Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (27 page)

One of the best parts of that job is getting to work directly with Suzuki and hear his impressions and interpretations of what’s happening in the natural and political worlds. He’s a great storyteller, and one of my favorite stories is one he tells about adolescent revelation. When Suzuki was in high school at the London Central Secondary School in Ontario during the early 1950s, he was bright and well-regarded enough that he wound up serving as student council president. But still, he complained at the dinner table one evening that he was finding it hard to make sure that everyone liked him. This is an issue for many teenagers, and Suzuki may have been more prone than most. As Japanese-Canadians, he and his family had been stripped of their possessions and interned during the Second World War. It was a stark example of the price you can pay if you fall out of favor in the neighborhood.

Suzuki’s father, however, was obviously unbowed from spending the war at work in Canadian labor camps. He said that if David tried to be liked by everyone, he would never stand for anything. The young Suzuki took that message to heart. During his subsequent career as a geneticist and journalist, he has carried a sense of courage and conviction that I personally have witnessed in few other individuals. After reading Rachel Carson’s watershed book
Silent Spring,
Suzuki firmly decided that he stood for environmental awareness, and he has never shied from standing up for it since.

One of David’s talents is inspiring those around him to be all that they can be, and from that inspiration, when he recommended me as chair in 2007, I started looking for an opportunity to learn more about corporate governance. I was pleased to right away find a directors education program starting in Calgary, Alberta, through the Institute of Corporate Directors.

I love Calgary. I grew up there, and I go back often to visit family members and friends. But if by his conviction David Suzuki has become a polarizing character in the Canadian establishment, Calgary is the pole where his support is the coldest. It’s an oil town, a booming (and busting) community of engineers and entrepreneurs, most of whom make their living from the abundant fossil fuels that have made Alberta the richest jurisdiction in one of the richest countries in the world. People in Calgary don’t like to talk about climate change, and these days David Suzuki talks about little else. The directors course, overall a fabulous experience, was also populated largely by oil and gas executives. As a group, they were bright and polite, so while they didn’t quite welcome me as one of the family, we quickly forged a working relationship that tended to feature more gentle ribbing than outright argument.

Given that relationship, I wasn’t completely surprised when I walked into the room on the morning of February 27, 2007, and found a copy of the
Calgary Herald
spread out in front of my usual place. The large front-page headline said: “Suzuki Says Premier Unfit to Lead Alberta.” It seems that the week before, Alberta premier Ed Stelmach had told a business audience that he understood the government had a responsibility to protect the environment, but that “it’s clear that green politics are as much about emotion as they are about science.” Suzuki the scientist was passing through town on a tour to raise awareness about climate change, and his response included a generous helping of emotion: “If your premier thinks he’s worried about the future—and he doesn’t realize not doing anything about greenhouse gases is going to wreck the economy—then he doesn’t deserve to be a leader.” Throughout the day one after another of my director colleagues took the opportunity to stop by my chair or touch my elbow during a break to say, “So, you’re David Suzuki’s PR guy; was it
your
idea to say that our premier is unfit for office?”

Time and again I smiled and said that David Suzuki, son of Kaoru Suzuki, is not the kind of leader who takes speaking points or tolerates muzzling by his public relations advisor. But as the day wore on, I started wondering more specifically about the quote. I was thinking about David’s periodic insistence on saying things that got people riled up and about the circumstances that inspired him to do so on this occasion.

The first thing you might consider is something that the
Herald
reported in the same story: Alberta, with roughly 11 percent of the Canadian population, generates 40 percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. The province’s tar sands deposit, the largest source of oil outside of Saudi Arabia, and one of the dirtiest anywhere, is also the single biggest and fastest-growing source of those emissions anywhere in the country. As reported in the overview document
Oil Sands Fever,
prepared by the widely respected Alberta environmental organization the Pem-bina Institute, the tar sands are huge. Spreading over 58,000 square miles, they cover an area as large as Florida. If Canada is America’s biggest (and most reliable) source of oil—and it is— this is where most of that oil originates.

