Facts and fictions

The eyes of the world’s environmentalists are increasingly turning towards the vast and relatively untapped oil resources of the Canadian state of Alberta, about which a policy debate is unfolding in multiple jurisdictions that could be a definitive moment in understanding mankind’s relationship with natural resources.

The reason that the usually little considered topic of Albertan development is firmly on the agenda is that Alberta’s oil resources are not of the poke-a-hole-in-the-ground-and-wait-for-it-to-bubble-out variety. Rather, Alberta’s oil wealth is in the form of ‘tar sands’ – bituminous deposits that must be baked, steamed and cajoled out of the ground where they reside.

This process is a treble no to the environmental movement. Firstly, the process is massively environmentally destructive to local habitats – referring to the steaming ponds of noxious stagnant water that characterise these developments as a moonscape is doing a disservice to the Moon. Secondly, the process is energy intensive – much more so than traditional oil extraction. This means that the carbon footprint of tar sands oil is much higher than the equivalent ‘conventional’ output. In a context of global action to avoid climate change, tar sands are a definite step in the wrong direction. Thirdly, and the reason that I describe this brouhaha as a definitive one, tar sands represent the opening salvo in what will become a concerted battle by to demand that fossil fuel resources are left in the ground. Coal is already a case in point, with the environmentally conscious decrying new coal power stations as anachronistically ill conceived – but the tar sands are the key front in this argument, the place where the environmental movement can score an early victory against the pressure to continue to exploit everything we can dig up. If a precedent can be set against tar sands, then the same may be done for the similar-but-different oil shales, and other high carbon energy technologies.

Now, all this is an extended introduction to the point that I really want to consider here. As is so often the case in these environment-vs.-business disputes, the Albertan establishment, from oil companies to Government to local universities has been drafted in to protest the innocence of the tar sands. They make a variety of protestations, from claiming that tar sands are not worse than all oil (true, but the flame belching monoliths of inefficiency that they are invoking are hardly a complimentary comparison), to claiming that tar sand emissions are not that much higher than normal oil and to protesting that they are getting better, that an environmental footprint to rival Chernobyl is an interim situation as they get better at fending the ducks away from the toxic lagoons.

And then, as with all the best business arguments against other people who are essentially right, they claim that the environmentalist’s campaign has been ‘emotional’. I draw this allegation from an article in the Edmonton Journal http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Eyes+world+watching+Alberta/3616245/story.html, in which a local Albertan academic is attributed the memorable paraquote that, ‘Industry and government have responded “with facts” — describing what they are doing to mitigate environmental footprint — “to a discussion taking place in an emotional arena.”’

This is a tasteful example of the old pursuit of damning with faint praise – the success of the environmental campaign is acknowledged, and with a deft sleight of hand allocated gently to a surfeit of irrational, emotional thinking. There are so many reasons to take issue with this casual dismissal of emotionally overwrought hippy reactionaries that I’m not sure where to start, but given the focus of this blog, I’ll start by reflecting on how this type of conversation epitomises the truism that ‘The thinker thinks…’.

You see, the environmentalists have been invoking emotions. Rightly so. When something evokes an emotional response, it is entirely appropriate that we should step back and take note of this. If people are emotionally activated by images of the unpleasant deaths of thousands of animals, by the sight of vast acreages reduced to slag heaps, this is not a signal that people are not to be trusted, but that there may be something wrong with killing thousands of animals and with destroying vast areas of wilderness. But this is not all that environmentalists have been doing. They have been using facts. Indeed, the statement I just made includes the kernel of at least two facts – that tar sands results in animal deaths and destruction of habitats.

As it happens, they have been wielding rather more facts than this. They have been invoking detailed lifecycle assessment of the carbon impact of oil sands development. They have a vast weight of science on global warming behind them. But our journalist and academic have conspired (either purposefully or through an accident of sub-editing) to ignore all this within the article. The environmentalists use ‘emotions’, and business is hobbled by being able to respond only with ‘facts’.

Now, it is true that business and Albertan local government have been wielding various facts. Indeed, some of them are actually the same as the ones the environmentalists use – statistics can be like that. Some of them are undoubtedly even true. But what we are seeing is people for whom it is almost an article of faith that environmentalists, campaigners and progressives base their positions on rash value judgements rather than actual analysis, letting their internal prover point out to them every emotional statement by a activist while they let the underlying evidence being used wash over them.

And anyone of a similar instinctive tendency reading this article will let themselves believe the same – the NGOs are floating in a data void, and poor old much abused business is, as normal, required to compete with an uneven arsenal, equipped only with truth and the desire to create wealth for everybody else.
The treatment of the facts is thus not only not even-handed – for many readers, it has been entirely vetoed. The journalist has, probably without malice, written an article that emphasises the weight being given to the view against the tar sands, but implicitly denies that it has legitimate basis. Foolish indeed, oh European Parliament, to be taken in so. But let us also reflect for a moment on what those facts actually are that business is using. It is vital that we should understand that the facts being wielded in defence of the tar sands are being massaged and manipulated to read the way they are wanted to.

A good example from a recent report was the publication of a headline emissions figure for tar sands when mixed with conventional oil. One might as well judge arsenic safe by testing it in homeopathic infusion. The report points out that the average carbon footprint of oil reaching the States from Canadian tar sands is ‘only’ 6% higher than normal oil – because the tar sands oil is mixed with conventional crude. This is, strictly speaking, true. But to emphasise it is beyond disingenuous. The way that the tar sands literature is presented ‘factually’ by business and government is replete with these examples – numbers being selectively presented and subtly misadvertised to create the impression that things are better than they are.

Factual argument indeed. The statistics of tar sands production are being misleadingly presented to legislators and officials at the highest levels of governments around the world.



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