Grist reporter Jonathan Hiskes joins ForestEthics in the toxic Tar Sands
,October 13th, 2010
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| Jonathan Hiskes |
This week, ForestEthics' Executive Director Todd Paglia and US Campaigns Director Aaron Sanger accompanied Grist reporter Jonathan Hiskes on a trip to the toxic Tar Sands. Check out this 4-part series of posts by Mr. Hiskes reporting from Northern Alberta.
| Post 1: Don't Boreal Me |
Post 2: Like Tolkien's Mordor, but not as pretty |
Post 3: Flush with contradiction |
Post 4: Brand risk |
Post 1: DON'T BOREAL ME
Farmers and travelers in a tar-sands boomtown
I'm up in Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, the international boomtown at the center of the Canadian oil fields. It's an unseasonably warm, sunny Canadian Thanksgiving, and much of the town is cleared out, with workers back home for the holiday in Edmonton or Calgary, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland.
Photo by Jonathan Hiskes, Grist.
In a few hours, I'll join conservationists from the group ForestEthics for a helicopter tour of the tar sands, one of the largest industrial excavations in the world, and by any measure an environmental catastrophe. The entire oil deposit that could be mined or drilled here is the size of North Carolina. I'm eager to see that first-hand. But I'm also interested in the town of Fort McMurray itself. What happens when a community grows from 34,000 to more than 100,000 within 15 years? How does a town function (if it does function) when the vast majority of residents come from elsewhere and don't intend to stay for long?
Post 2: LIKE TOLKIEN’S MORDOR, BUT LESS PRETTY
Flying over the tar sands
I'd expected to discover that flying in a helicopter over the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, might help me understand the scale of the development here. Instead of just reading about it, I would be seeing the place where more earth is being scraped, dug, blasted, and plowed than anywhere else on Earth.
Photo by Jonathan Hiskes, Grist.
But it didn't work out that way. Up close, the tar sands are too big to comprehend.
I'm here with Todd Paglia and Aaron Sanger of ForestEthics, who have kindly paid for me to join them on a trip with several of their funders. The flight almost didn't happen. Nine helicopter companies refused to do business with the group, which opposes the mining that is the region's economic lifeblood. The tenth company was either ballsier or clueless that the oil companies had warned pilots not to cooperate with tar-sands critics.
Post 3: FLUSH WITH CONTRADICTION
Tar-sands bathrooms are eco-friendly, which makes up for all that other stuff
Say you're an energy executive from Houston or Edmonton, Alberta, staying at the biggest hotel near the Canada tar sands, helping your company reap profits from the largest oil excavation project on the planet.
Photo by Jonathan Hiskes, Grist. It's dirty business -- producing usable petroleum from the black muck here requires three to four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional drilling, plus two to four barrels of water per barrel of oil, the remains of which are fed into tailings ponds.
So you'll be glad to know that the hotel bathroom toiletries come in "eco" packaging -- biodegradable shampoo and conditioner bottles and recycled-paper wrappers for the shower cap and shoe polisher. It's the little things that add up, see? We all must do our part to protect the planet, starting with our toiletries.
American companies don’t want tar-sands oil on their logos, creating an opening
Over the past few days I flew over the devastated landscape of the Alberta tar sands, toured the nearby boomtown struggling to deal with the influx of mining workers, scoffed at greenwashing by the energy companies, and snuck a nugget of hardened bitumen home as a souvenir.
Photo by Jonathan Hiskes, Grist.
What I didn't find in the Canadian subarctic were any solutions for "fixing" the tar sands. The solutions are down the pipelines in the U.S., where most tar-sands oil ends up (the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than from any other country). As with the BP Gulf spill, the most promising responses are the ones that shrink the demand for oil -- efficient vehicles, electric vehicles, cities and towns designed to let people get around without driving.
So it's surprising that one of the environmental groups most active in the tar sands, ForestEthics, isn't trying to reduce the need for oil (disclosure: they paid for most of my trip). Instead, the group is trying to make the tar sands a liability for major American corporations, threatening to run public campaigns against companies that use tar-sands oil to ship their goods. It ran a full-page ad in USA Today with Canadian oil dripping onto an American flag, showing companies how it could mess with their logos in a public campaign.
This year ForestEthics petitioned 30 companies to explain the high environmental and social costs of tar-sands oil (which carries three to five time the greenhouse-gas footprint of conventional drilling). The group persuaded 16 of them to boycott shipping companies that use tar-sands oil, or to at least give preference to ones that don't, U.S. campaign director Aaron Sanger told me. They include Walgreens, Timberland, The Gap, Levi Strauss, Bed Bath & Beyond, and several that haven't yet announced their shift.
