JUNE 18, 2019
As we know, big lies can run
free across borders with few joining the dots.
For example, no media reports
that China’s growing dispute with Canada is based on Canada’s enforcement of
the Trump administration’s unilateral and illegal embargo against
oil-competitor Iran. A cynical reply is that this is predictable. Canada
attacks any designated US Enemy in junior partnership with global corporate
command.
But this time there is a new
twist. Canada is attacking itself without knowing it.
A US Big-Oil backed juggernaut
of Conservative provincial governments and the federal Opposition are well
advanced in a Canada campaign to reverse longstanding parliamentary decisions,
environmental laws, climate action initiatives, Supreme Court directions,
first-nations negotiations, and bring down the government of Canada. Yet no-one
in public or media circles has joined the dots.
Canada’s vast tar-sands
deposits are world famous as surpassing Saudi Arabia oil-field capacities in
total barrels of potential yield. Great Canada! Yet few notice that over
two-thirds of the entire tar-sands operations are owned by foreign entities
sending their profits out of Canada, and almost all its raw product is
controlled for refining and sale in the US.
What is especially kept out of
the daily news is the incendiary fact that the infamous, election-interfering
and oft-EPA-convicted Koch brothers have a dominant stake in the toxic crude of
the Alberta tar-sands seeking a massive BC-pipeline out to their US refineries.
Koch-owned industries have
already extracted countless billions of their near $100-billion fortune from
the tar-sands and deployed their well-known voter-manipulations to change the
balance of power in Canada as they have done in the US.
The objective is the same in
both cases – ever more tax-free, publicly subsidized and state-enforced control
by US Big Oil of Alberta’s massive oil resources with no government regulations
or interferences in the way.
A Short History of the
Background Facts
Prior to the wide-mouth
pipelines of toxic Alberta crude planned through BC mountains, lands and waters
to US processors, oil has to be extracted from the tar-sands first. This
demands a continuous gargantuan depleting and polluting of the great
Athabaska Lake, River and watershed to steam-boil the tar out of the vast
open-pit mines. The immense open-pit mines are not formed or pumped out of
desert as in the Middle East. They are torn in state-size chunks out of the
earth’s mantle by monstrous wrecking machines ripping out the boreal forest
lands by the roots to destroy the carbons sinks and water-hold stabilization
they provide in the Northern region as well as pump out ever more
climate-changing gases.
To boil the tar out of the
endless open-pit mines already demands the equivalent of twice the amount of
water the entire City of Calgary uses and recycles in a year. But water
consumed by the tar-sand boiling is permanently polluted and wasted, and its
fresh- water take from the great Athabaska watershed will only increase as the
tar-sands ‘development’ is maximized, accessible oil fields are exhausted and
prices rise. So too the annihilation of the boreal forests acting as a sink for
carbon and holding the watershed together will be permanently lost.
Yet this is only the beginning
of what ends up being the biggest single point-source of carbon pollution and
climate destabilization in the world. It pollutes 2.5 times more carbon gases
than natural oil. Extraction mechanisms cost almost 8-times more fossil fuels
than natural oil, and use overall almost as much energy as is produced!
For many years now, the Kochs
have made most of their vast fortune from processing billions of
barrels of tar-sand crude in the US, not Canada. This is why their octopi
funding fronts have relentlessly pushed for ever more pipelines through others’
lands (including Dakota’s indigenous Standing Rock) to control this bigger and
safer business than tar-sand extraction itself.
This is also why the Kochs
have led the huge financing of climate change denial against the known science,
in which tar-sand extractions and burning produce far more toxic carbon gases
than high-grade oil. Most of all, the Kochs have acted out of sight to ensure
control over elected governments that might regulate and control their
above-the-law activities. They spent more than the Republican Party itself on
the 2012 US elections.
They invented and funded the
Congress-upending Tea-Party, and finance endless attack ads against all
resisters to their will to dominate the US Congress and Senate (and behind the
scenes the Trump presidency).
Canada’s Love-in With US Big
Oil as ‘Alberta’ and ‘National Unity’
In Canada, the governing
corporate media and parties have had such a media-transmitted love-in with Big
Oil that even Alberta’s NDPPremier Rachel Notley militantly demanded over
years that the US-dominated tar-sands mega project receive ever more rights and
public subsidies to run its toxic tar-sand crude over neighboring BC mountains
and the inland whale-inhabited ocean channels as a moral obligation to
Alberta.
