Some time in May – no one knows the exact date – a pipeline began leaking in northern Alberta, just 165 km from the Northwest Territories. By the time it was shut down, at least 22,000 barrels of a toxic oil-and-water emulsion had poisoned hectares of environmentally sensitive muskeg near Rainbow Lake.

You might expect that in these days of high-tech, pipelines would have sensors to detect leaks, but not in this case. Pace Oil & Gas only learned of the problem on May 19 when the pilot of another company’s low-flying plane noticed a dark stain spreading over the land.

Just a year earlier, another pipeline dumped 28,000 barrels of crude oil into forest and muskeg close to Little Buffalo, a Cree community 400 kilometres southeast of Rainbow Lake.

These spills are a tiny fraction of the environmental damage caused by the fast-growing oil and gas industry – an industry that Stephen Harper’s government believes should be much less regulated.

 A greenhouse gas superpower

Speaking to a UK business audience shortly after becoming Prime Minister in 2006, Stephen Harper announced his government’s intention of making Canada an “energy superpower.” Canada, he said, was already the “fifth largest energy producer in the world,” ranking third in gas production, seventh in oil and first in both hydro-electric and uranium – but that is “just the beginning,” because “an ocean of oil-soaked sand lies under the muskeg of northern Alberta.”

“The oil sands are the second largest oil deposit in the world, bigger than Iraq, Iran or Russia; exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. Digging the bitumen out of the ground, squeezing out the oil and converting it into synthetic crude is a monumental challenge.

“It requires vast amounts of capital, Brobdingnagian technology, and an army of skilled workers. In short, it is an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger. By 2015, Canadian oil production is forecast to reach almost 4 million barrels a day.” [1]

What Harper didn’t say – in fact never says – is that unlike building pyramids or walls, mining the tar sands threatens environmental catastrophe. “Squeezing out the oil and converting it into synthetic crude,” is a very dirty process: producing a barrel of tars sands crude emits up to three times more greenhouse gas a barrel of conventional crude, making tar sands oil the dirtiest on the planet.

As climate scientist James Hansen wrote recently, if the tar sands are fully mined, “it will be game over for the climate.”

“Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.” [2]

Harper doesn’t care. Environmental protection is way down on his list of priorities, and oil industry profits are at the top.

A pro-oil, anti-environment agenda

It should be noted that the Conservatives are not the first governing party to put oil production ahead of environmental protection. Between 1993 to 2006, Liberal Party governments ratified the Kyoto Accord and announced a variety of green-sounding programs, but in practice supported projects that ensured that none of their declared emissions targets could be met.

Long before Harper made it his top priority, the Chretien and Martin governments actively promoted expansion of production in the Alberta Tar Sands. In 1995 a joint federal-provincial task force announced plans to triple tar sands production by 2020, a target that was actually exceeded in less than a decade. Chretien’s Environment Minister, Stephane Dion, told U.S. reporters in 2005 that “there is no minister of the environment who can stop this [tar sands development] from going forward, because there is too much money in it.”

As a result, while the Liberals were in office, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions rose more than 27 percent, the worst record of any industrialized country.

But the Conservatives have gone farther, abandoning even the appearance of environmental concern. Their overriding goal is to speed up approvals and reduce public scrutiny of potentially damaging projects. Canadian environmental reviews may have been rubber stamps under Liberal governments, but industry still viewed them as time-consuming annoyances. Harper and his gang want to reassure investors that hearings or reviews will be quick, and the outcome pre-determined.

While Harper’s attack on environmental policies covers a lot of ground, including killing purely scientific projects, his central focus has been on eliminating any government programs that might interfere with rapid expansion of energy extraction and export products. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he promised to “take action to ensure that major energy and mining projects are not subject to unnecessary regulatory delays – that is, delay merely for the sake of delay.” [3]

 Gutting environmental protection

What Harper meant by eliminating “delay merely for the sake of delay” became clear with Bill C-38, the massive budget implementation bill tabled in the House of Commons in April. Formally titled the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, it includes 150 pages of changes to environmental regulations, all designed to weaken environmental protections and limit public participation in environmental reviews.

As Green Party leader Elizabeth May says, it should be called the Environmental Destruction Act.

These sweeping changes prompted Maurice Strong, the Canadian diplomat who was secretary-general of the famous Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, to call the current federal government “the most anti-environmental government that we’ve ever had, and one of the most anti-environmental governments in the world.” [4]

As a former Environment Canada employee wrote recently in a widely-circulated Open Letter:

“Canada is the second largest land mass in the world – though our population is small, you can be sure that when a country that encompasses 7% of the world’s land mass, and has the largest coastline in the world says ‘screw it’ to environmental protection, there will be massive global repercussions.” [5]

 Against Kyoto

Harper’s anti-environment activity isn’t limited to Canada. The Conservatives have also acted to block any international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions: such a deal would not only affect Canadian production directly, it would lead to other countries reducing imports from the new “energy superpower.”

In 2002, before he became Prime Minister, Stephen Harper wrote a fundraising letter seeking support for a “campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto Accord.” The global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was, he wrote, “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations,” that would “cripple the oil and gas industry.” [6]

In office, Harper’s government have been world leaders in the fight to prevent any progress towards a more effective treaty. Five years in succession, international environmentalists named Canada as the country that did the most to “delay, stall, and otherwise disrupt” negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. During the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, 400 non-governmental organizations declared that Canada had the worst emission control record of any industrialized country, having “consistently refused to adopt any regulatory framework to start reducing emissions, namely from the rapidly growing sector of tar sands. …” [7]

In December 2011, days after successfully blocking any concrete emissions-reduction plans at the international climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that Canada was withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol – becoming the first and so far still the only country to formally repudiate the global climate change treaty.
In February, Kent told the Calgary Chamber of Congress that quitting Kyoto was “my early Christmas present to myself – and to Canada.”

