Canada is the environmentally responsible choice for the U.S. to meet its energy needs in oil for years to come.
Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade.
In a recent open letter to Canadians, Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver warned that “radical” environmentalists with anti-expansionist views of the tar sands were putting corporate profits at peril. Ironically, the tar sands industry and its supporting politicians have responded to the “radical” threat by increasingly attempting to drape the incessant expansion of bitumen production in the guise of environmentalism and sustainability. This includes claims about “responsible resource development” (in contrast to the “unrealistic” anti-growth agenda of the radicals), the “ethical” superiority of Canadian oil (in contrast to tyrannical regimes elsewhere), the increasing efficiency of extraction processes, and the wonders of land reclamation.3
This chapter examines how a combination of federal and provincial governments, industry, and high-profile apologists has attempted to construct these narratives by co-opting and discursively reframing environmental concerns. I argue that this approach, which is best understood as a form of reactionary environmentalism, is designed to reassure investors, neutralize criticism, and placate both apathetic and concerned citizens. Its Achilles heel, however, lies in claims to be engaging in a rational conversation, despite lacking evidence, in order to defend the unsustainable proposition of endless growth.
Reactionary Environmentalism in the Tar Sands
Reactionary environmentalism is, in essence, an extreme right-wing philosophy tied to the political economic ideology of neo-liberal capitalism. It goes under various guises, such as “ecological modernization,” “market ecology,” and “green neo-liberalism,” with the fundamental premise being a “business-as-usual” approach to environmental problems that largely places the onus on technological innovation and corporate self-management.4 In this messianic vision of enlightened corporations operating benignly within ever-freer markets, the best thing for the environment—it is claimed—is to turn everything into a commodity, from the water we drink to the air we breathe, as this supposedly yields uncoerced behavioural reform and promotes investment in innovation and efficiency. Yet regardless of whether adherents truly believe such promises, reactionary environmentalism must also be seen in light of its primary objective: to oppose socio-political change and defend the status quo.
Reactionary environmentalism has taken many different forms in relation to the tar sands. It can be seen as a sort of double-headed beast: on one hand, in attack mode, seeking to condemn environmental science and neuter environmental regulations; on the other hand, portraying a “softer” side, with a feel-good message of “progress” in industry’s efforts to reduce the intensity of ecological damage from bitumen production and restore disrupted forests and wetlands. I will focus my attention here on five main examples of reactionary environmentalism in the tar sands.
1. Co-opting Environmental Concepts
Not long ago, the main marketing strategy for Alberta Synthetic Crude Oil (SCO) was purely and simply to convince potential producers that it was worth the capital investment, whereas in recent years, industry has had to dress up the entire megaproject in green clothing. Years ago, efforts to reduce ecological impacts were seldom trumpeted, mostly because they were seldom practiced. It is important to recall that it was not until 2003 that the US Energy Information Administration even recognized Alberta’s vast bituminous deposits as an economically viable source of oil.5 So while the production of SCO had already been wreaking havoc upon the landscapes and communities of northern Alberta for decades, up to this time serious attention to questions of the environment overwhelmingly took a backseat to SCO’s main selling points—economic growth and energy security—in order to secure further investment and exports.
