Ethical Oil by Ezra Levant

Author:Ezra Levant [Levant, Ezra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4642-1
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2010-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

North American oil companies, like pretty well every industrial business on the planet, have their tangles with nature that don’t always turn out well. In 2009, oil sands giant Syncrude was charged in the drowning deaths of sixteen hundred ducks that had landed on one of its tailings ponds, a pool where residues like clay, bitumen, sand, and other materials are left to settle out from water used in the oil sands mining process before being cleaned up.

Nothing like this had happened to Syncrude in at least twenty years of oil sands operations47: the phalanx of bird-repelling devices, including noise cannons, Syncrude explained, hadn’t been properly activated in time for the birds’ spring migration because of stormy weather in the region.48 Had Syncrude been an airport, the failure of the bird cannons might have downed a jetliner, killing hundreds of passengers. The failure at the tailing pond meant that the only casualties were the birds themselves.

Since the 1970s, Syncrude has become pretty good at using scarecrows and noise makers to keep birds off their tailings ponds; it certainly had strong incentives to do whatever it had to do. In addition to the PR disaster that followed, the maximum legal penalty for “depositing or permitting the deposit of a substance harmful to migratory birds in waters or an area frequented by birds” could see company executives jailed for six months,49 in addition to nearly $1 million in federal and provincial fines.50 Of course, that wasn’t good enough for environmental groups: a Greenpeace spokesperson called the penalties “very weak.”51

While Syncrude executives had every reason to want to save the ducks, the incident has turned into a bonanza for environmentalist groups, which finally – for the first time in decades of safe, victimless oil sands operation – had some genuine evidence to back up their claims that the operations were harmful. International media suddenly wanted to hear their warnings of the coming calamities; the ecological apocalypse of which this was just a first sign. MSNBC even dutifully published photographs handed to them directly by the anti–oil sands campaigners at Greenpeace, which still had the Greenpeace logos printed on them.52

Never had anti–oil sands groups been given a PR gift like this, and they intended to milk it for all they could. The Pembina Institute, in league with a list of foreign lobby groups, issued a press release, screaming that “more than 160 million” birds from Canada’s boreal forests would die from oil sands development, according to a new study they had just prepared.53 All that was missing was the Austin Powers character Dr. Evil raising his pinky while saying the word “million.”

That’s quite a statistic, and if you heard it on the news, as many people did, without any examination of how that figure was arrived at, you could be forgiven for being worried.54 How many people hearing about the looming bird Armageddon took the time to read that report in full? How many journalists did? Because, if you did, you’d see that Pembina’s

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