[R-G] The word on 'dirty 'oil Authors take critical look at oilsands;

[Anthony Fenton]

The word on 'dirty 'oil
; Authors take critical look at oilsands;

Eric Volmers
Calgary Herald

Sunday, November 02, 2008

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=d7e9705f-5863-4968-a5a5-1a1dbda807c9

Andrew Nikiforuk may feel let down by the various vanguards of  
Canada's establishment -- our government, our media, our industry.

But the journalist and author acknowledges Canada can be a relatively  
benign place to operate if you're a pot-stirring writer looking to  
topple apple carts and criticize what has been, up until recently, a  
bit of a sacred cow in his home province.

"I would expect in Russia or Nigeria, someone like me would just  
disappear," says Nikiforuk. "Thank God I live in Alberta. Where they  
just send letters to the editor."

It's a sly reference to a recent letter drawn up by the Energy  
Resources Conservation Board, the provincial regulator of the oil and  
gas industry that gets raked over the coals in Nikiforuk's latest book  
Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.

The board fired off a letter-to-the-editor to the Calgary Herald  
before the newspaper had printed anything about the book, pointing out  
what it sees as errors.

Nikiforuk, who offers a rebuttal on his website, makes no apologies  
for ruffling feathers. In fact, he seems at least a little pleased  
that the ERCB - tar Sands: dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by  
andrew nikiforuk (douglas&McIntyre, 208 pages $20) - the tyranny of  
Oil: the world's Most Powerful Industry-- and what we Must do to Stop  
It byantonia Juhasz(Harper Collins Canada, 480 pages, $26.99)

has opted to participate in the debate at all. Tar Sands paints an  
unflattering picture of oilsands development as a poorly-planned,  
badly-regulated free-for-all to frantically liquidate northern  
Alberta's precious bituminous sands and feed "irrational global  
demands."

The result, he says, is a $200-billion behemoth that has swallowed the  
province's economy and identity, altered the nation's foreign policy  
and inflicted still-unknown damage to Alberta's environment. Yet, he  
claims, it has received scant attention over the years. If such a  
project were active in the U. S., Fort McMurray would have long ago  
been populated with newspaper bureaus of the L. A. Times, New York  
Times and Washington Post, he says.

"We are just catching up with a nation-changing event with continental  
and global implications," Nikiforuk, 53, says. "This is the world's  
largest energy project, which is in our own back yard and has so  
demonstratively changed Alberta. . . . The media has failed to really  
tackle this story. This is a story that is just as dramatic as the  
Klondike, only 100 times better."

If oilsands development remains under-reported by the mainstream  
media, as Nikiforuk believes, it has become a lightning rod for  
certain areas of the political spectrum, in entertainment-as-activism.  
Documentary films such as To the Tarsands and Downstream have tackled  
the controversy, with the latter even being shortlisted for an Academy  
Award nomination. The recent miniseries Burn Up--while fictional and  
rather conspiratorial in nature--paints oilsands development in  
Alberta as a less-than-noble pursuit.

Even Canuck-turned-Hollywood-starlet Neve Campbell has weighed in,  
voicing her disapproval of the development after flying over it in a  
helicopter.

But unlike artists who work in those mediums, authors attempting to  
write the quintessential last word on the topic face the specific  
challenge of painting the big picture, in all its dauntingly complex  
glory. Authors like Nikiforuk need to wrap an enormous amount of  
scientific, geopolitical, economic and social data into something the  
average reader will enjoy, or in the very least understand. It's not  
an easy task, he says.

"There is so much information, and a lot of it is not readily  
available to the public," says Nikiforuk. "I interviewed 100 people in  
Fort McMurray alone to try and get a sense of where everyone is coming  
from. The book doesn't capture everything because it is so damn large.  
I did two years of basic reporting just to begin to understand how big  
this thing was and what a true, nation-changing development it is."

Few authors wading into the subject have much positive to say about  
the oilsands. There's little discussion of green initiatives in the  
region, for example, or the financial benefits of the industry.

