Activists with the Sierra Youth Coalition cycled nearly 1,000 kilometres to bring continued attention to the environmental impacts of the tar sands
It’s Friday afternoon on Fourth Ave. S.W. Office workers pass by on the sidewalk, only partially aware of a small group of activists standing with their bicycles outside the BP building.
These cyclists have travelled a long way — nearly 1,000 kilometres — with an environmental message. They’ve cycled from the oilsands north of Fort McMurray to the corporate headquarters of Calgary energy companies to ask for a moratorium on oilsands development and call for better environmental protection. To make their point, the Sierra Youth Coalition activists brought bottles of water they collected from the Athabasca River downstream from the oilsands.
First stop is Total, the latest company to seek approval for their oilsands plans.
“Could you take a bottle of toxic water to Total?” activist Jeh Custer asks a worker heading into the building.
“Don’t harass them,” a security guard tells Custer as the worker walks by.
“I’m not harassing them, I’m just asking them a question.”
“They come here to work,” says the guard. “Not to answer your questions.”
A few years ago, the actions of this little group would have seemed strange in the capital city of Canada’s oil industry. But environmental concerns are now on everyone’s radar.
In April, national headlines carried the news that 500 ducks had died after landing on a tailings pond near Syncrude’s operations. Earlier this summer, Greenpeace tried to block a tailings pipe on the same site.
Even industry is talking big about the environment. The protesters secure a meeting with a spokesperson for Suncor, the second-largest company in the oilsands. Nearly every company I call has a plan to make their operations greener.
One company — Syncrude — even openly admits it has to be more environmentally responsible in the future.
The message brought by these cycling environmentalists is something Fort McMurray MLA and former environment minister Guy Boutillier understands well. When Greenpeace showed up on his doorstep when he was a cabinet minister, he invited them into his office to meet.
“Why do we put industry in one corner and environmentalists in another corner and say ‘fight it out’?” he asks.
I plan to ask him about the province’s contributions to Fort McMurray’s infrastructure, but before I get a question out, he brings up the environment.
“Do you think I care about the environment? This is my home,” he says. “I have a young son who breathes the air here. What do you think is more important to me: politics or my son?”
While Boutillier may express it more fervently than others, his words are echoed across Fort McMurray and across the industry. Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, is well-versed on environmental matters and is quick to point out that, despite the oilsands’ image as a producer of dirty oil, the carbon emissions required per barrel of oil isn’t much worse than some oil being produced in California or the Persian Gulf.
Brad Bellows, a spokesperson for Suncor, can list his company’s environmental achievements easily: Suncor has dramatically reduced the amount of water needed to produce a barrel of oil. The intensity of carbon emissions released by the company has also fallen.
Not everyone is convinced. Dan Woynillowicz of the Pembina Institute argues that the improvements made by industry amount only to efficiency: things they should have done anyway to make their operations cheaper. None of the improvements, he says, have actually hurt the companies financially.
And despite the rising environmental consciousness in the industry, the dozen environmentalists standing on the sidewalk this afternoon still seem to be on the opposite side of the debate from the oil executives calling the shots. Security bars them from the building, and only by going through a side entrance can activist Greg Ellis deliver a bottle of Athabasca River water to Total.
So why do they bother when the industry appears to ignore their concerns? “It’s keeping the issue on the table, on the front page, on the news,” says Ellis. “We feel it’s a global issue.”
An hour or so later, they wait downstairs from Suncor, in another office tower a block east. This time, they’re in luck. A company spokesperson agrees to meet with them and, smiling, takes them upstairs.
