With Stephen Harper earning Canada the Fossil of the Year award in Copenhagen, touting the oilsands as a clean energy source would be a hard sell just about anywhere. Anywhere but Alberta, that is. In an economy little more diversified than its politics for the past four decades, Gordon Kelly’s new book The Oil Sands: Canada’s Path to Clean Energy? argues that Alberta is in a unique position to be a world energy leader not only in terms of fossil fuels, but in alternative energy as well. However, it seems that Kelly’s broad definition of “alternative” energy happens to include nuclear, methane hydrates and coal bed methane, in addition to wind, solar and other renewable sources of energy.

In a province where oil production still reigns (for now) as a major driver of the gross domestic product (GDP), his message is likely to be well-received by many, but certainly not all. Granted, Kelly does acknowledge that current oilsands development has a long way to go before it can even begin to be considered “clean.” But he’s not afraid to partake in a little greenwashing of the oilsands’ reputation, by stating general platitudes such as “the industry is constantly evolving and has come a long way in incorporating new innovations to make recovery more efficient all the time.” So what does this mean exactly?

Kelly feels that the ecological impact of the oilsands — including its production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) — has been grossly exaggerated by environmentalists and their left-wing ideologies. This is a dissenting view of Canada’s current environmental pariah status in the international community, but hardly a disinterested one. Kelly’s many decades of work in the oil and gas industry betrays his bias towards funding continued research in making oilsands development cleaner, instead of investing the billions into renewable energy, which he feels is more or less impractical, at least in Alberta. His bias is also a source of curious contradictions in this book. For instance, how can Alberta be a global leader in alternative energy, without investing in it more than fossil fuels?

One of the basic premises of The Oil Sands is that while the industry can and should be cleaned up a great deal, it is nowhere near the ecological disaster that critics claim it is. Kelly’s view seems to entirely reject environmentalists’ claims as based mainly on ideological grounds. Dismissal of ecological, public health and safety concerns is unlikely to open up much dialogue between concerned parties. More serious, it will simply contribute to Canada’s current image as a rogue state in climate change discussions that relies on obstructionist policies to stall international co-operation and negotiation.

The Oil Sands could be renamed The Oil Sands Apologist’s Handbook. That is what it certainly is. Kelly succeeds in providing relatively succinct and easily digestible summaries of many of the major oilsands projects in northern Alberta, the various technologies (and terminology) involved, and some suggestions on how to make current operations run cleaner — particularly from the standpoint of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Kelly purports carbon capture and sequestration will save the day for oilsands development and many of his solutions for making the bitumen extraction process cleaner are technology-heavy. Moreover, he has a great deal of faith in private enterprise in league with the provincial government to look out for public interests, and gives the impression that environmentalists just need to get out of the way. His assertion that Big Oil knows better than government how to be innovative — and therefore has all the answers — is suspicious at best.

His rather thin chapter on research and development of alternative energy, including renewable energy, gives some insights on fuel cell technology and wind farms. However, Kelly believes that solar is not a practical solution for Canada on the whole, citing limited year-round sunlight.

Overall, The Oil Sands does little more than try to greenwash perceptions of current oilsands operations, and fails to convince that leaving everything to Big Oil is the best course of action.