Green groups rally against oil sands development
ROBERT MATAS
From Monday's Globe and Mail
January 28, 2008 at 5:09 AM EST
VANCOUVER — An environmental group that successfully shifted the buying power of Victoria's Secret, Home Depot and Staples in a campaign to protect British Columbia's old-growth forests has now turned its attention to Alberta's northern oil industry.
"There is no question the marketplace is starting to wake up to how dirty oil from the tar sands is," Tzeporah Berman, program director for an environmental group called ForestEthics, said yesterday in an interview.
Ms. Berman said she anticipates "some major announcements" from Fortune 500 companies within a couple of months. She also expects Hollywood celebrities will tour northern Alberta this year to draw attention to the environmental impact of the multibillion-dollar industrial developments.
Today, Ms. Berman will be on the street, part of a demonstration outside the meeting of provincial and territorial premiers.
The environmental groups - ForestEthics, Greenpeace, Environmental Defence and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee - are opposed to any increase in activity in extracting oil from the sandy forests of northern Alberta. They say the federal government should impose caps on emissions from oil-sands development or shut down the northern Alberta industry.
"The point [of the demonstration] is to raise awareness of the impact of the tar sands, not only in Alberta but for all of Canada, and to ensure that Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach knows wherever he goes, we will be watching him. We will be doing everything we can to raise awareness, both at home and in the marketplace, about the current plans and about plans to expand development in the tar sands," she said.
"What is really horrifying to me is to know that, despite all the good efforts of people across the country and new laws and policies at the provincial level such as what [B.C. Premier Gordon] Campbell is doing, our emissions will continue to rise because of development of the tar sand."
Oil production in northern Alberta is expected to quadruple to more than four million barrels a day by 2020, if all proposed projects proceed. About $90-billion is being invested in what has been described as the biggest industrial project on Earth.
Estimates by the Energy and Utilities Board indicated that 175 billion barrels of oil could be recovered with existing technology, enough to feed current U.S. consumption for more than 50 years. However, the process produces two to three times the carbon emissions of a conventional oil well and creates toxic waste water.
Ms. Berman said the response from the corporate executives is markedly different than the response she received when campaigning against logging of old-growth forests.
"When we started doing the forest marketing campaign and we started approaching major customers, often I would meet with them and they would consider environmental issues to be secondary, not their core business. But now when we meet with major corporations, they're listening and they're concerned. They know in order to do business they have to be seen as leaders on climate change," she said.
ForestEthics is contacting Fortune 500 companies to discuss their involvement with Alberta. "The forest campaign of ForestEthics has a very strong record of successful market intervention on critical environment issues in Canada, and in the coming months, the tar sands will be our major focus," she said.
Ms. Berman, who had a minor role in The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio's film about global warming, is also speaking to Canadian celebrities in Hollywood and other stars about touring the oil-sands developments in northern Alberta. "I find huge willingness on the part of many celebrities to work on this issue," she said.
"The dramatic expansion of the tar sands and its huge global-warming impact wipes out all of our good efforts across Canada," she said, adding that the environmental groups at the demonstration will call for an immediate moratorium of expansion in oil sands and for "hard caps" and emission reductions.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080128.wbcprotest28...