The spell of ‘national unity’
to sell Alberta’s US-controlled oil sands is not broken even as the forest
fires and floods in BC and Ontario rage beyond all records from the
fossil-carbon-destabilized climate. Now six new pro-developer premiers of
Canada and the leader of the federal opposition are shouting that any
more delays to the Big-Oil pipelines are “breaking up the country”.
US Big Oil led by the Kochs’
political war chest and already covertly dominating the US Senate and
Presidency, has long gotten its way by such polarizing propaganda. Yet in
Canada the line is swallowed whole and spread by the national media as the
“unity crisis” facing the country.
Big Oil’s crucial step in
putting the tar-sands into the driver’s seat of Canada politics has gone
beneath the radar. First of all it assumes a premise which no-one questions
that all the toxic raw product must be piped through Canada unprocessed “to
market” (i.e., US refineries), and that Canada must duly enforce this off-shore
refinement “as a national priority”. Once this full false premise is
established as a given, it follows that the toxic Alberta crude must be piped
raw across the BC mountain forests and aquifers, and then into its
paradisal inland ocean channels for oil-tanker transport – now demanding a
rising and rarely mentioned seven-times more oil-tanker traffic with
toxic product that cannot be cleaned up.
Any ‘delays’ to this (never
named) US-Big-Oil agenda with Canada juniors are then attacked as against
‘national unity’. They are called ‘illogical’ and ‘punishing Alberta’- even
when the time is legally required for amending legislation that has been ordered
by the Supreme Court of Canada and for negotiating with the first nations whose
lands and waters will be overrun by the dirty-oil project in a period of
‘national reconciliation’.
In fact, the governing
premises here are lawless and driven by what the Kochs specialize in – a
fanatic anti-government agenda claiming to be for tax-payers and citizens. The
rule of law is implicitly dismissed. Carbon pricing legislated by elected
government – which sane oil corporations now accept as economically required –
is ferociously attacked.
Even Parliament’s long-passed
Bill C-48 protecting the Northern BC Coast from heavy oil-tanker traffic
(tankers carrying over 10,500 metric tons of tar-sand crude) – a bill supported
and voted for by over two-thirds of MP’s – is attacked in the Senate of Canada
backed by Big Oil and Alberta.
Thus the single most important
legal protection of Canada’s greatest environmental treasure, one that has been
the negotiated decision of Parliament and a condition for the oil-pipe through
BC, is marked for elimination. The federal Conservative Party goes along, and
its ever-smiling leader Andrew Scheer has promised if elected in the
approaching federal election to abolish Bill C-48.
The worst part of the whole
multiplying Big-Oil tar-sands mega-project may be the mammoth toxin-filled
tankers ploughing through and despoiling the world’s most awe-inspiring
green inland coasts in BC. It is like the Vietnam coast in this sublime natural
beauty, but even more than Vietnam, it is an ecological paradise carrying
a world of whales, eagles, biodiverse life and breathtaking
music of nature with thriving indigenous peoples protecting
the environment since ancient times in a breathtaking music of life
from rising green peaks to the fish depths of the ocean.
That the current Big Oil
forces, Alberta Conservatives, the federal Conservative Party, many in the
Senate of Canada, and various corporate media and fronts are all seeking to
reverse the already-legislated Bill C-48 protection of even the Northern BC
coasts from this grossest abuse of majestic life and beauty at every level and
scale of Creation demonstrates how cancerous the Big Oil tar-sands mega-project
has become.
Yet in the unseen, historic
shell-game going on behind the scenes, there is a convenient perpetual
side-show of attacks on PM Trudeau whose unforgiveable sin is not to push the
oil-pipes and tankers through BC fast enough.
Led by Jason Kenney as Premier
and the so-far invisible Koch brothers, the Conservative Party across provinces
and federally has formed into an implicit war against any public control over
and regulation of Big Oil. Any legal impediment to the massively toxic
extraction and export through Canada’s most pristine natural environments to US
control, refineries and far more profitable foreign sale is reverse portrayed
as an attack on Alberta and a strike at Canada’s unity as a country.
