SHAWN MCCARTHY
Jan. 21, 2012 9:34AM EST
It was the 2009 annual summer retreat of the Green Group – the chief
executives, presidents and executive directors of the largest
environmental organizations in the United States – and their Canadian
counterparts had wrangled an invitation for the first time.
The U.S. environmental movement appeared to be on a roll, with a new ally
in the White House, the House of Representatives on the verge of passing a
climate bill, and guarded optimism about a breakthrough at the United
Nations summit in Copenhagen later that year.
That June, the green leaders gathered at the Airlie Center, a historic
farmhouse turned conference centre an hour’s drive from Washington, in
rural Virginia. Billed as an “island of thought,” Airlie is a sylvan
retreat for American progressives: It was there that Martin Luther King
Jr. laid plans for the Poor People’s Campaign and U.S. Senator Gaylord
Nelson announced plans for the first national Earth Day.
For the Canadian eco-activists, the Airlie session had an equivalent
significance, marking the moment when the broad and powerful U.S.
environmental movement turned its focus – and well-financed campaign
tactics – against Canada’s booming oil sands.
The concerted attack that began there set the stage for this week’s
decision by the White House to reject a proposed oil-sands pipeline
through the U.S. heartland.
Green groups on both sides of the border are vowing to keep up pressure on
the Achilles heel of the Canadian oil industry – the multibillion-dollar
pipelines needed to transport Canadian crude to markets in the U.S. and
Asia. In doing so, the environmental groups are rushing headlong into a
confrontation with the Conservative government, which is determined to get
a pipeline built through British Columbia and has criticized foreign
critics as troublesome “special interests” who have no business getting
involved.
Indeed, the government wants to frame the issue in traditional economic
nationalist terms, draping the oil sands in the maple leaf and shielding
Canada’s economic engine from costly interference from abroad. The reality
is that the oil sands – and Canada’s place on the world’s energy map – are
a global concern. And there are stakeholders on both sides of the debate
well beyond our borders.
A light switches on
While the oil sands were not unknown to U.S. activists in the summer of
2009, the Americans attending the green summit were consumed with their
own battles. But the Canadians arrived with a blunt message to look north:
In Alberta’s oil sands, they warned, multinational companies were rapidly
expanding production of a particularly nasty source of crude.
As 20 top U.S. environmentalists sat silently, Greenpeace Canada executive
director Bruce Cox gave a presentation that spelled out the oil sands’
enormous impact and the surge in greenhouse-gas emissions that would
accompany the massive expansion that was planned by the industry and
endorsed by federal and provincial governments.
One graphic was particularly eye-catching: a map of existing and proposed
pipelines, resembling a spider web spinning out from Alberta across the
central United States, to carry oil-sands bitumen to U.S. refineries.
“It was a clarion call,” Mr. Cox said this week in an interview. “And we
had a specific ask: ‘We want you to engage on this subject. We want you to
put it on the radar.”
By all accounts, the Greenpeace session was a galvanizing moment. Groups
like the influential Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) had
campaigned against the oil sands for years, but now the top leadership was
directly engaged, and other groups picked up the ball.
“The meeting with the Canadian groups really made a difference,” NRDC
president Frances Beinecke, one of the attendees, said from her New York
office. “It was a very important session for elevating our attention in
the U.S. to this issue and the interrelationship between the two
countries.”
In response to politicians and others who promote Canadian oil as an
“ethical” alternative to imports from Islamic plutocracies and conflict
regions, she said, “We want a cleaner energy future, and taking us from
one addiction to another doesn’t move us forward in that regard.”
The counter-punch
The Obama administration’s decision this week to impose a further delay in
approving TransCanada Corp.’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline project
brought howls of outrage from Republicans and the oil industry, and
“profound disappointment” from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The State
Department did invite the company to reapply when it has completed the
rerouting of the pipeline around the ecologically sensitive Sand Hills
region in Nebraska – essentially punting the final decision until after
next November’s elections.
Stung, the Harper government has lashed out at foreign environmental
groups, characterizing them as “radicals” and “jet-setting celebrities”
fuelling pipeline controversies in Canada. Federal regulators are now
holding a public review of Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline, and
the government has warned that foreign groups are financing delaying
tactics to undermine the development in the oil sands.