However, in recent years, the industry has made its efforts to enhance the efficiency of extraction and minimize the per-barrel impact a primary selling point. Former Alberta premier Alison Redford clearly admitted this shift after a 2011 trip to Washington, going so far as to suggest that marketing SCO to Americans would thereafter hinge on reframing the environmental image of the tar sands: “We heard very quickly that [Americans] don’t want to hear anymore the security argument or the jobs argument. We get that…. Really, this is about environmental stewardship and sustainable development of the oil sands. We were quite happy to talk about that, [but] that was a shift in the kinds of conversations that Alberta was having.”6
Although this has been a marked turn in some ways, it did not come entirely out of the blue. As early as the mid-1990s, industry and government together began thinking about how to placate environmental concerns, which was reflected in the National Task Force on Oil Sands Strategies. The task force’s final report cryptically acknowledged the significant environmental risks of developing the tar sands, and suggested that these will have to be minimized—at least perceptively—in order to garner enough public consent: “Oil sands development will not proceed unless the environmental consequences are mitigated to a degree acceptable to regulators and the public.”7
It is interesting to note how this strategic approach to environmental management originally took shape as a response to the risks posed to the expansion of tar sands production by genuine ecological concerns, as interpreted through a financial lens. That is, ecological critiques posed clear threats to profitability, and the response was to co-opt and thereby neutralize them. The adoption of a cumulative environmental approach to monitoring the ecological impacts of development illustrates this well. This concept was raised long ago by ecologists who were critical of the consistent failure of large-scale developments to consider impacts holistically. In the tar sands, the response was to set up the Cumulative Environmental Management Agency (CEMA) in 2001, which government authorities claimed would take the varying viewpoints of industry, environmental, and Indigenous groups into account. Yet the rhetoric of a cumulative approach fell flat, as industry dominated CEMA to such an extent that a number of First Nations communities and environmental organizations withdrew participation in 2008, claiming that it had “lost all legitimacy as an organization and process for environmental management in the oil sands.”8
Children wear masks to protect themselves from the toxic fumes that surround their community during the fourth annual Healing Walk, 2013.
In the wake of this blow to CEMA’s legitimacy, critics put out a renewed call for a moratorium on new tar sands project approvals until the cumulative impacts of development were better understood, to which authorities responded with attempts to co-opt the very image of a moratorium in the first place. In 2009, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the Canadian minister of the environment tried to dispel the need for government intervention because “there has been a de facto moratorium on oil sands developments because of the nature of the economy.”9 The hollowness of this claim was subsequently exposed when a spokesperson for the Oil Sands Developers Group said: “There isn’t a de facto moratorium. In fact, the Oil Sands [Developers Group] is continuing to invest significant amounts of dollars in growth.”10 Much like earlier attempts to co-opt the cumulative approach concept, the imagery of a “de facto moratorium” amounts to a cursory attempt to appease critics, spinning the idea of slowing down the pace and scale of development without actually doing anything to affect it.
Another example of how environmental criticisms have been spun into a counter-narrative occurred in 2005, when a dozen environmental organizations in Alberta issued a joint declaration stating that the tar sands were expanding too fast.11 These claims were, of course, nothing new, but thanks to the growing activism and media coverage surrounding the tar sands, they had become harder to brush aside. Unfortunately, this declaration also came with a gift, as it set out conditions by which further expansion would be acceptable, including the implementation of: a sound regulatory regime that would facilitate the transition to a sustainable energy economy by decreasing the demand for synthetic crude oil; a new fiscal regime to ensure long-term sustainable prosperity in Alberta by reducing dependence on the energy industry; and the adoption of an adequate and independent cumulative approach to environmental management. Rather than deny the validity of the declaration, authorities reacted to it by simply co-opting its rhetoric. As a result, we hear about industry having adopted a cumulative approach and slowing down the pace of development, while in reality production has continued to grow year after year.
2. Reframing: From Unsustainable to “Sustainable” Development
Both Big Oil and its backers in the Albertan and Canadian governments have increasingly attempted to challenge the label of unsustainability with respect to the tar sands, in part by simply reframing the discourse. Although fossil fuels are by their very nature non-renewable and unsustainable, the tar sands are now being sold as a “sustainable” megaproject. The provincial government of Alberta has some experience in this regard, having faced a crisis of legitimacy in the 1990s over its dependency on natural resource extraction. The response then, as now, has been to construct new ecological subjectivities rather than enact substantive regulations. As Davidson and MacKendrick effectively put it, the “close relations between natural resource industrial interests and the Alberta administration, combined with Alberta’s neo-liberal political ideology, limited opportunities for significant environmental reform. The province consequently opted for a process of discursive reframing rather than institutional restructuring.”12 In other words, industry is simply changing its lingo, not its behaviour.
