The Gitga’at Nation of Hartley Bay, B.C. has reported an oil spill, between two and five miles long and 200 feet wide inside the Grenville Channel, not far from the proposed tanker route for the Enbridge Gateway pipeline.

According to a media release, the spill, believed to be from a sunken munitions ship, was spotted by a commercial pilot and reported to the Gitga’at Nation and the Canadian Coast Guard on Tuesday evening.

“If this spill is as big as the pilots are reporting, then we’re looking at serious environmental impacts, including threats to our traditional shellfish harvesting areas,” says Arnold Clifton, Chief Councillor of the Gitga’at Nation. “We need an immediate and full clean-up response from the federal government ASAP.”

Heavy oil is thought to be leaking from the USAT Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, a U.S. army transport ship that sank in 1946 with 700 tons of bunker fuel on board. According to the Gitga’at, the Canadian government first promised to remove the oil and munitions from the ship in 2006, but has not followed through.

“This incident definitely raises questions about the federal government’s ability to guard against oil spills and to honour its clean-up obligations,” says Clifton. “As a result, our nation has serious concerns about any proposal to have tankers travel through our coastal waters, including the Enbridge proposal.”

The Conservative government recently introduced legislation that would give the federal cabinet final decision-making power over projects like the Northern Gateway Pipeline, including the authority to overturn decisions by the National Energy Board.

- Zeff Davies

I could run this old video of Peter Kent introducing a documentary where he calls global warming “the greatest threat to life on the planet” and warns that the devastating effects of climate change “will be seen in our children’s lifetime.

Or I could run this picture of him returning from the Durban conference yesterday, like some shabby Neville Chamberlain declaring “There will be peace grease in our time…”

After declaring that Kyoto is dead.

Claiming that we would have to pull every car off the road, or pay $14 billion to stay in the treaty. Which is totally absurd. But even if it was true would be less than we are going to pay for our shiny new prisons.

Or I could tell you how Stephen Harper refused to answer a question in the House of Commons today about whether he is a climate change denier.

Even though his record speaks for itself.

Or I could just run this video from these Taiwanese animators . . . .

Because the shame is going viral.

The shame of the Cons.

And the shame of us all . . .

As he continues his visit to the oil sands and neighbouring communities today, James Cameron will have no clue what they represent to many Albertans.

He will learn that they are a threat to the health and livelihood of the people who live downstream from them, in Fort Chip. He will learn that they are ugly as hell. And from Premier Ed Stelmach, when he meets him on Wednesday, he will learn that “Blahdee blahdee strict environmental standards blahdee blahdee employment for aboriginals bloodee bloodee loved that Titanic.”

What no one will mention is that, for a certain generation of Albertans, the oil sands represented a place at the international table for a small, isolated province, just as the discovery of oil in Alberta in 1947 represented an escape from penury. Before the Leduc find, Alberta was a society susceptible to the funny money schemes of Bible Bill Aberhart and the radio sermons of Ernest Manning; afterwards, it was set on a fast course to modernization. It took awhile, but Peter Lougheed became inevitable.

But it remained a runty, spurned creature in the eyes of the East, and an unknown one outside Canada. But as it become clear that under all that northern forest lay reserves that would make an increasingly oil-starved world take notice, Alberta began to realize it could be a playah. Even if no one else had yet.

And so it has become. Calgary is the new financial epicenter of Canada; American politicians tour the oil sands and make cooing sounds, because they know they need the proceeds to fuel their imperialistic adventures. None of which is to say that the environmental consequences of all those monster machines and tailing ponds should be overlooked just because Alberta wants to feel like a Big Boy. But some historical context might be useful to Mr. Cameron as he makes his way along the Athabasca River — if only to understand why not everyone he meets will shuffle their feet and look ashamed.

***

Cameron arrives in Alberta:

Cree elder Celine Harpe on the effects of the oil sands:

Forget Nancy Pelosi. The news that James Cameron is coming to visit the oilsands, combined with the premiere of Fubar 2 at the Toronto Film Festival last night, creates a perfect PR storm for Alberta.