It is also a sticky, toxic mess. As quoted by journalist Andrew Nikiforuk in his book
Tar Sands,
“Dr. Steven Kuznicki, a scholar at the Imperial Oil-Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Oil Sands Innovation, calls bitumen some of the ‘ugliest stuff you ever saw . . . contaminated, non-homogenous and ill-defined . . . Bitumen is five percent sulphur, half a percent nitrogen and 1,000 parts per million heavy metals. Its viscosity [stickiness] is like tar on a cold day. That’s ugly.’” In order to refine a single barrel of crude oil from this material, Alberta’s tar sands plants have to dig up an average of more than two tons of overlay material (in other words, that which used to be the earth and flora of the boreal forest) and two tons of tarry sand. The tar must then be heated using 250 cubic feet of natural gas— enough gas in all tar sands operations to heat three million Canadian homes every year—and washed with between two and five barrels of fresh water, a resource that tar sands companies are licensed to consume at the same daily rate as the entire city of Indianapolis. When you’re done, you’re left with a vast scar in the Earth and a tailings pond full of toxic sludge.

The tailings ponds are a growing problem. Already covering more than fifty square miles, these are considered to be the largest man-made structures on Earth. NASA’s shuttle veterans have reported that you can see the ponds glistening from space, but they are anything but attractive up close. I had the opportunity to fly over this scattered black ocean in a helicopter last year and, even seeing it, the extent of the devastation is hard to digest. The ponds leak an unknown amount of that heavy-metal-laden goop into the surrounding water supply 24/7.
¹
One report, prepared by the Pembina Institute in December 2008 for Environmental Defence Canada, estimated that seepage could amount to 3 million gallons per day or a billion gallons a year. Another Environmental Defence document, titled
The Most
Destructive Project on Earth,
noted in 2008 that, thanks in part to that seepage, total mercury in sediments in the Athabasca River delta were 98 percent above historic medians, dissolved arsenic in the river had jumped 466 percent, and arsenic in sediment had risen by 114 percent. There is also the question of airborne toxics. A 2007 Environment Canada report noted that summer heat releases huge amounts of volatile organic compounds from the ponds, including over one hundred tons per year of benzene. As with mercury, there is no safe level for exposure to benzene—any amount threatens human health.

The tailings ponds pose a constant risk to wildlife, especially the migratory birds that sometimes make the mistake of landing on what they thought was water. In April 2008 five hundred ducks died an oily death after doing just that. At the time, Syn-crude Canada insisted on CT V this was the first such incident in thirty years. That would be easier to believe if Syncrude had actually owned up to the duck deaths, as it is required to do by law. But Syncrude kept the deaths quiet until an anonymous tipster reported the incident to an Alberta Fish and Wildlife office. Syncrude, as well as Suncor, the other major tar sands developer, might also be more credible in defending the state of the ponds if they were not so aggressive in discouraging environmental oversight. Dr. Kevin Timoney described the company’s policy this way in a December 9, 2008, article titled “Toll of Oilsands Tailings Ponds on Migratory Birds Is Difficult to Measure” in the
Edmonton Journal:
“Oilsands leases are secured facilities, fenced, patrolled and administered as private property. Studies not supported by industry are not allowed, nor are ornithologists and the general public permitted to observe bird mortality incidents. Few scientific studies have gathered mortality data in a form that allows a real estimate of death rates.”

Thus we know only that annual bird deaths are somewhere between sixty-nine, the number reported by industry, and one hundred thousand, the highest estimate offered in a Boreal Songbird Initiative report entitled
Danger in the Nursery.
In the piece he wrote for the
Edmonton Journal,
Timoney, an ecologist with Treeline Ecological Research, dismissed the higher numbers out of hand, suggesting the current annual death toll is in the range of eight hundred to seven thousand. “Such a death toll,” he says, “is sufficiently tragic not to require exaggeration.”