The assumed absolute necessity
of this pipeline and tanker extension of the multiplying tar-sands project is, in
fact, the demand of US-led Big Oil to loot and pollute Canada’s natural
resources for value added in the US (including for oil sale back to Canada at
multiplied prices). Yet every politician is supine before the transnational Big
Oil powers involved. Even Liberal leader Stephan Dionne who won the Liberal
leadership in 2006 on an environmental platform dared not question
the Koch-led tar-sands mega-project. “There is too much money in it’, he
responded to environmentalist concerns.
With all these unseen premises
against Canada’s common life interests now cast as inalterable necessity, the
trap is well set. As a federal election must occur before October 21, all the
wheels are being oiled for Conservative toppling of the Liberal government and
override of any resistance to the biggest force-play of US-led Big Oil in
Canada’s history.
The Unspeakable
Contradiction: Jobs, Environment, and Prosperity Lost by Raw-Crude
Pipeline and US Refinement
No-one yet recognizes the
Koch-led US Big Oil plan to extract Saudi-like treasure from Canada’s boreal
forests and to transport its toxic crude through and out of Canada with
ever-rising environmental damages at all levels is actually throwing away all
the Alberta “jobs”, “investment”, “tax revenues” and “prosperity” which it
promises to deliver. All of these economic benefits would actually materialize
and multiply many times if the tar-sands were processed and refined for
Canadian, US and global sale inside Alberta.
Most ironic of all, the
biggest immediate danger of Alberta tar-sand crude is that is irreversibly
toxic because it is not processed first before transportation over
land, aquifers, shorelands, and inland ocean channels. This is what the BC
resistance on the ground is most motivated by – the irreversibly disastrous
consequences when this unprocessed toxic crude spills anywhere along the rocky,
ocean-tempest way. The spills are an historically demonstrated certitude, but
like climate destabilization itself are denied by the Big-Oil beneficiaries in
future tens of billions in private profit.
As always in the ruling
narrative, there is ‘no alternative’. ‘It must be done now to create jobs
and get product to market’. Astonishingly, no-one in government or the
mass media observes the fact that many more well-paying permanent
jobs, far more oil revenues, and infinitely more safety from tar-oil
spills and dirty-oil carbon effluents are assured by processing the raw
bitumen in Alberta itself.
On closer examination not yet
considered, the political stampede for the trans-mountain pipeline of toxic
Alberta crude through the BC mountains and coastal waterways is based on a
very big lie. If Alberta and Canada’s government, globally
competitive Canada oil firms and working people really want
to “create jobs”, “get product to market’, “achieve
environmental security”, “provide needed investment and revenues for the
Canadian people”, and “reduce climate-destabilizing gases” the option is
economically self-evident.
Process the tar-sand product
in Canada and Alberta where the uncleanable toxins can be stripped out first by
rigorous regulation and safely precautions before flooded through
huge breakable pipes across mountains, aquifers, forests, and ocean coasts and
the world-renowned lands and waters of a 5000-year-old ecological wonder larger
and more unspoiled than any in the world.
Yet just as climate science
does not matter to rogue Big Oil, so too the prevention of toxic Alberta crude
running through Canada by processing it in Canada first is erased from
discussion. No public voice even mentions the environmental risks of pipelining
the toxic crude through the mountains and coats of BC when it could be cleaned
up in Alberta first. None yet flags all the lost Canadian fortune and economic
development going down the drain by raw-crude pipelines straight to the
control, refineries and global sale of foreign Big-Oil multi-billionnaires like
the Koch brothers. As for the foreign interference in Canada’s elections
manipulating every step, no-one reports this either.
For what? The driver is not “jobs
and prosperity”, “creating and sharing wealth”, and “making the indigenous
people independent” (what a Canada Senator incredibly just wrote to me). The
truth is the opposite on every count. Tens of thousands of high-paying jobs,
escalated tax revenues, immense new domestic profits and investment
opportunities are now all wasted for Canada by letting four times more of the
value-added go South to US Big Oil management, refineries and high-grade global
sales.
The real driver here is dispossession of
Canada’s workers, first peoples, taxpayers and the common wealth by ever more
multi-billion private profits extracted from its public lands at the lowest
oil-royalties in the world to further enrich the already obscenely rich who are
mostly not tax payers and are, in effect, lead destroyers of the life support
capacities of the planet.
More articles by: JOHN MCMURTRY
John McMurtry is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada whose work is translated from Latin America to
Japan. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems
published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his
most recent book isThe
Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.
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