This attempt at discursive reframing has resulted in the creation of dubiously titled agencies, such as the Oil Sands Sustainable Development Secretariat, and produced reams of documents that claim, in defiance of the laws of physics, that tar sands operations are “sustainable.”13 The federal government has also gotten into the act, as exemplified by a report entitled The Oil Sands: Toward Sustainable Development, produced by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources shortly after the Harper Conservatives came to power.14
The rhetoric of reactionary environmentalism has increasingly been exported in the face of mounting resistance from US and EU environmental groups (as discussed at various other points in this book). This includes using public resources to hire high-priced lobbyists tasked with convincing American and European policy-makers of the positive impact of technological and regulatory measures taken,15 repeatedly invoking terms like “environmentally responsible” and “sustainable development” in reference to tar sands production. Thus, rather than address the unsustainable nature of production at a material level, the response of reactionary environmental-ism has been to discursively rebrand the production process.
3. The Trope of “Ethical Oil”
One of the most vivid examples of reactionary environmentalism in the tar sands can be found in the so-called “ethical oil” argument. This was first put forward in a popular book by right-wing pundit Ezra Levant and was subsequently promoted via the website EthicalOil.org, run by neo-conservative lawyer Alykhan Velshi.16 Both Levant and Velshi have very strong, well-established ties to the Conservative Party of Canada, and Levant clearly positioned his book as an attempt to deflect attention from Andrew Nikiforuk’s award-winning 2008 book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.17
The “ethical oil” narrative couples a highly selective use of facts with a reliance on nasty personal attacks to create a classic straw man geared towards making the tar sands look benign. The part it does get right is the fact that petroleum production is very dirty business—this is, after all, an industry rife with examples of coercion, deceit, and gross corporate negligence. Yet where Levant and Velshi go wrong is in assuming that because extraction elsewhere has often been very bad, this makes the tar sands somehow good, as though it is exempted from the toxicity, CO2 emissions, corrupt politics, and other negative aspects of the petroleum business.
The trope of “ethical oil” rests in large measure on Alberta’s place in an affluent, Western, democratic, capitalist nation, which ensures that transnational corporations (including many of the same players who have been implicated in crimes elsewhere) are welcome to purchase their extraction “rights” and can be entrusted to be responsible, law-abiding corporate citizens. Former premier Ralph Klein helped convert Alberta into a “capitalist paradise,”18 and this political and regulatory environment of neo-liberal capitalism is the crux of Levant’s claim that “the oil sands are cleaner than any other competing jurisdiction.”19 After all, the companies are just doing what they are allowed to do by law!
Levant attempts to build his case further through a hodgepodge of relativist claims, and some patently absurd ones. For instance, at one point he goes so far as to liken the extraction of bitumen to “the largest cleanup of an oil spill in the history of the world.”20 He also casts doubt on the science of climate change as a mere “theory,” while celebrating the industry’s tremendous efforts to reduce the intensity of pollution per barrel produced and its impacts on water, wildlife, and downstream communities—all the while heaping scorn upon dirty industries abroad. Ultimately, like other examples of reactionary environmentalism, the “ethical oil” argument amounts to an attempt to divert the attention of citizens, policy-makers, and investors, both in Canada and abroad.
4. The Fixation on Technological Innovation
In recent years, the tar sands industry has developed an aggressive public relations complex, headed by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and Natural Resources Canada. This involves a range of advertising platforms (e.g., prominent billboards in cities and along highways, television commercials, and bus stop posters) touting such things as reclamation areas and the economic benefits to all of Canada. The essential goal of these advertisements is to reassure Canadians that the tar sands are being developed responsibly and bring many economic benefits, while adverse impacts are carefully mitigated.
