Trapped in Black Tar
Andrew Nikiforuk tells how the oil sands made Canada a suburb of Fort McMurray.
Nikiforuk: 'This is the Third World.'
- Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent
- Greystone (2008)
"Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Russia or Nigeria, I swear to god." Andrew Nikiforuk is on stage at the Capilano Performing Arts Theatre, reflecting on life in Alberta as an outspoken critic of the tar sands. Yet one of the most decorated magazine writers in the country spared little as he carved up the captains of industry and politicians behind Alberta's massive oil boom, in front of about 200 people on Oct. 26.
Drawing on his new book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, Nikiforuk forcefully outlined a very ugly business. He described the tar sands development as the largest capital project in the world, at $200 billion since 1996 when the associated pipelines and refineries are rolled in.
Then he set out the stakes. The development of the world's dirtiest oil has made Canada the biggest supplier of the United States' massive energy needs for the last seven years. "While we were having our donuts at Tim Hortons, we were becoming what Stephen Harper calls an 'emerging energy superpower.' "
Nikiforuk also set out the consequences. Not just the environmental ones -- we'll get to those. The political ones. "We are now a petro-state," Nikiforuk declared, with a wildly fluctuating petro dollar, noting that in Nigeria, Venezuela and Russia the consequences are not too subtle. "In Alberta, it's a little more subtle."
The implications of all that oil lucre sloshing loosely about in politics and society are rather profound, Nikiforuk argued, noting that the only real democracies in the Middle East are the countries without any oil. In British Columbia, he says, our complicity is being bought with the tar sands' dirty money. Toxic sour-gas wells that feed the tar sands' own enormous energy demands are putting $2 billion a year in the B.C. government's coffers. The feds are getting $5 billion to $6 billion a year in tar sands–related corporate tax revenue, Nikiforuk estimates. "They've used it to lower your taxes."
He quoted Thomas Friedman's twist on preacher Jonathan Mayhew's famous 1750 dictum: "There is no representation without taxation." In other words, if oil companies are the ones improving governments' accounts, then governments will do the oil companies' bidding, not ours.
Meanwhile, he told the Capilano crowd, with all the money bubbling up in Alberta, citizens worry more about cashing in than building a community. Voter turnout for provincial elections is 40 per cent. Fort McMurray, at the centre of the tar sands development, delivered a 14 per cent turnout in the last provincial election.
The tar sands boom, which Nikiforuk asserts has drawn more than 12 times as many foreign workers per capita as the United States -- 70,000 applications in 2007 alone -- has also produced grim social consequences. Crack cocaine is easier to get in the work camps than a pizza, and prostitution is rife, Nikiforuk says. Inexplicably, "transvestites are very popular."
And when the tar sands workers go home to places like Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, he adds, they bring their problems home with them.
Of course, the environmental consequences of the boom are astonishing. Each day, the tar sands produce the greenhouse gas equivalent of 12 million cars, and consume enough natural gas to heat six million homes. "The federal government found it would take 20 nuclear reactors to do that work."
Mammoth destruction
The tar sands development could ultimately encompass an area the size of Florida. "You can see the craters from the moon." Fifty per cent of the landscape being destroyed is wetland. "We don't know how to replace wetland."
A 2008 industry-funded study suggested that the "steam-assisted gravity drainage" projects (as opposed to the open-pit mines) could extirpate caribou, bear, moose and fish from between one and three million acres. Water in the Athabaska region is in decline by 30 percent since the 1960s, Nikiforuk said. The process of extracting oil from the sand requires vast quantities of water, and produces enormous volumes of toxic waste. Nikiforuk said a dozen tailings ponds cover 50 square kilometres, held back by sand dams that rival the Three Gorges dam in size. "They're all leaking."
Nikiforuk asserts that efforts to monitor the effect on the Athabaska watershed, part of the third-largest river system in the world, is pathetic. In 2004, Nikiforuk said, federal scientists declared that the monitoring program "was designed to find nothing."
"This is Third World," Nikiforuk observes. "It's really disturbing that this would happen in a country like Canada."
