Alykhan Velshi, the former communications director for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, has a new activity: running the Website EthicalOil.org. Using large pictures with captions in block letters, this Website compares ethical oil with conflict oil, a contrast used earlier this year by Peter Kent, the Federal Minster of the Environment, in his defence of the tar sands.
The pictures on this website claim that conflict oil is linked with death among indigenous peoples (the Sudan Oil Fields), while ethical oil gives employment to aboriginals. Conflict oil funds terrorism, while ethical oil funds peacekeeping. In conflict oil countries women are stoned to death. In Canada women are elected mayor (Melissa Blake of Fort McMurray). Conflict oil is dictatorship (flags of Saudi Arabia and Iran -with Arabic script) while ethical oil is democracy (the Canadian flag).
These pictures are effective. They are also misleading, as the comparison they invite is not “apples to apples”. The Arab states identified in the pictures don’t produce oil from tar sands. They do produce oil by conventional means. But no responsible body in Canada is advocating that extraction of oil by conventional means should be stopped.
Yes, environmental groups in Canada have proposed that extraction from the tar sands be stopped, because this method of extraction has an immediate impact on the environment. Just as important, extraction from the tar sands adds 4% to Canada’s Green House Gas emissions, when Canada’s international position is that we will reduce GHG emissions.
This use of the words “ethical” whitewashes oil from the tar sands.
Peter Jones
P.S. The pictures refer to “oil sands” and not to “tar sands”. Both descriptions have a measure of accuracy. The oil (so oil sands) is extracted from bitumen, which is tar (so tar sands).
P.P.S.
Read the Comments by Jim Hansen on the occasion of the Tar Sands Protest at the White House. Hansen put the matter of the tar sands in these graphic terms:
“George Bush confessed our addiction to oil. Taking tar sands oil amounts to borrowing a dirty needle from a neighbor addict”
Peter Jones
Unfortunately, there are probably many silent victims of the tar sands – the families afflicted with cancer because they drank downstream water. Not only they, but their families are those suffering – how does one explain to an infant that the mother’s death was justified because the oil that caused it was “ethical oil”? There is a rising mortality rate in several small communities that is magnified because those communities are very small and very isolated. Substitute stones for oil, and the harm is just as great. In fact, the damage done to the boreal forest and to the wildlife population is unconscionable. We are all affected when our oxygen supplies are threatened and our rivers poisoned.
There is no such thing as perfectly ethical oil. Not possible. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette and you have to damage the earth and/or people in some way to find oil. But Alberta oil is a lot more ethical that the filthy blood soaked oil coming from the middle east and Africa. It amazes me how it does not seem to bother Canadian and American people that they are burning blood oil when they drive to church or mosque each week to worship and pray for peace, they heat their schools and universities with blood oil, they heat there non-profit environmental and social organizations with blood oil, and the billions they pay for blood oil is used to oppress women and murder people all over the world. In my view, not one drop of blood oil should arrive at our shores. I’ll take Alberta tar sands oil any day.
Cheers