
“If someone ever in their life tells you that your oil is immoral, you’re a climate criminal… stop them right there and say: ‘Oh no, I’m not an oil man. No sir, no ma’am, I’m not. I’m an ethical oil man,’” said Ezra Levant, author of Ethical Oil. Massaging the bruised egos of Peace River, Alberta’s oil men and women, Levant gave the keynote speech at this year’s Peace Oil Sands Conference and Trade Show. “You need to show the self-confidence and the respect of knowing that everything we do is at the highest ethical levels in the world,” he told the local bitumen industry.
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When asked what a bad neighbour might be, Baytex’s spokespeople couldn’t fathom an answer. “I don’t think we have ever thought about it that way… I don’t think it’s in our view to compare us with a bad neighbour. Who would that be?” one spokesperson asked. “Then we’re getting into finger pointing and we don’t want to do that,” another added.Dry days filled with Orwellian doublespeak culminated in a presentation from Ezra Levant, a broadcaster known for airing racist rants and fabricating news, a convicted libellant, and founder of the Ethical Oil Institute which has ties to the Prime Minister’s Office. Levant downplayed the environmental impacts of the oil sands and recast them as a bastion of human, worker, and aboriginal rights. He retraced the genesis of his “ethical oil” worldview, arguing that Canada’s oil industry is ethical because it is produced in a vacuum of pitiful alternatives.
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When asked by our reporter if he was promoting a worldview based on hostility, fear, supremacy, and division, Levant clarified: “To call Saudi Arabia, Iran, Boko Haram, Nigeria bastards is an insult. You’re right. And I feel insulting towards them. I despise them. They are odious… If I was speaking honestly I would be swearing about those people right now—a blue streak. So I’m not even expressing the real depth of my hatred for them. And it’s hate.”“Canada is so peaceful we actually won a Nobel Peace prize for inventing peacekeeping,” Levant said, standing before a photo of Canada’s troops. “Saudi Arabia? Well, they invented 9/11… Iran is building nuclear weapons as fast as they can and the missiles to deliver them,” Levant said, perhaps unaware that Canada has exported military vehicles to Saudi Arabia and radioactive tritium, a hydrogen bomb component, to Iran. Ethical oil, ethical guns, ethical bombs, of course.“He used the example that our oil sands are ethical because we don’t kidnap young schoolgirls and hold them for ransom. And that’s very true, but we do a lot of things that aren’t proper either,” said Three Creeks resident Diane Plowman. “I think he was intentionally selective… We have families who have had to leave their homes because of the air quality.”
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Plowman places blame with the Alberta Energy Regulator, an industry funded corporation that oversees the oil sands. “It’s jet speed ahead, in terms of approvals, without really considering how we’re going to manage this,” she said.
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“When I was a school kid way back in the 20th century, we first learned about CO2 when we studied photosynthesis. Back then, CO2 was called plant food. But now it’s called pollution,” Levant said. “And I apologize—I’m emitting some CO2 right now. And earlier today, I apologize, I emitted some methane,” he said, prompting audience laughter.“Tailings ponds? Yeah, we’ve got tailings ponds. They’ll be cleaned up,” he assured the crowd, referring to the giant poisonous lakes in Fort McMurray’s oil sands. Someone in the audience laughed.Levant concluded to a sustained applause. “Thanks for coming to Peace River,” a man in the audience shouted proudly.He abandoned the stage, announcing it was time for him to catch a flight out of town. And while all moral and ethical responsibility was deflected onto boogeymen in faraway places, a very real industrial violence remains in the Peace River region.“If we continue on with the use of energy in the way that we’re doing now, we need to make sure that we’re extracting it in an environmentally safe manner: Safe for the people that live there; safe for the workers that work in that industry; and safe for the ecosystems that will hopefully long survive all of us,” Diane Plowman said. “We hear a lot about 35-year plans for oil sands infrastructure and bitumen extraction facilities—that’s half a lifetime. We need to think way beyond us and think about the generations that are coming after us. The generations before us took good care of our land and here we are taking every ounce of goodness out of the earth and on top of the Earth and leaving a mess for generations to come.”“Maybe we’re sucking it dry and one day this world will just collapse. Maybe, but who knows?” asked Kirby Dachuk, an oil industry veteran. “In the meantime, I still gotta keep doing what I’m doing though to survive. And if I don’t, I lose my home. My kids don’t get to go get a bike once in a while… They don’t get shoes. They walk around like cavemen.”“It’s tough, especially here, when you start fighting it. Then nobody’s working and everybody’s got a hate-on,” Dachuk said.“It’s interesting what greed and the dollar sign does for a community,” Plowman echoed,noting that “this whole thing has fractured our community beyond measure—families fighting with families… It’s a very small community and you see everybody everywhere. Lots of people who are directly employed know they can’t stand up and say anything without consequences.”“It’s so hard to get people to go beyond their wallet, their own wallet, and say ‘is this the right thing?’ Not just ‘how much money can I make from this?’” Plowman concluded. Regardless, she stressed: “Unless we’re dying, we’re here and we’re going to push for some cleaner air.”@m_tol