5 Leftist Lies About the Best Source of Oil on Earth

Posted By Kathy Shaidle On October 26, 2010 @ 8:00 am

Last week, I reported the news that the U.S. based Tides Foundation is funding Canadian environmentalists who are trying to shut down Alberta’s oil sands industry.
Canada provides the United States with tens of millions of barrels of oil that otherwise would have come from Saudi Arabia, the misogynistic sheik-ocracy that most of the 9/11 hijackers called home. But leftists don’t care about that. They’ve recently convinced huge American companies like Bed, Bath & Beyond to boycott Canadian oil. Activists say the oil sands devastate the landscape, cause cancer, cheat aboriginals out of land and revenues, and are a major source of toxic unicorn farts CO2 emissions.

Too bad none of that is true. And you should care because getting your oil from a friendly neighbor instead of a dubious Middle Eastern “ally” or unstable African dictatorship is a matter of national security.

Now that “climate change” has lost the public’s interest, you’ll be hearing a lot more about the evils of Canadian “blood” oil. After all, activists have to invent a new crisis to keep those donations rolling in. (Greenpeace needs to pull in $700,000 a DAY just to keep its lights on.)

As the campaign against the oil sands ramps up, and the junk science starts making the papers, be sure to arm yourself with the facts.

What follows are five leftist lies about Canada’s oil sands :


#5 The area around the oil sands is a toxic hellhole

Environmentalist propaganda doesn’t always depend on outright lies. Greenpeace and their comrades often accurately describe what’s happening — but lie about why.

So you’ll read the shocking fact that the air around Fort McMurray and Fort Chipewyan, Alberta — that is, oil sands “ground zero” — is literally hellish: it smells like sulphur. The water tastes terrible. Thick black goo bubbles up from the earth.

All true. But as native Albertan Ezra Levant reveals in his new book, Ethical Oil, the landscape has been like that for as long as recorded history. Old diaries reveal that early explorers to Canada noticed the same things. That’s because, well, there’s petroleum naturally percolating up under the earth, as it’s done for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Indians never used to mind: they scooped up the thick tar and used it to weatherproof their canoes. (Today, some natives work for the oil industry and others campaign against it — either way, it’s a source of revenue.)

But today, Greenpeace and their colleagues want you to think Big Oil has raped another once-pristine landscape. That’s why National Geographic and leftwing fundraising brochures focus on the ugly pits left behind by the oil sands extraction process.

What they won’t tell you is that only 2% of the area has been mined in that admittedly hideous fashion. The rest of the oil is so deep underground that it is steamed and pumped out, just like it is all over the world.

“And,” as Levant notes, “even the 2 per cent that is mined will be reclaimed once the oil is pumped out — it’s the law in Alberta, and the first oil sands mine reclamation projects have already been certified. They’re gorgeous hiking trails now, with forests and pristine lakes.”

And when it comes to that new and mostly imaginary pollutant, CO2? The oil sands produce just 5% of the country’s greenhouse gases, less than the emissions from its cattle and pigs.



#4 The oil sands cause cancer

Expect to see and hear a lot of Dr. John Connor. He’s served the local native community of “Fort Chip” for a long time, and noticed that his patients were coming down with a rare form of cancer that attacks the bile ducts. In fact, his own father succumbed to the illness.

Dr. O’Connor raised the alarm — and for his whistleblowing troubles, was met with a bunch of ethics complaints from the “authorities,” obviously designed to silence him.

But this terrific movie plot (can’t you just picture Russell Crowe in the lead?) runs out of steam in the third reel.

You see, Health Canada immediately launched an investigation of O’Connor’s allegations. “But,” as Levant explains, “they found a strange roadblock: O’Connor himself, who refused to turn over his patient files, even though he was required to do so by law.”

When he finally relented, his files showed that there had “only been two rare cancers in town, not half a dozen. Other cancer diagnoses were completely fabricated. O’Connor simply made them up….”

That hasn’t stopped O’Connor from hitting the lecture circuit and — you guessed it — starring in a movie.


#3 You can trust Greenpeace

No doubt, regular NewsReal Blog readers already view enviro-giant Greenpeace with a jaundiced eye. However, Ethical Oil rounds up all the dirt on that once semi-respectable ecology group. It’s the best expose of Greenpeace you’ll find between two covers.

