Dear Michael Marx, Executive Director, Corporate Ethics International:
I am an Albertan that lives in St. Albert. I have moved here with my family 10 years ago from Europe. I have grown up in an environment where conservation and protection of natural resources were second nature to us and everyone around us. I have lived through the stop-nuclear campaigns in the 70s in Germany, the acid rain issue in the 80s, lead in gasoline, asbestos in buildings, PCBs in fluorescent fixtures and so on. I do have a rain barrel in my yard and I drive a SMART car. I do understand environmental protection. I do not understand you and your organization.
Your campaign against the oilsands is completely ridiculous, lacks any balance in the information that is presented and is an insult to millions of Albertans and Canadians who live, work and play in this great country. You have the right to express your opinion in the open but you also must hear and face the opinions of people that you insult with your defamatory actions and representations. Who do you and your organization think you are to judge people and issues from the safety of your office on the sunny coast in Northern California?
About 456,000 jobs are directly or indirectly linked to the construction and operation of the oilsands. This number represents families and households that build their lives on this. You speak of becoming less "addicted to oil." Go ahead and try to run a hybrid car or to heat your house in sustained -40 C with non-fossil fuels. Or try to switch your country's Silicon Valley industry from carbon-based products for plastics and other materials to something that doesn't need oil. On a life cycle basis, oilsands have similar greenhouse gas emissions to other sources of oil. Oilsands are located below the surface of 140,200 square kilometres of land. That is 4.5 per cent of Canada’s total boreal forest. Mineable oilsands only exist under 0.1 per cent of Canada’s total boreal forest. Forty years of oilsands mining has disturbed about one hundredth of one per cent of the entire Canadian boreal forest — some 500 sq. km. That little tiny piece of land is what you keep recycling over and over in your imagery. Yes, it can be seen from space. And so can the Golden Gate Bridge, or your office building on Google Street View. And all surface disturbed land must be restored by law after the mining is completed. Eight per cent of that land has been totally restored and is grazed by a roaming buffalo herd to demonstrate that the soils are settled, stable and in equal condition as they were prior to mining. Today, oilsands mining projects use less than one per cent of the water that flows in the Athabasca River. That figure is projected to grow to two per cent of the river’s flow if all the oilsands mining projects that are currently planned ever go ahead. Two per cent. About 98 per cent of the river will continue to flow down nature’s drain for millennia to come. More than 80 per cent of water drawn by industry from the Athabasca River is recycled. Why don't you concern yourself with the water waste, the diversion, channelling, damming and the massive losses through irrigation evaporation in California? Tailings you say are seeping into the river. In fact, raw bitumen runs into the river on hot summer days and has for thousands of years, a fact welcomed by indigenous people hundreds of years ago by using the fluid tar to waterproof their canoes. You know all of this, I assume, and choose not to mention this in your campaigning.
You should be ashamed to spend $50,000 on billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis to spread your spin and misinformation. If you are truly concerned for the wellbeing of others, put your funding towards people who have nothing and are in need of food, shelter or basic healthcare. But keep your mouth shut on issues you don't seem to understand or choose to withhold facts and accurate information on.
Robert Fernandez, St. Albert