A central theme in the CAPP advertisements is the portrayal of technological innovation as something capable of largely solving the environmental degradation associated with tar sands extraction. Of course, improved technologies aimed at reducing pollution levels are not in themselves negative, but focusing on such “fixes” can distract the public from the more fundamental demands being made by environmental scientists and advocates. That is, while climate scientists demand that net greenhouse gas emissions be reduced, and ecologists demand that the production of tailings ponds and the practices of clear-cutting and open pit mining be stopped altogether, the tar sands public relations complex meets these with promises to reduce the pollution burden per barrel produced, reduce CO2 emissions through carbon capture and storage technologies, slow the growth of toxic tailings ponds through tailings reductions operations, and reclaim degraded ecosystems through sophisticated engineering strategies.
So while new technologies can indeed decrease the relative impacts of production, this focus fails to mention how efficiency gains are often offset by the growth in overall production, a well-established tendency in the history of resource exploitation in capitalism that is referred to as the Jevons paradox. The point is that technological innovations are being driven with the goal of enabling both increasing profitability and increasing volumes of bitumen extraction. The imagery of technological solutions is also coupled with a portrayal of the tar sands as a highly regulated industry, when regulations have in fact been limited, geared towards facilitating expansion, and often gone unenforced.21 For example, a recent television advertisement by the federal government claims that it is “protecting the environment with new fines for companies that break the law, returning developed land to its natural state, increasing pipeline inspections by 50 percent, [and] requiring double hulls for tankers,”22 claims that are very clearly designed to neutralize some of the criticisms associated with the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal by appealing to innovations in technology and legislation.
5. Silencing the Rest
Where environmental problems prove difficult to spin, one tactic has been to attack the messenger—firing whistleblowers and slandering critics,23 with environmental organizations that are critical of the tar sands regularly portrayed as “outsiders” and “foreigners.” A stark illustration of this vilification occurred when Conservative politicians tried to discredit renowned environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk and Dr. John O’Connor when they testified at a parliamentary committee, implicitly accusing them of treason for having travelled to Norway to notify Statoil investors about the impacts of investment in the tar sands.24
These efforts to tarnish the reputation of Dr. O’Connor followed an incident some years earlier, in which his medical license was revoked by Health Canada after he raised concerns about potential correlations between bituminous developments and cancer in a First Nations community downstream. Health Canada accused O’Connor of causing undue alarm, hiding medical information, and overbilling patients—charges that would years later be dropped as baseless.25 Astoundingly, such intimidation was not without precedent: Dr. David Swann, the former medical officer of health for the Palliser Health Authority in southeastern Alberta, was fired in 2002 for making public statements in support of the Kyoto Protocol—a stance the health board condemned because it was seen as something that would hurt Alberta’s fossil fuel-reliant economy.26 Adam Albright sums it up well:
Today those who speak the truth [about the tar sands] are discredited and banished. Openly criticize and your job will disappear. Write a story and your services will no longer be needed. Publicize a health threat and you will be run out of the province. Try to enact a Climate Law and the Minister of Environment will go to the far reaches of the continent to make sure it does not pass. The Giant Machine just rolls along as million dollar PR campaigns are trotted out at the first sign of dissent.27
Conclusion
For Big Oil and their loyal politicians, environmental concerns raised by scientists, organizations, doctors, and citizens represent a real threat to exponential growth and corporate earnings. All they can see is a reservoir worth trillions of dollars, with proven reserves (extractable with current technology) that amount to more than two centuries’ worth of production at 2011 levels. The economic motivation for creating an alternative eco-narrative could not be clearer. But as this chapter has shown, reactionary environmentalism is exposed as a flimsy shield without any substance. The tar sands public relations machinery has repeatedly sought to neuter the implications of any environmental criticism in order to justify continuing expansion. Struggles to confront the tar sands must take heed of these strategies and continue working to expose them for the hollow and misleading promises they are.