Targeted by big oil
Nikiforuk himself has paid a price for his forceful reporting, but it's still a modest price by Third World standards. As he nursed a cup of green tea the next morning in the empty restaurant of his Robson Street hotel, he said he figures he's banned from the Calgary writer's festival, Wordfest, because its major sponsor is Encana. Certainly the spin doctors at the Energy Resources Conservation Board, which is supposed to regulate the industry and protect the public, have him in their sights. The board accused him of promoting numerous falsehoods in a letter posted on its website, after he criticized natural gas well monitoring at a small-town meeting. Nikiforuk, of course, disputes their view.
If you're looking for a case of someone who's really been targeted, there's no better example than John O'Connor, a physician and the former medical examiner for Fort McMurray.
Tar Sands outlines how O'Connor's work in downstream Fort Chipewyan raised his concern, first because of the stories he heard of deformed fish and then because of the health problems he encountered, including renal failure, lupus, hyperthyroidism and a particularly troubling rare bile duct cancer linked to industrial pollutants. He learned that the province had ignored scientists' calls for a health study in the area in 1996, 1999 and 2004. In 2006, he renewed calls for a detailed study. "Where is this cancer coming from?" O'Connor asked. "I'm not saying stop the oil sands. I'm just asking questions."
Scientists from Health Canada, Environment Canada, and Alberta Health responded to his advocacy by filing complaints with the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons, accusing O'Connor of causing "undue alarm," overbilling, "irresponsible practices," engendering mistrust, and blocking access to medical files. Although O'Connor was cleared of all charges except that of causing undue alarm, the complaint effectively silenced him for a year. The social consequences of the boom also affected him. Nikiforuk said one son was beaten up by a drug addict, and another became addicted to crack. In 2007, O'Connor moved to Nova Scotia.
While the Alberta Cancer Board finally decided earlier this year to study cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan -- the rate of bile duct cancer in Fort Chip could be as much as 400 times that of the general population -- Nikiforuk writes that "no provincial or federal agency has offered to do its own review of the cancerous ponds or their seepage rates into groundwater and the river."
'A country adrift'
Tar Sands' detailed and devastating critique of regulatory failures is compelling reading. No less troubling is the complete absence of a governmental plan for the development of the tar sands, beyond as much as possible as soon as possible. "There's no energy plan, there's no water plan, there's no climate plan," Nikiforuk told The Tyee. "We really are a country adrift."
Alberta's royalty on the raw tar sands bitumen is set at just one per cent until industry recovers all its capital costs. Even former Alberta energy minister Murray Smith described that as a "give it away" approach. "We have to discipline this project, because right now this project is in charge," Nikiforuk said.
Few dare to challenge the status quo in a province that just voted overwhelmingly to return the son of an Imperial Oil executive as prime minister. And few in the media acknowledge it when they do, although both national and Alberta media did take notice when former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed spoke up
in a Calgary speech last year about the pace of development and the environmental consequences. "We think we're mavericks?" Nikiforuk intoned at the Capilano theatre. "We're not mavericks."
Nikiforuk shakes his head at the lack of attention given to the tar sands story in the Canadian media. He figures it's a bigger story in the United States. He doesn't suggest it's a conspiracy so much as simply pure inattention. "Somebody made the assumption that this was all normal," he told The Tyee. "When the Klondike happened, we had reporters there," he told the crowd at Capilano. "We even had great poets there."
Nikiforuk doesn't spare much rhetoric on how important this story for Canadians: "The rest of Alberta has become a suburb of Fort McMurray. Parts of British Columbia have become a suburb of Fort McMurray. The whole of Prince Edward Island has become a suburb of Fort McMurray."
Sleep rocked by explosions
In British Columbia, there's certainly very little sense that the Peace River natural gas boom is linked to the tar sands, just as there's not much awareness of the environmental damage caused by gas exploration and drilling. Then there are the considerable human and animal health risks posed by sour gas, which Nikiforuk explored in his Governor General's Award–winning 2001 book, Saboteurs: Weibo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross).
Until the two October bombings of Encana pipelines south of Dawson Creek, and the associated letter to a local paper calling oil and gas companies terrorists, the only thing most people knew about Peace River gas was that it inflated the provincial government's surplus. But then city dwellers aren't much at risk of having a sour gas well operating 100 metres from their front door, as is currently permitted.
The mere possibility of an Encana pipeline to Kitimat feeding oil-tanker traffic on our coast has caused more alarm in urban B.C. than what's already happened in the Peace district. Nikiforuk said British Columbians need to do more to challenge the province's regulation of the industry. "You should congratulate Gordon Campbell on following through on the carbon tax," he told the Capilano audience, but at the same time insist on better regulation, higher royalties, and a legacy fund to ensure the revenue creates lasting benefits.