Cameron (who is, of course, the successfully grandiose director of Titanic and Avatar), advised Premier Ed Stelmach in a letter received yesterday that he’ll be in the province for a three-day fact-finding trip starting September 27th. When Avatar was released last year, its story of rapacious developers vs. indigenous locals raised inevitable comparisons with Premier Ed’s big northern sandbox. Cameron called the oilsands a “black eye” on Canada’s image, and native leaders invited him to visit the area. A step behind as usual, Stelmach followed-up with his own invitation, but now that he’s been taken up on it, his spokesman says “It’s kind of short notice” and that “if it’s possible to do it, the premier would be certainly glad to meet with him for a few minutes.”

That was precisely the wrong response. The correct response would be “Yessir, Mr. Cameron. Any dietary requests for the big state dinner we’d like to throw for you?” It seems to me unlikely that Cameron is visiting out of pure intellectual interest. May I remind the Premier that the director also makes documentaries, and that in between Titanic and Avatar he produced a number of widely seen films about the ocean, precisely because all that time in the water had piqued his interest? If he now decides to turn his attention topside, to the oilsands — if, in fact, his visit is more in the nature of a location scouting trip — it won’t matter how many dollars Alberta throws into public relations campaigns defending its tar baby. It is perfectly screwed. It’s unlikely that cowtowing to Cameron will make much difference — but pissing him off almost certainly will.

As for Fubar II: it is, as aficionados of art house film will already know, the sequel to the 2002 mockumentary about a pair of beer-fisting, mullet-growing Calgary headbangers who make Bob and Doug Mckenzie look like contenders for a genius grant. (The title is an acronym for “fucked up beyond all repair”.) By a neat coincidence, the new movie has them travelling up to Fort McMurray to work on, yes, the oil sands.

 
Hm, let’s see. James Cameron sets his eyepiece on Alberta’s 4700 sq. km. “beauty” mark while a movie about its not-best and not-brightest, featuring shots of the oilsands that, according to its director, look “kind of like Blade Runner“, opens before the international press in Toronto. As they used to say in that old Milton Berle routine: Makeup!

Remember that two year Environment Committee study on the tarsands that was ultimately shredded because the four parties at the table couldn’t agree on the wording of the witnesses’s testimony? The Lib members of that committee have now released their own report on the testimony and, as Andrew Nikiforuk reports at The Tyee, it is “scathing.”

~ Athabasca River is being polluted
~12 barrels of freshwater required to produce one barrel of crude
~world’s largest man-made dams contain 170 square kilometres of toxic mining waste and they’re leaking
~steam plants could affect aquifers over an area the size of Florida, using 3½ to 6 barrels of groundwater to extract one barrel of bitumen

Most alarming is the report’s contention that science-based policy has been replaced by “bureaucratic compromise,” with the federal government entirely abrogating its responsibility to monitor and protect our water supplies. The Alberta government just flat-out refused to appear before the committee at all.

You’re shocked I’m sure.

Wait. Did I say our water supplies?

A year ago Alberta Energy spokesman Tim Markle said: “The Chinese takeover is good news for Alberta.”

He was referring to tarsands in northern Alberta being developed by the Chinese state investment fund in partnership with Calgary-based Penn West Energy Trust. China National Petroleum Company obtained 11 oilsands leases and the Chinese Offshore Oil Corporation invested $150 million in Calgary-based Meg Energy. Sinopec has bought into Syncrude. PetroChina, also state-owned, holds a 60% majority stake in two oilsands projects, and has also signed a memorandum with Enbridge to take up to half the space on its proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline from Alberta to the port of Kitimat in BC.

In comments under Nikiforuk’s Tyee article, commenter Ed Deak weighs in:

The opposition can jump up and down, they won’t get anywhere, because they’re attacking the effects and not the causes.

Attacking other political parties, this is also true for BC, and anywhere on Earth, is a waste of time, because politicians are nothing more than pimp/executioners of and for the criminal neoclassical market economic theory, being taught in our universities as a “science”, that’s destroying the Earth and humanity.

Unless our politicians will one day get enough gumption together to attack the causes they’re part of the problem, regardless of the hot air they’re blowing.

