With a negative worldwide spotlight on the Alberta tar sands, the Alberta government is trying to green up the dirty oil label. Instead of conserving energy or making significant investments in wind or solar, the Alberta government is using old fashioned public relations greenwashing in the hopes of being more green. This is a tried and true tactic of the Bush administration – don’t change your action, just change people’s perceptions.

Unfortunately greenwash works. Intelligent people I know fall for it. One example is Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Hellmann’s has a slogan that is ‘eat real, eat local’. Mayonnaise is suddenly as healthy as spinach and local because Hellmann’s says so. I can only imagine all the local farmers they are supporting. Hellmann’s doesn’t do anything different, but slaps a real food label on it.

Helmann’s is owned by Unilever, a multinational corporation. They don’t care about local, the farmers, or the environment. Unilever has an atrocious human rights and environmental record. It has been busted dumping mercury in Kodaikanal, India. The corporation was founded on clearing people and forests in west Africa one hundred years ago to create palm oil plantations. Even today it buys over one million tonnes of palm oil annually from deforested Malaysia and Indonesia. Unilever just cares about making money.

Greenwash is rampant in the oil industry. BP’s slogan is Beyond Petroleum. CorpWatch said that it should really be Beyond Preposterous. This is because the reality is that BP spent $26.5 billion acquiring ARCO and $1 billion a year drilling in Alaska. They spent a measly $45 million to buy the Solarex solar energy corporation. The joke is that BP spends more on promoting its Beyond Petroleum than it does actually investing in renewable energy.

                                           

Another example is Shell. They had advertisements in Europe that were promoting the tar sands as “sustainable”. Words like sustainable and local mean different things to different people. Surprisingly the U.K. Advertising Standards Authority forced Shell to pull the ad after the World Wildlife Federation filed a complaint. Shell defined the tar sands as sustainable even they are one of the dirtiest fuel sources on earth.

Corporations are expected to behave like this. It is extremely disturbing when governments greenwash. For governments aren’t by law mandate to maximize profits. Governments are to work on its citizens behalf. When our governments greenwash it shows that they are in reality working for corporations.

And the Alberta government is working hard for oil corporations. It always has. Tony Clarke’s book ‘Tar Sands Showdown’ (2008) found that Syncrude, which initially was a consortium of four US-controlled oil companies including Exxon, “convinced both the federal and provincial governments to provide the burgeoning tar sands industry with generous, publicly funded incentives in the form of subsidies, thereby underwriting much of the risk and costs associated with production, in return for little in the way of actual ownership and control”.

Syncrude is the largest company in the tar sands. Andrew Nikiforuk in his book titled ‘Tar Sands’ (2008) said that “every day, the company (Syncrude) dumps 500,000 tons of tailings into the Syncrude Tailings Dam”. This pond covers over 23 square miles putting the sin in Syncrude.

Oil from the tar sands produces three times the emission as compared to conventional crude. The Alberta government is doing all it can to spin this. An “independent” report from the Alberta government’s own research institute, the Alberta Energy Research Institute, found that greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands are only 10% higher than crudes from the United States. To get this number they use a life cycle analysis from drilling to the tail pipe of your car, rather than just the extractive process.

Our government is in bed with the tar sands industry. They are protecting and subsidizing them, much like the US government did with the auto industry. This is not in the best interests of Albertans.

Instead the government should be raising the bar to minimize the impact of the tar sands and should be promoting conservation and investing significantly in solar and wind energy (the United States is investing six times per capita more than Canada is, we are being left behind in the twenty-first century). The Alberta government though continues to greenwash and shill (for free) for corporate oil, while the tar sands continues pumping out those emissions.  

Unlike corporations, governments can be held democratically accountable. The time has come to hold the Alberta government accountable.