Montreal Gazette reporter William Mardsen was among the first authors  
to shine a critical light at Alberta's oil industry for a mainstream  
audience. Last year's bluntly titled Stupid to the Last Drop: How  
Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't  
Seem to Care) was an unabashed polemic, intent on shattering any  
comfort the average citizen may have taken in the assumption that  
Alberta knows what it's doing when it came to managing resources (it's  
original title: Albertans are Stupid). Tony Clarke's up-coming book,  
Tarsands Showdown, follows a similar path but also delves into its  
geopolitical implications of how the oilsands will change Canada's  
reputation and footing in the world. U. S. writer Antonia Juhasz's The  
Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry -and What We Must  
Do to Stop It, takes on Big Oil in general, but reserves a good deal  
of space to bemoan oilsands development in Alberta. Dr. Andrew Weaver,  
a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and expert on climate change, touches  
on the issue in his new book Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming  
World.

"I don't like to pick on the tarsands, it's one part of a much bigger  
issue," says Weaver, who will be speaking in Calgary, Edmonton and  
Lethbridge later this month. "But what the tarsands captures is the  
end-to-end environmental degradation. The wildlife activists can  
attack it because of its specific impact on wildlife; the water  
conservation types can attack it because of the amount of water it  
uses; the natural habitat types go after it because of its impact on  
existing habitat and on and on. It has become like the spotted owl in  
the U.S. It's an icon, it epitomizes the whole spectrum--the very  
worst aspects of humans interacting with the environment."

Such drama, the authors hope, will help the debate bubble up from the  
underground realm of activists and scientists to the public at large,  
preferably a public beyond Alberta.

But as a writer, how do you ensure the average reader doesn't nod off  
as you passionately rail against lax regulations, geopolitical shifts  
and the law of petropolitics?

"It's a challenge and different people have approached it different  
ways." says author Tony Clarke, who is executive director and co- 
founder of the Polaris Institute in Ottawa. "I have come at it from  
the standpoint, that while there's certainly economic and social  
impacts, there is a larger impact from a geopolitical framework. You  
have to get Canadians to realize how important this mega-project is  
and how it could become the centrepiece of the economy for the first  
half of the 21st century. We need to push Canadians to look at the  
deeper implications of this and how it relates to who we are as people."

Nikiforuk says he took pains to ensure his book went beyond preaching  
to the converted. Tarsands begins with a bluntly worded 22-point  
"declaration of a political emergency" and ends with a 12-step plan to  
regain "energy sanity," which includes action the general reader can  
take. In between, Nikiforuk writes not only about environmental and  
political concerns, but takes the reader into the frenzied boom of  
Fort McMurray and along the so-called "highway to hell" that leads to  
it. He tells the story of Fort McMurray physician Dr. John O'Connor,  
who Nikiforuk says faced severe "political persecution"when he went  
public about an increase of cancer cases in Fort Chipewyan, downstream  
from oilsand projects. He tells these tales with old-fashioned good  
writing, whether it be describing the yearly level of carbon dioxide  
emitted from tarsands projects as enough to "fill one million two- 
storey, three-bedroom homes and suffocate every occupant" or the  
provincial and federal governments as "joyous peanut hawkers who can't  
believe the size of the crowd" in Alberta's "global energy playground."

In its three-page letter, the Energy Resources Conservation Board has  
claimed Nikiforuk's reporting to be either inaccurate or incomplete on  
issues relating directly to the board's duties as provincial  
regulator. But Nikiforuk stands by his reporting and his reasons for  
tackling the oilsands in the first place.

"I try to choose subjects that will make some difference to my  
children," Nikiforuk says. "I have three boys in Calgary. This project  
has tremendous implications for young people in the province. If we  
can get it under control and manage it's financial and political  
impact properly and reduce its environmental footprint, then maybe we  
can use this project to make Alberta the greenest province in Canada  
and Canada the greenest country in the world."
© The Calgary Herald 2008