The tar sands crime wave is part of the “growth” and the “GDP”, without any deductions for damages and no politician would dare to question it, as it would bring panic to the almighty stockmarkets.

Then, when the Chinese bring back the money we’re paying them for killing our manufacturing infrastructure, praised by economists and the WTO, to buy the country up from under our feet with our own money, it is called “wealth creating foreign investment” that helps to pay for the billions spent on “defence”.

Afterthought : An Alberta Energy spokesdude says: “The Chinese takeover is good news for Alberta” and yet back in March we were all apparently shocked shocked shocked when CSIS head Richard Fadden casually mentioned China in his remarks about “foreign interference” on “possibly unwitting” Canadian public servants and politicians here in the West.

We pretty much behaved as if we were teenagers horrified to discover that our parents have sex. I mean obviously we know they must have but we don’t much like to hear about it. And given the public pillorying Fadden received for it, I don’t imagine it will be brought up again.

Four “Rethink Alberta” billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis proclaim the “Alberta Tar Sands Oil Disaster” is worse than the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster. There’s also a vid.

 
Alberta Preme Ed Stelmach is pledging $268,000 to mount a public relations offensive against the ads and has settled on a most unusual strategy:

“Of 350 million Americans, 330 million of them probably don’t even know where Alberta is,” the premier said. “Let’s not ramp this up too much because that’s the kind of exposure the group wants.”

Of course not all of that $268,000 in public tax money is going to be spent on strategically ignoring the ads. At the alberta.ca website, Stelmach promises to counter the ads by telling “the real Alberta story”:

“disturbed land area actually smaller than London!”

He then links to nine already previously available vids on the Gov of Alberta Oil Sands page. Some quotes from those vids:

“50% of our oil in Canada is produced from oil sands and that’s going to grow in the future. We think in about 10 years it will be about 75% of Canada’s oil production and a large part of our exports will be oil sands derived crude.”

“Virtually no more water will be used out of the Athabasca River”

“We do extensive water monitoring quality of the Athabasca River; we take thousands and thousands of water samples. We’ve been monitoring since the 1960′s and so far we’ve not been able to find any impact from the tailings ponds itself.”

“Over the last 10 or 15 years the air quality has been rated good 98% of the time.”

“There is the perception out there that it’s the largest industrial footprint on the planet. Actually it’s one-tenth of 1% of global GHG emissions.”

And so on and so on.

Stelmach’s vids include footage of scientists gathering snow samples along a river and that reminded me of the testimony given to the Environment Committee on March 30 by Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta. He said he had conducted the first independent research done since 1983 on airborne tar sands contaminants found in the snow pack along the Athabasca River. Testing at 31 locations he found:

“Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well.”

Further, he said that although Environment Canada tests at only one location on the Athabasca, it has come up with the same numbers, as have the oil companies in their own research. Schindler contends the oil companies’ reports on contaminants are duly submitted to Environment Canada, who used to do that research themselves before handing that responsibility over to Alberta and the oil companies, but he believes EC is being muzzled and prevented from making the findings public. The oil companies, whose first allegiance is to their stockholders, are of course not obliged to do so on their own.

And then the Environment Committee scuttled its own tar sands report.

Andrew Nikiforuk has an excellent article at The Tyee on what else the Environment Committee heard that it subsequently decided not to tell us about:

What Those Who Killed the Tar Sands Report Don’t Want You to Know

and then takes on the many claims made by the scientists and spokesies in Stelmach’s vids:

Alberta Hides Dirty Truth as US Demands Tar Sands Facts

One thing’s for sure in the Tar Sands vs. Gulf Oil Spill Disasters comparison: our government, Environment Canada, and the Environment Committee are doing no better job at regulating the tar sands than the US Minerals Management Services did in overseeing the oil rigs in the Gulf.

Imagine Avatar with a few plot changes.  Keep the introduction, the meeting with newly-blue Jake and nimble Neytiri, and the seeds of Eywa floating around Jake in ethereal, foreshadowing bliss.  Keep Jake’s hunting mission and the introduction of the Turuk. However, change the plot from the point when the Colonel tells Jake to get aboard a shuttle to regain his legs.