The tar sands are taking a toll on human health as well, though the details are similarly up for debate. As
National
Geographic
reported in a story in March 2009, in 2006 John O’Connor, a family physician who flew in weekly to treat patients in the tar sands community of Fort Chipewyan, reported that he had in a short period seen five cases of chol-angiocarcinoma— a bile-duct cancer that normally strikes one person in one hundred thousand. There are only one thousand people total in Fort Chip. O’Connor couldn’t seem to interest anyone in the cancer cluster until he mentioned it in a 2006 radio interview. Then, he told
National Geographic
writer Robert Kunzig, the story “just exploded.” But it still didn’t interest the government. Alberta Health spokesperson Howard May responded in an email to Kunzig, “There is no evidence of elevated cancer rates in the community.” It’s not clear how May justified making this statement when O’Connor’s statistics proved that the occurrence rate of cholangiocarcinoma in Fort Chip was five thousand times above normal.

How is government responding to these risks? Well, instead of stepping up the monitoring of local health or the enforcement of environmental standards, Alberta premier Ed Stelmach added C$25 million to his 2008 budget for a public relations campaign aimed at promoting Alberta and the tar sands as environmentally friendly.
²
This is a classic mistake—a misstep that should send off warning bells to anyone with experience in public relations. The first priority in crisis management should always be to manage the crisis, not the media. If ducks die, you should think about ways to prevent them from dying in the future. If people die, you should apologize to their family members and try to identify and prevent the cause of death. If your province is growing incredibly rich at the expense of other people in the world, you should look hard at whether it is absolutely necessary to authorize the industry responsible to double in size over the next five to seven years.

That’s the current Stelmach plan: double the tar sands operation as quickly as possible. As
National Geographic
reported, oil sands developers spent C$50 billion in construction between 1998 and 2008—C$20 billion in 2008 alone. And the plan, at least before oil prices tanked, was to spend another C$100 billion to more than double the tar sands output between now and 2015. You can imagine the pressure that must exert on a premier, a governor-equivalent reigning over a province (Alberta is 255,000 square miles) that is only a little smaller than Texas (268,000 square miles) but has a population (3.6 million) that is only a little larger than that of Connecticut (3.5 million). You can imagine that Premier Stelmach would think it politically untenable to turn off, or even slow down, that kind of development.

But that depends on whom he might consider to be his political masters. In May 2007 a Pembina Institute poll found that 71 percent of Alberta respondents were in favor of a moratorium on new tar sands development. So it wasn’t Stelmach’s voters who were urging him to overheat the economy and the world (the mining and refining of tar sands oil generates three times as much greenhouse gas as conventional oil); it was a different stakeholder group altogether.

Faced with the prospect of placing a moratorium on tar sand development, even only until some of the safety issues could be worked through more effectively, Stelmach responded, as reported in
National Geographic,
like this: “It’s my belief that when government attempts to manipulate the free market, bad things happen. The free-market system will solve this.” But as
National Geographic
writer Kunzig pointed out, the free market doesn’t consider the effects of tar sands pollution on rivers and forests, cancer-stricken neighbors, or people around the world at risk from greenhouse gas emissions. Kunzig concludes, “In northern Alberta, the question of how to strike that balance has been left to the free market, and its answer has been to forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow is not its job.”

Alberta’s oil producers are not lifeguards. They are businesspeople, bound by the rules of business to maximize profits for their shareholders. And it doesn’t appear that Alberta’s government is overburdened with lifeguards either. Without getting into a debate over Premier Stelmach’s fitness to govern, he seems disturbingly willing to stand back and let people stampede toward the cliff. As the government says in its January 2008 climate change plan,
Responsibility/Leadership/Action,
“As a leading energy producer for Canada and the world, Alberta is responsible for producing about a third of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions—the leading cause of climate change. Our emissions are expected to increase by another third over the next five to ten years.” Tomorrow, apparently, is not the Alberta government’s job either.