslands at a surprising pace. And the
operations are removing oil that would otherwise end up in local air and
water.
 |
| OIL SAND |
Instead of requiring perpetual subsidies, á la
the “renewable” technologies that President Obama intends to redouble
if he is reelected, the oil sands generate vast sums in royalties and
taxes: an anticipated $690 billion into federal and provincial coffers
all across Canada over the life of the project. That’s on top of tens of
thousands of jobs of every description, including nearly 2,000 Native
Canadians (Aboriginals), whose communities have enjoyed soaring living
standards since the operations were launched. In fact, the oil sands
project will ultimately generate 11,219,000 person-years of high-paying
employment from Alberta to British Columbia, Ontario and the Maritime
Provinces, say government sources.
This
North American oil is displacing millions of barrels of annual US oil
imports from some of the least savory countries on Earth, while adding
billions of barrels a year to planetary petroleum production, and
thereby keeping world oil prices lower than they would otherwise be.
These
are huge benefits. The oil sands project is hardly perfect. It causes
environmental impacts, just as all human enterprises do, especially
those that provide energy. Indeed, even fantasy fuel projects – wind,
solar and biofuel boondoggles that provide
comparatively minuscule amounts of energy, but require billions in
taxpayer subsidies – have enormous ecological impacts.Here’s the most important point:
Canada’s
oil sands (and the Keystone Pipeline that will bring their petroleum to
the United States) must be evaluated on environmental and ethical
grounds that compare them to real world alternatives to them – not to
some utopian energy resource that exists only in the minds of idealists,
ideologues and special interest environmental pressure groups.
These
critics viciously attack Alberta and the oil sands industry – accusing
them of “blood oil,” environmental devastation and unethical practices.
In reality, oil sands petroleum is among the most ethical and ecological
on Earth, especially when compared to real-world alternatives like
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, Russia, Ecuador and Venezuela, whose
human rights violations, terrorism sponsorship and reckless
environmental records are legendary. And yet oil sands critics give them
a free pass, while heaping opprobrium on Canada.
Whole
Foods says oil sands fuel “does not fit our values.” Perhaps the grocer
and its “ethical” colleagues prefer values espoused in alternative
oil-supplying nations on rights of women, children, gays and foreign
housekeepers; stoning, lashing and lopping off hands and heads;
treatment of civilians during wars in Chechnya and Darfur; massacres and
environmental degradation in the Nigerian delta region; rigged
elections and Swiss bank accounts for oil proceeds; or treatment of
aboriginals, minorities and Christians.
Perhaps
Whole Foods, Sierra Club, NRDC, Obama’s EPA and allied critics prefer
to look toward China, which provides 95% of the rare earth metals that
are essential for wind turbines and solar panels. Those operations have
brought unprecedented air and water pollution,
cropland and wildlife habitat wastelands, widespread radiation
contamination, and cancer and lung disease in workers and local
residents.
28% of Canadian oil industry jobs held by women is “not enough,” intones Kairos,
a left-leaning coalition of churches. Compared to what? Women’s jobs in
Saudi Arabia or Iran? The 3.5 million more American women who have
ended up on poverty rolls since President Obama took office?
Some
1,600 ducks died after landing in an oil sands waste pit several years
ago. A repeat of this isolated incident is increasingly unlikely as open
pit mining and oil-water separation pits are replaced by in situ drilling and steam. Nevertheless, using analytical methods that only IPCC
climate alarmists would appreciate, the “respected” Pembina Institute
conjured up the fantastical “calculation” that “more than 160 million
birds would die from oil sands development” over the coming decades.
The
claim is not merely wild fear-mongering. It ignores the growing impact
of wind turbines on raptors, and attempts by industrial wind developers
to get US Fish & Wildlife Service “programmatic take” permits: 007 Licenses to Kill thousands of eagles, hawks, whooping cranes and other protected birds every year without fear of prosecution.
Greenpeace
routinely pillories oil sands companies as “climate criminals,” while
the US Environmental Protection Agency uses their oil sands CO2
emissions to justify denying Keystone Pipeline permits. (Greenpeace lost
its Canadian tax-exempt status, but still manages to con contributors
out of vast sums, to retain its status as a $340-million-per-year
pressure group. EPA conducts illegal experiments on humans, to justify regulations that are killing thousands of coal mining and utility jobs.)
These
positions reflect adherence to the shaky hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and unsupportable claims that the oil sands
contribute disproportionately to a looming climate Armageddon. However,
Alberta environment office show that “greenhouse gas” emissions from oil
sands plummeted 38% between 1990 and 2009, and are now 5% of Canada’s
total GHG emissions – and equal to or lower than CO2/GHG emissions from
petroleum operations in Nigeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
So-called “ethical funds” likewise excoriate oil sands developers like Total, Syncrude
and Imperial Oil, while promising investors that their money will
purchase shares in “responsible” companies that don’t produce fossil
fuels, do nuclear power or contribute to climate change. Co-operative
Bank’s is one of those modern day snake oil “entrepreneurs.” Its über-ethical
Sustainable Leaders Trust (don’t you love that name?) makes that pitch –
and then invests client cash in Third World coal mines … and oil sands!
The
rogues’ gallery of oil sands critics and their shady dealings is so
vast that someone could write a book about them. In fact, Ezra Levant
did exactly that. His Ethical Oil is an eye-opening companion to my own Eco-Imperialism, which chronicles the often lethal misdeeds of other self-righteous pressure groups.
Their
misrepresentations, double standards, questionable practices and
perverse ethics would get them brought up on fraud charges, if they were
oil companies or non-“ethical” investment “trusts.”
It’s
time to apply the same legal, ethical and credibility standards to
these “socially responsible” outfits that they insist on applying to the
corporations they denounce. Keep that in mind the next time you see
EPA, Greenpeace, Co-operative Bank or anyone else taking pot shots at
oil sands or Keystone.
*****************************
Paul
Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive
Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author or Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.************************************
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