In the new, improved version, Jake refuses to leave, and states that the Na’vi are living beings and the Unobtanium is unobtainable by humans after all. The Colonel huffs and puffs, but somehow, amazingly, the scientists and the Resources Development Administration (RDA) sit together for months to reach a win-win agreement for Pandora, its inhabitants, and the humans. Astonishingly, Pandora is thus saved in a battle of words rather than a battle of weaponry.

Granted, it’s unlikely that movie-goers would appreciate a plot riddled with lengthy impassioned discussions between the opposing camps, nor would movie crowds embrace a story completely devoid of epic war scenes. But that might be because one is fantasy, while the other, it turns out, is plain old reality.

Quietly, behind the scenes, Canadian environmentalists and the Canadian lumber industry have had 2 1/2 years of such meetings. Laying aside their differences and focusing instead on the agreed-upon importance of natural resources, nine environmental organizations, including Greenpeace and 21 companies under the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), have committed to working together.  The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which Greenpeace’s Richard Brooks calls “the largest of its kind anywhere on the planet,” has been created to protect 72 million hectares of forest and to develop “more sustainable harvesting practices.” The agreement also outlines the timeframe in which to stop both logging and road creation on 29 million hectares of the forest while plans are developed to protect the woodland caribou that reside within the forest area.

The agreement isn’t perfect.  The National Post‘s Peter Foster argues that it’s simply a way for the lumber industry to get environmentalists off its back, and for environmentalists to look like they’ve brought the lumber industry into line. Meanwhile, long-time campaigner for the caribou, Helene Walsh, points out that a lot of companies logging in critical areas are not even part of the FPAC. Nonetheless, the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement is a document of cooperation between disparate interest groups with a common passion, and one that has infinite potential.

So, might this provide a model to the opposing sides in the great UVic bunny fight?

Allow me to explain. Drive through the University of Victoria’s park-like campus, and soon enough a rabbit will hop by. And another one, and another. True to Leporidae lore, the rabbits are multiplying, well, like rabbits.   They are almost entirely abandoned pet rabbits, as well as their offspring, and UVic officials have their lands full.

Initially, UVic agreed to sterilize the animals and send them off to sanctuaries, a plan that was abandoned when not enough licenced sanctuaries materialized. The province would not allow the critters to be adopted,  and so the cull began. Thus far, 94 rabbits have been trapped and given lethal injections, with another 1400 to go. Animal liberationists have taken up the cause and are asking you to call and email so no more bunnies will die. The battle has become pitched, with activists allegedly overturning traps and both sides conducting public relations campaigns (see here and here).

There seems little prospect for agreement, perhaps because cute animals are involved. However, both the rabbit sympathizers and the university need to learn a lesson from the parties to the Boreal Forest Agreement.  Sitting down and reaching a mutually acceptable solution is possible, given enough time and goodwill. Granted, the rabbits will continue to multiply in the interim, but the two sides, however passionate, can reach a resolution, despite many conflicting viewpoints. And unlikely allies may emerge as a result.

While it may be farfetched to imagine a Hollywood blockbuster based on shared interests, compromise, and  a contract, it worked for the forest companies and environmentalists. Surely if it worked for them, it can work to save the rabbits, not to mention peace and order on the UVic campus.

While waiting for the moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf to be lifted, the Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Services, these guys, have approved five new offshore drilling projects since June 2.

On more than one occasion watching American news coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’ve heard it referred to as the greatest disaster of its kind in US history. One might think it is the worst in world history. One would be wrong.

Reuters has published a piece by Robert Campbell providing some very interesting background and context. The worst disaster of this kind was the explosion of the Mexican Ixtoc offshore well 31 years ago this month, back in 1979. According to the article, Ixtoc poured three times more crude into the Gulf than has gushed out so far in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What happened with Deepwater was not only conceivable, it had precedent. Why, then, were its lessons not learned?