Nikiforuk worries, though, that the bombings in B.C. will actually constrain debate, just as he doubts the ability of the RCMP to catch the culprit. What does he make of reports that convicted saboteur Weibo Ludwig is not a suspect? "The letters that went out during Ludwig's campaign bear the same characteristics..." he said.
Governments addicted to revenue
Andrew Nikiforuk vacillates between cynicism and a little bit of hope as he considers the future. In Alberta, he said there's a sense, even in the business community, that the tar sands are out of control. "People have really seen the quality of life diminish in the province." He thinks it's possible that a new party and leader will emerge -- essentially conservative but with an emphasis on the conservation component.
He thinks it's possible that we might eventually heed the example of a country like Norway that has salted away oil and gas revenue in a meaningful legacy fund. He thinks the public will accept carbon taxes when they are properly explained. He even believes that large sums of money aimed at carbon sequestration may come Alberta's way to simply leave that sticky bitumen in the ground.
But he believes change is going to take a while.
"The B.C. government is so wedded to the income that they're not going to properly regulate the industry," he said. In Canada, much depends on what happens in the United States. "Let's face it -- Canadians are followers." But he believes the national parties on the left will eventually be forced to act together. In the world as a whole, he thinks it will take $200-a-barrel oil to get us to act.
"We are not serious about any of this yet."
Read an excerpt from Tar Sands: "Declaration of a Political Emergency."
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
G West
05-11-2008
Thanks Charles
Thanks to David too.
And above all thanks to Andrew Nikiforik - let us hope all Canadians are paying attention now, before it's too late.
Van Isle
06-11-2008
The Tarsands is a huge
The Tarsands is a huge economic boondogle and of course our governments are in it up to their armpits. The oil industry has a formula for operations if they're economical to operate; basically it's energy output vs energy input ratio. In their heyday of oil exploration in the '50's and '60's the ratio was about 200 to 1. The tarsands ratio is 1.5 to 1, and of course the eventual cleanup isn't in the equation at all. If you want to read a good book about this; Petro-dollar Warfare by William Clarke
seth
06-11-2008
Greens responsible?
I hope Canada's and BC's Green parties who are responsible for the election of Neocon environment destroying governments in both BC and Canada, read this article and understand people die because of their childish disagreements with other progressives in federal Liberal and the BC/Canada NDP party.
alive
06-11-2008
Libs no better!
I agree seth!
But the main obstacle really is the liberals, who split the left vote by pretending to be left oriented!
Thinking voters cannot vote for the liberals because it has been shown, too often, that they basically are identical to the conservatives.
For now, that leaves only the NDP if you seriously wish to change things!
southdeltawalker
06-11-2008
Andrew on rabbletv
Andrew Nikiforuk spoke last Friday night at the Council of Canadians AGM in Edmonton.
Here is link to rabbletv-click on "on demand' button on bottom of player. http://tv.rabble.ca/
morechatter
06-11-2008
Its a Reality
There is no way out as our neighbors thirst for oil is directed toward Canadian soil and its the money from energy that is going to keep us afloat during the recession. However having said that there needs to be REGULATIONS to protect our environment as we would not want to end up like the States. As contra to Mr. Campbell and Mr. Harper in Canada people rule not profits. America has regulations yet the Liberal government is pushing for deregulate with TILMA or better yet ILLMUD. Government needs to change its focus to producing clean energy something that does not destroy a countries environment and lands.
Budd Campbell
06-11-2008
Which media did you say weren't reporting the story?
"Few dare to challenge the status quo ... And few in the media acknowledge it when they do, ... "
"Nikiforuk shakes his head at the lack of attention given to the tar sands story in the Canadian media. He figures it's a bigger story in the United States. He doesn't suggest it's a conspiracy so much as simply pure inattention. ... "
In the campaign for the October 14th federal election, Jack Layton made remarks about the tar sands huge consumption of water. He made comments specifically mentioning the Fort Chipewayn cancers and the work of John O'Connor. He was joined by Linda Duncan, the NDP candidate in Edmonton Strathcona. It was national news for about one day at the start of the campaign, but Layton was ridiculed by many media people for making unsubstantiated, populist charages against the oil industry.
