Peter Foster: Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands
Eric Gisin
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/09/21/peter-foster-ethical-oil/
http://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Oil-Case-Canadas-Sands/dp/0771046413
http://www.amazon.ca/Ethical-Oil-Case-Canadas-Sands/dp/0771046413
Peter Foster September 21, 2010 - 7:10 pm
Oil sands opponents are motivated by anti-capitalist, anti-development ideology and organizational
self-interest
An Alberta government delegation came east this week to sell the embattled oilsands as a good news
story for all of Canada. The Pembina Institute took a group of Athabasca aboriginals to Washington
to claim that they were being poisoned.
One of the frustrations of observing the oilsands "debate" is how one-sided it is. The Albertan
government officials couldn't stop apologizing for how much harder they had to work - like the
carthorse in Animal Farm - to be more "sustainable." Their opponents - who never created a
productive job in their lives - continued to unload factual garbage by the dump truck, to be
faithfully served up by the media.
Given this reluctance to fight, it is uncertain how far the defenders of the oil sands will welcome
the uncompromising support of Ezra Levant. Mr. Levant is an intellectual bulldog, as the Canadian
human rights establishment discovered to its cost. He is also sometimes a loose cannon (he recently
managed to libel the appalling George Soros, which takes some doing), but not here. In his new
book, Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands, he not only exposes the lies and hypocrisy of
the media-coddled opponents of the vast resource, but raises the uncomfortable question of what
alternatives to the oilsands these moralists prefer.
If the United States doesn't take oil from the oilsands, it has to take it from Saudi Arabia,
Venezuela, Nigeria or Iran, whose human rights records are appalling, and whose environmental
performance tends not to be so great either.
Mr. Levant notes that the "facts" about the oil sands are comprehensively perverted. They are
presented as laying waste to an area the size of Florida when in fact only 2% of that area will be
disturbed by anti-photogenic strip mining (which has to be reclaimed). The development is portrayed
as a gigantic sponge for fresh water when the maximum that it can divert from the Athabasca river
is just 2.2% of its flow. "Dirty" oilsands oil is declared to be a threat to the global climate
when it is responsible for one-thousandth of global human emissions of CO2, which in turn are a
small part of overall emissions. The oilsands are painted as destroyers of aboriginal culture when
in fact they provide hope, and well-paid jobs, for desperately poor, often dysfunctional,
communities.
Mr. Levant goes after the NGO peddlers of doom and gloom - from Pembina through Greenpeace and
church group Kairos to the World Wildlife Fund - suggesting that they are motivated by a
combination of anti-capitalist, anti-development ideology and organizational self-interest. He
lacerates those who purport to rank businesses on "ethical" grounds while profiting from the very
activities they condemn. He skewers craven U.S. corporations such as Whole Foods and Bed Bath &
Beyond because when they cave in to environmental extremists in supporting boycotts, they are of
necessity supporting fascist theocracies and Bolivarian despots.
Mr. Levant suggests that Greenpeace's priorities are severely skewed by organizational
self-interest. They treat the truly horrendous environmental problems of China with kid gloves
because Beijing allows them to raise funds in the country, which they see as a huge "market." While
Chinese cities are the unhealthiest places to live on earth, Greenpeace China's top campaign issues
are recycled Western cellphones and disposable chopsticks!
Mr. Levant emphasizes that petroleum-driven industrial society isn't going away any time soon, and
stresses that such "alternatives" as wind and solar are in fact heavily subsidized job destroyers.
He suggests that the oilsands get so much flak primarily because Canada is a free, open and
democratic country.
The book raises questions that demand not so much further analysis as psychoanalysis. These include
just why people would manufacture egregious falsehoods about the oilsands, and why the media would
be so ready and willing to regurgitate them. Perhaps the outstanding example is that of Canadian
Dr. John O'Connor and his claims about extraordinary high levels of certain types of cancers at
Fort Chipewyan. Dr. O'Connor was made a media hero, in particular by Canadian journalist Andrew
Nikiforuk, but when authorities sought to investigate the doctor's findings, he obstructed the
inquiry, which found that he had either greatly exaggerated, or entirely manufactured, details.
Mr. Levant points out that Mr. Nikiforuk has taken money from Greenpeace, but it is perhaps a
mistake to imply that the likes of Messrs. Nikiforuk and O'Connor are not genuinely motivated by a
desire to prevent harm and do good. The problem is that such desires seem to be like mental viruses
that sometimes occupy the brain to the exclusion of all objective evidence, and consume their hosts
with moral self-inflation and a demonic image of "the enemy."
Mr. Levant has certainly already raised the ire of his opponents. Police had to be called to a book
signing in Saskatoon. Matt Price, policy director of Environmental Defence, wrote to The Globe and
Mail: 'So Ezra Levant thinks it's somehow more ethical to replace dictator-supporting,
planet-cooking oil with dictator-free tar sands oil that cooks the planet even faster?"
Last week the CBC's Jian Ghomeshi held a "debate" between Mr. Levant and Mr. Nikiforuk. Mr. Levant
steamrollered both of them (it inevitably turned out to be two against one). I could almost have
felt sorry for Mr. Nikiforuk if he hadn't started out by suggesting that oil was either "The
Devil's
tears" or "The Devil's Excrement." With imagery like that, you know that objectivity has already
gone out the window. Ethical Oil provides some desperately needed perspective.