Where to start?

Well, one of the founders has denounced them. Patrick Moore has a Ph.D. in ecology, making him the only environmental scientist in the original Greenpeace group. This former director of Greenpeace International now tells anyone who will listen that “Greenpeace has evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas.” He resigned in 1986.

Here’s one for your “argument around the dinner table” files. In 2006, when President Bush began touting nuclear power, Greenpeace issued a “fact sheet” denouncing that form of energy. But, Levant writes:

…the release was sent out prematurely, without being proofread, and it contained this whopper:

‘In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].’

The press release actually arrived on the desks of hundreds of newsrooms exactly that way.

That’s some “fact sheet”!

And ask yourself (if you have to) why Greenpeace targets mild-mannered, civilized Canada as an environmental villain, while ignoring the likes of China, where the air is unbreathable and working conditions are appalling.

Oh, come on, you know the answer: Canadian authorities give Greenpeace a slap on the wrist when they launch one of their brash protests, and the local media laps it up. Greenpeace doesn’t have the guts to do anything to challenge the world’s biggest Communist police state.


#2 Ethical funds let you save the earth and make money

“Progressive” churches and other “social justice” groups like to brag that they’ve got all their money invested in “ethical funds.” Quakers have long favored these funds, which refuse to buy stocks in companies tied to alcohol, pornography and arms sales.

And lots of these environmentally focused ethical funds boast pretty good rates of return. How do they do it?

By… investing in oil companies, of course, not to mention nuclear power and even smoke-belching coal plants in the former Soviet Union.

Canada’s own aptly named Ethical Funds condemns the country’s oil sands as the source of “the world’s dirtiest oil,” yet a glance at its prospectus shows that it is “a major investor in the oil sands” (while strenuously opposing any additional energy development in the area, naturally.)

They claim that as shareholders, they can “leverage their power” and “push for change” — usually in the form of an annual, scolding letter to major oil companies, which promptly ends up in the recycling bin, no doubt.

And these guys aren’t stupid. Think about it. As Levant writes:

Hypocrisy is one thing. But there’s another level ther: if the Ethical Funds solution is to maintain current oil sands operations, but simply ban new development, that’s a pretty clever way for ethical Funds to protect their own oil sands companies while trying to have the government ban competitors.

Cute trick! Bernie Madoff could have learned a thing or two from these “ethical fund” managers.

#1 “Green jobs” are the way of the future

Remember “green jobs”? They were the flavor of the week but when their champion, Van Jones, crashed and burned, you didn’t hear much about “green jobs” as much.

But like lots of environmental fads, this one will get recycled, too. We’ll hear that, as part of our effort to “get off oil,” we need to promote green jobs.

Obama and the UN like to tout Spain as a country that’s leading the way in “green jobs,” but there’s a problem. As Ezra Levant points out:

…for every single so-called green job created in Spain since the government first embarked on the initiative in 1997, the policy killed 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy. (…) In fact, according to the study’s analysis, were the United States to adopt the same policies as Spain has — just like Obama has said he hopes to — it could expect to create 3 million to 5 million jobs, but it will likely eliminate, based on Spain’s experience, as many as 11 million other jobs in the process.

Meanwhile, anti-oil sands activists will try to convince you that the poor benighted souls who toil in the local industry are underpaid, under-housed and burdened by crime and other social ills. But the fact is, you can buy “52 more house” in Fort McMurray than you can in nearby Edmonton. The Ministry of the Environment rates the town’s air quality “good” about 99 per cent of the time. And considering the unusually high number of young, able bodied men in the vicinity, the crime rate has fallen as the area has become more prosperous.

Wow, what a hell hole! Of course, if you’re a leftist, it is. When ordinary people are earning good money working honest jobs, the left’s pool of disaffected recruits shrinks. And God forbid these people shop at Wal-Mart and indulge in other kinds of icky “consumerism” with their hard earned wages.

Especially when those wages are earned working for Big Oil. And, in this case, an energy enterprise that, relatively speaking, is clean, ethical and loves its best customer, America.

No wonder the left wants to shut it down.


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