In BC, Prof Michael Byers, the NDP candidate in Vancouver Centre said the tar sands development had to be stopped if Canada was to get its GHG emissions under control. For this, the media burned him big time. And that's not just the big CanWest media and the CBC, either. It includes the Georgia Straight, where Charlie Smith was only interested in carbon taxes and Liberal Green Shifts, and it includes the Tyee which reported absolutely zero about Layton or Duncan or about Byers statements about GHGs.
All this was part of a carefully pre-packaged strategy involving Liberals, academics, ENGOs and the media, including the "alternative" media. The object was to make certain that the non-Tory vote either stayed Liberal or got drowned out. The NDP need not apply. It worked.
The only bright spot is that Duncan won in Edmonton-Strathcona. Why? There's no Georgia Straight in Edmonton willing to sell anti-environmental right-wing, multi-millionaires Liberal backbenchers like Joyce Murray and Hedy Fry as some kind of progressives who understand the serious dangers of climate change.
The lesson in all this? After a while, it's hard to ignore the fact that all media are commercial and beholder to their advertisers for their incomes. And after a time, the integrity level of those media outlets is a matter of pubic record, the one they themselves created.
Cynic
06-11-2008
"The rest of Alberta has
"The rest of Alberta has become a suburb of Fort McMurray. Parts of British Columbia have become a suburb of Fort McMurray. The whole of Prince Edward Island has become a suburb of Fort McMurray."
And Fort McMurray is a suburb of Texas. (couldn't resist... :)
Jeffrey J.
06-11-2008
All Media Not the Same
Media monopoly concentration has reached an all time high, both in Canada and the US. This potent concentration of ownership has resulted in a huge democratic deficit in our institutions. The small, independent media venues like the Tyee, CCPA, and others are a significant voice, but are still no match against the powerful corporations who dominate the airwaves.
North America's media used to be spread between 500 or so individual companies. That has shrunk to less then a dozen. That is the real problem. Monopoly ownership used to be illegal and regulated, like it is in Europe. The sooner we return to that structure, the faster the public will be able to learn about issues like the Alberta oil conglomerates. Great book review!
David Lewis
06-11-2008
Nikiforuk is supporting a carbon tax
This article states Nikiforuk supports Campbell's carbon tax, yet no one complains. Its all great guy, wonderful work, glad you are informing us all. I guess you can get away with things a bit higher up on the page that are crimes down here in the lowly comments section.
The proven reserve is a Saudi sized 170 billion barrels but its only a tiny part of the entire deposit. Nikiforuk is overblowing it when he brings up Florida. The first time I researched this I got a figure of 1/35th of the Florida sized deposit is the proven reserve, maybe it could be as much as 1/10.
The Florida sized area Nikiforuk mentions is the entire deposit. Its a 200 foot thick average 6% oil mixed with sand blanket covering an area a bit smaller than Florida. It seems very doubtful if anyone would ever mine that. Most of it is too deeply buried.
All the things Nikiforuk brings up, i.e. the massive energy requirement to process it, the massive water requirement, the colossal effect on the region, all of these alarming projections, except his reference to the Florida sized area, are based on calculations on what it would take to exploit the much smaller area where the deposit is close enough to the surface to be the proven reserve as of now. Its going to be converted to moonscape, but its "only" going to be at most 1/10 the size of Florida. You're all relieved now I guess.
It isn't the world's dirtiest oil. Converting coal to liquids has got to be worse. Rand published a report citing Pembina work stating tar sand oil can result in 30 percent more CO2 emissions than conventional crude because of the energy spent mining and processing, whereas coal to liquids can be 100% more. A carbon tax of around $60 a ton would make it economical to sequester the carbon underground which means, if there are no technical surprises, that if the US forced Canada to sequester the carbon from the tar sands oil the deposit would still be economical to produce as long as the oil price was above $60 a barrel, according to the EIA. Until you actually do things its all speculative I suppose.
Judging by the roars one hears around BC there will never be a carbon tax so Canada will be able to kill the planet on its own just by producing this one deposit I guess.
170 billion barrels of oil sold at $100 a barrel is $17 trillion, so there's no doubt Nikiforuk is on track when he starts thinking about what something like that would do to the people who controlled it. They put Harper into power, they shredded Canada's signature on Kyoto, and they hold us all in thrall.
ME2
06-11-2008
If we REALLY want change.