The Harper government itself has actively lobbied in state, federal and
European capitals to oppose policies that it views as detrimental to
Canadian oil. Yet it has good reason to worry about the globalization of
the opposition. The stakes are enormous, and not only for the Prime
Minister’s home province.
Oil is now Canada’s largest export by far, and the country ranks third in
total crude reserves behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Meanwhile critics
worry that the oil boom is transforming the country into something of a
petro state, driving the loonie higher at the expense of Central Canadian
manufacturing.
In the U.S., activists have targeted fossil-fuel production and use, with
campaigns against coal, oil and the controversial “fracking” extraction of
shale gas. But oil is the most politically divisive.
U.S. groups such as the NRDC have been active in Canada, and foreign
foundations have funnelled money to Canadian environmental groups and
activists, in some cases specifically to organize opposition to the
Gateway pipeline through B.C.
Even in Europe, the Canadian government is battling an effort within the
European Parliament – backed by well-organized activists – to pass
low-carbon fuel regulations that would rate oil-sands crude as the world’s
worst from the standpoint of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Yet the environmental community is simply following the pattern of the
international oil industry, which seeks to influence policy wherever it
has operations. And they are also following a known script for global
campaigns, whether to save the Brazilian rain forest, to protect tiger
habitats in Asia or, indeed, to halt logging in British Columbia’s
Clayoquot Sound.
Canadian oil producers are now finding they have to respond to the
heightened international campaign against them, said David Collyer,
president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, speaking
from Washington, where he was meeting U.S. colleagues, Canadian embassy
staff and analysts to assess the political climate for Canadian oil
exports in the 2012 election year.
“It’s a global business, and it’s hard to draw boxes around these things,”
he said. “Ultimately, it is for Canadians to decide whether those voices
are relevant to the debate or not.”
Who’s winning?
International groups have seized on the Alberta development as a potent
symbol in the much bigger fight over climate change. Mr. Collyer argued
that the groups have been acting out of fear, trying to win a battle to
show that they are not losing the war.
Since the optimistic days of the Green Group summit, the U.S. Senate has
failed to pass climate legislation, Mr. Obama has proved disappointing on
emission regulations and international climate talks have faltered.
In turn, the environmental campaign has provoked a public-relations
response in Canada: the founding of EthicalOil.org, a group with close
ties to the Harper government and the industry. The group has been highly
critical of the foreign groups that have financed campaigns in Canada.
“These groups unfairly target Canada and our oil sands because it’s an
easy, risk-free target for them,” EthicalOil spokeswoman Kathryn Marshall
said.
But Rick Smith, executive director of Toronto-based Environmental Defence
and an attendee at the 2009 Green Group summit, said the Canadian
activists sought out the support of U.S. colleagues to help even the
playing field against the hugely powerful oil industry.
“Canadian environmentalists were working on these issues long before we
saw any greenbacks,” Mr. Smith said. “It was really the aggressive
expansion of the tar sands themselves that has made this into a
continental issue and an international issue.”
Canadian officials play down the climate impacts, saying the oil sands
represent only 5 per cent of total emissions in Canada and that this
country accounts for only 2 per cent of global emissions. But critics say
the country’s per-capita emissions are among the highest in the world, and
Ottawa will not be able to reduce them if oil-sands production grows as
expected.
Choke point
Shortly after the Airlie meeting, the NRDC’s Ms. Beinecke visited Fort
McMurray, Alta., along with Margie Alt, president of Environment America,
a green umbrella group. Both women say they were awed by the sheer scale
of the bitumen mines run by Suncor Energy and Syncrude.
“Clearly the overriding concern of the environmental community globally is
climate change,” she said. “And it really doesn’t matter where it comes
from or where you burn it.”
But she said it is wrong to assume that the NRDC has an inordinate focus
on Alberta’s oil producers. The sprawling environmental charity – with a
annual budget of $100-million (U.S.) – has offices across the United
States and one in Beijing. It works on the full range of environmental
issues, including coal mining, shale gas and hydraulic fracturing,
renewable energy and clean oceans.
But Ottawa and Alberta can expect environmentalists across borders to keep
up the pressure, whether on a Keystone revival, the Gateway project or any
future proposal. Having gotten nowhere persuading governments to rein in
oil-sands growth in the first place, they will keep looking to block the
infrastructure it takes to get the oil to market.
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Special thanks to Richard Charter