 Pipelines and witch hunts

Today, over 99% of Canadian oil exports go to the United States, but there is growing concern in the oil industry that the U.S. may not be a wholly reliable customer. Canada’s conventional oil production is falling fast – between 1990 and 2005 it dropped from 1200 to 1050 thousand barrels a day, and is expected to be less than 600 barrels a day by 2020, so all production growth is coming from the tar sands. That means that U.S. environmentalists’ campaigns against dirty oil pose a direct threat to Canadian oil profits.

The Obama government’s decision to delay the Keystone Pipeline, which would take tar sands bitumen to the southern U.S. for refining, confirmed the Tories’ unease about relying on U.S. markets.

The Harper government is actively lobbying U.S. politicians to okay Keystone and to block any laws that might discriminate against dirty oil from the north, but it is also seeking customers who are less concerned about the tar sands. As Harper said in Davos in January, “we will make it a national priority to ensure we have the capacity to export our energy products beyond the United States and specifically to Asia.” [8]

The essential element in that plan is Northern Gateway, a proposed pipeline from the tar sands to the Pacific Ocean. A report prepared by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pembina Institute and the Living Oceans Society, explains some of the environmental dangers this poses.

“The proposed Northern Gateway pipeline would carry highly acidic and corrosive diluted bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands through nearly 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) of rugged and unstable landscapes to Kitimat on British Columbia’s northern coast. The pipeline would be serviced by over 220 supertankers each year sailing through B.C.’s North Coast waterways, which have been off-limits to the giant vessels due to concerns that an oil spill would ruin precious coastal natural resources.”  [9]

A large part of the proposed pipeline route passes through First Nations territories, lands never ceded to Canada or B.C. Those communities are virtually unanimous in opposing the project, despite attempts by Enbridge to bribe them with promises of jobs or cash. The “Save the Fraser Declaration,” signed by 66 First Nations, states firmly:

“A threat to the Fraser and its headwaters is a threat to all who depend on its health. We will not allow our fish, animals, plants, people and ways of life to be placed at risk.

“The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines project. … violates our laws, traditions, values and our inherent rights as Indigenous Peoples under international law” [10]

The Conservatives, like the southern racists who opposed the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s, blame this indigenous opposition on outside agitators – what Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver calls “environmental and other radical groups” funded by “foreign special-interest groups.” They are using that excuse to justify a witch hunt against all who oppose their plans.

Conservative Senator Nicole Eaton, told the Senate on February 2:

“There are millions of dollars crossing borders masquerading as charitable foundations into bank accounts of sometimes phantom charities that do nothing more than act as a fiscal clearing house."

At the same time, the federal budget, which cut most pro-environmental programs in the name of reducing the deficit, includes $8 million in new funds to pay for tax audits of environmental charities that oppose tar sands development. This is unlikely to identify any illegal activity – charities are permitted to devote up to 10% of their spending to political advocacy – but the audits themselves are time- and money-consuming. This is clearly a punitive measure designed to discourage groups with charitable status from opposing Harper’s destructive policies.

Of course there is no suggestion that tax auditors or the Senate might investigate pro-pipeline lobbyists like the right-wing Fraser Institute, which has accepted half a million dollars from U.S. oil billionaires (and Tea Party supporters) Charles and David Koch. Nor will there be any scrutiny of the fact that over 70 per cent of all tar sands production is owned by corporations and individuals based in other countries. [11]

 What’s good for oil companies …

As James Hansen writes, “Today we are faced with the need to achieve rapid reductions in global fossil fuel emissions and to nearly phase out fossil fuel emissions by the middle of the century.” [12]

Instead of contributing to that process, the Harper government is actively promoting increased fossil fuel production. And not just any fossil fuel – it is promoting the dirtiest oil on earth, a product whose impact on the climate and the environment in general is far more damaging than conventional oil.

Unfortunately, however, this understanding is not shared by Harper’s parliamentary critics. None of the four Opposition parties — NDP, Liberals, Greens and Bloc Québécois — favour shutting down the tar sands. All of them claim that tar sands development can be made “sustainable.” And the NDP and Greens support demands by the trade unions directly involved in tar sands exploitation for building additional bitumen upgrading and refining capacity. [13] These positions have been endorsed by the Canadian Labour Congress. [14] They undermine the efforts of many grassroots environmentalist organizations and turn a blind eye to the near-unanimous opposition of Alberta’s indigenous peoples, who are waging a desperate struggle against tar sands development, as its front-line victims.

Contrary to the wishful thinking of the opposition New Democrats, Liberals, and Greens, there is no way to make the tar sands “sustainable.” Hundreds of square kilometers of forest and muskeg in northern Alberta are already damaged beyond repair: no restoration program can ever return those ecosystems to their original state or anything close to it.

Even if the extraction and production process were somehow made cleaner, no level of oil production can be considered safe when the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is close to (perhaps already beyond) the level at which catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable. Harper’s drive to double production by 2020 is grossly irresponsible, a crime against the planet and humanity.

A government that was truly concerned about humanity’s future would stop all tar sands expansion immediately, and rapidly phase out current production, while providing equivalent jobs or income to all displaced workers.

But the Harper government doesn’t put people first. Ruined lands, poisoned rivers, and runaway climate change – for him, such collateral damage is a small price to pay for maximizing oil industry profits in the 21^st century.

Ian Angus

---

Footnotes (All URLS accessed on June 2 or June 3, 2012)