Alive thinks :
"For now, that leaves only the NDP if you seriously wish to change things!"
But the NDP will never be a serious force for either social or envionmental change until it poses a genuine election threat to the Grits and reforma-Tories.
This can happen ONLY if Left-leaning Liberals and Greens vote NDP, even if only for one or two elections.
This will get Campbells pseudo Liberals out of office and will force the ever-pragmatic Federal Liberals to shift policy directions.
bentrider2010
07-11-2008
Re: Facts
Mr. Lewis, Mr. Nikiforuk has his facts right. I think you are neglecting to include in-situ extraction in your figures. You may also be underestimating the depth to which overburden will be removed at a given price for bitumen.
Sequestration is not a solution. It is a diversion created by interested parties (notably the Conservative Party in Alberta). There is no technology to sequester even a fraction of the enormous quantity of GHG's produced in the tarsands.
The solution is to divert economic resources away from the tarsands and towards a sustainable economy. Alberta is being turned into a waste dump to benefit the United States addiction to oil. Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing oil companies in the tarsands with tax concessions, direct subsidies and free pollution licenses. Meanwhile valuable natural gas is being burned to make dirty oil. It's stuipid to the last drop and it's not just Albertans that are being stuipid - it's all of us.
Charles Campbell
08-11-2008
Florida, Sequestration and Tax Shifting
Andrew Nikiforuk's research is extremely meticulous. One need only to examine the hair-splitting the Alberta gas regulators are doing with him to understand just how much he has right. Any disservice in the article to the facts as he sets them out is certainly mine. For example, rather than saying the tar sands development encompasses an area the size of Florida, I might better have said a map of Florida neatly encompasses the area affected by the tar sands development.
I recommend people read his book. He devotes an excellent chapter to the sequestration issue.
I also feel the need to observe that the debate on carbon taxes often generates more heat than light.
If you want to discourage consumption of something noxious, say tobacco, you tax it. You tax the industry that makes it and you tax the people that use it. If you're good, you'll use the money to provide a complementary social benefit or offer a corresponding reduction in taxes on activities that aren't harmful. Another example, don't heavily tax earnings that contribute to the development of a healthy economy, but do tax speculation, particularly on land.
"Tax shifting" is smart public policy. We can argue the finer points of the BC Liberals' plan until we're all drowning in glacier water, but raising taxes on gasoline is a good thing to do.
Certainly the Liberal plan has its faults. But the issues can be complicated. Want to tax cruise ships and airplanes such that all those ships and planes travel through Seattle instead of Vancouver? I don't see much benefit to the environment there.
G West
08-11-2008
Charles
If this, (your words) "If you're good, you'll use the money to provide a complementary social benefit or offer a corresponding reduction in taxes on activities that aren't harmful.." were true, then your conclusion - that raising taxes on gasoline, heating oil and natural gas is simply a good - would also be true.
However, since the Campbell Tax DOES nothing but 'launder' money the second part of the proposition is false and the conclusion FAILS.
Furthermore, as has been amply demonstrated during the last year here in British Columbia, the inelasticity of demand for the goods in question makes the whole exercise nothing but an effort in political expediency and spin – much like what happens in an automatic washing machine at the end of the last rinse cycle.
If you don't accept the conclusion, try watching a few hours of television while reading a local paper.
I think you'll see lots of glossy (and not cheap) ads selling the illogic of Campbell's effort - all signed and sealed from the people who brought us that other piece of oversold nonsense about the 'BEST PLACE ON EARTH©'
Lefty
08-11-2008
Can you spot the diff?
Tar Sands - Old Speak
Oil Sands - New Speak
ME2
08-11-2008
On wet dreaming
All the wet dreams you folks have of sequestering CO2 or of punitive taxation of hydrocarbons are pure fantasy - as just the smallest amount of thought should demonstrate.
No such efforts can produce meaningful results unless EVERY producer is involved, and the chances of that are highly unlikely.
Any country which tried to go it alone, in the hopes of convincing others to follow suit, would be committing economic suicide.
The neocon alternative, trading "carbon credits" is just another of their scams.
So please, let's confine our disussion to means of forcing a switch to alternate forms of energy production.
OilbertaRedTory
08-11-2008
What a Bitumen ...
http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OilSands/793.asp
In words are seen the state of mind and character and disposition of the speaker.
Plutarch