I’ll let you read the fine article for the details, but it boils down to hubris and wishful thinking. Something like that wouldn’t happen if an American (or in this case, a British based mulinational) company was running the show. And if you discounted Ixtoc as the result of inferior third world effort, then you could say that nothing like that had happened before, and therefore it was extremely unlikely anything like that would happen in the future, thus making adequate safety measures “prohibitively expensive” relative to likelihood.

The article is chilling not only for the insight provided into the slack standards and head-in-the-sand perspective of everyone involved, both government and industry, but also for the questions it raises concerning current operations of deep water rigs put into service under exactly the same terms of this same period of slack oversight and cutting of corners.

Campbell observes,

Macondo, the scene of BP’s spill, is 30 times deeper than Ixtoc — 4,993 feet, or about a mile down in the dark, freezing depths of the Gulf. Special robots able to resist the crushing pressure of the deep that would destroy a modern navy submarine are the only way to get close to the leak.

then later notes that some of these deep water wells are drilling at 7,500 feet. It’s hard not to feel that what’s going on is a form of madness. It’s difficult to say where the most responsibility should lie — with blithely unprepared companies conducting dangerous operations whose failure could be regarded as a major crime against the planet, or governments, who should be safeguarding the environment, paving the way for these sorts of operations.

Obama rails at BP hoping he can make all that oil stick on them, but both the Clinton and Bush administrations are clearly implicated, and his administration can’t claim to be squeaky clean either, if only for the policies it has inherited. Hopefully his Deepwater Horizon oil spill commission is more than just a PR move.

The lessons of Ixtoc were dismissed and forgotten. Let’s hope the lessons of Deepwater are learned and acted upon.

~ o ~

In happier news, I would be remiss as a tech writer not to give a shout out to Hayabusa, the little Japanese space probe that wouldn’t quit no matter what. It made an impressive entrance, returning to Earth yesterday with a display of fireworks totally in keeping with the happy occasion.

All of the trials and tribulations it faced on its five year journey to a comet and back are outlined in this article of the Daily Yomiuru Online (still no word on the payload, hopefully it brought back a little comet matter to study). The team in charge of the project faced challenge after challenge with creative thinking and the true hacker spirit. Omedetō gozai masu!

Hands Across the Sand began in Florida in February to “protest the efforts by the Florida Legislature and the US Congress to lift the ban on oil drilling in the near and off shores of Florida.”

Well it’s a global movement now and here’s the Vancouver Canada page.

But don’t we already have a ban on tanker traffic and offshore drilling in BC?

Nope.

Natural Resources Canada – Review of the Federal Moratorium on Oil and Gas Activities Offshore British Columbia ERRATA :

The Terms of Reference for the “Report of the Public Review on the Government of Canada Moratorium on Oil and Gas Activities in the Queen Charlotte Region of British Columbia” state that “in 1972, the Government of Canada imposed a moratorium on crude oil tanker traffic through the Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait, and Queen Charlotte Sound due to concerns over the potential environmental impacts.” However; the moratorium on oil and gas activities offshore British Columbia does not apply to tanker traffic.

Prior to 1972, a number of permits for oil and gas exploration were issued for offshore British Columbia. Due to environmental concerns, rights under those permits were suspended as of 1972 by way of Orders in Council, thus forming a de facto moratorium.

Thank you, Pierre Trudeau, for suspending those offshore oil and gas exploration permits in 1972.

However in 1982 the Canadian government brought in the Canada Oil and Gas Act which allows the permits to be “renegotiated into exploration agreements” and “the time frame for renegotiation to be extended and the rights continued to be valid.”

In 1987, the Canada Petroleum Resources Act grandfathered the waiting exploration agreements.

“Thus, the moratorium continues to be maintained through government policy. No activity can occur until the former permits are converted to exploration licences. The decision not to negotiate with industry to convert those permits is a pure policy decision. There is no statutory impediment to carrying out those negotiations.”

Shorter Con: No actual laws against oil tankers or offshore drilling in BC.

The above “Errata,” by the way, were added to the Natural Resources Canada webpage just last year.

If it was my home uses Google Maps and the current situation of the Gulf oil spill to show what the extent of the disaster would look like overlaid on your neck of the woods. Click and it will find you..