A Short History of Greenwashing the Tar Sands, Part 1

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This is Part One of a three-part series on the political greenwashing of the tar sands inย Canada.

When I hatched the idea to write a book about the use of spin and propaganda in the battle over the tar sands, a close friend of mine suggested I avoid the term โ€œtar sands.โ€ His logic was simple: using this term, which has become a pejorative, would turn some people off, people who might benefit, he said, from reading myย book.

His recommendation was meant to be helpful, but it speaks to the power of manipulating language to make people believe something appears to be something that it is not. โ€œGreenwashingโ€ refers to the strategy of intentionally exaggerating a productโ€™s environmental credentials in order to sell it, and nowhere has greenwashing been more generously used than in the promotion of the tar sands and the new and bigger pipelines that proponents hope will carry it around theย world.

Greenwashing is fairly recent phenomenonโ€”it was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1999โ€”but it has become commonplace as public concern has grown over the spate of environmental problems we now face, and as consumers demand โ€œgreenerโ€ products as a means of solving them. The most recent analysis by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing found that although the number of green products is growing, the marketing of more than 95 per cent of them still commits one the seven sins of greenwashing.

The most egregious of these greenwashing efforts include such misleading efforts to market coal as โ€œclean,โ€ which is simply an Orwellian way of referring to the dirtiest of all hydrocarbon energy sources; greenhouse-gas intensive shale oil as faux-green โ€œEcoShaleโ€

It comes as a surprise to most people I talk to that โ€œtar sandsโ€ was actually the preferred term for Albertaโ€™s newest hydrocarbon resource when it first came to market in the late 1960s. It wasnโ€™t until the environmental community began to educate the public about the dirty downsides of turning bitumen into crude in the late 1990s that Big Oil and Canadian governments began using the term more useful and cleaner-sounding โ€œoil sandsโ€ to promote its development in northernย Alberta.

But this was only the first step in the greenwashing of the tar sands. The media was coerced into using โ€œoil sandsโ€ rather than the once-dominant โ€œtar sandsโ€ by tar sands proponentsโ€™ relentless attacks on those who used the term โ€œtar sands,โ€ portraying them as environmental extremists and disloyal Canadians. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), for instance, actually has a language policy that mandates the use of โ€œoil sands,โ€ claiming it is โ€œmore neutral and more accurate because the substance refined from the extracted bitumen is oil.โ€ (As Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, whose award-winning book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, points out, if this was really how we named things, then weโ€™d call tomatoes โ€œketchupโ€ and trees โ€œlumber.) This only serves to reinforce the aims of the pro-tar sands lobby, which is to portray the tar sands in as benign a light asย possible.

When using the term โ€œoil sandsโ€ was no longer enough to counter growing evidence about the environmental impacts of the tar sands, the oil industry polled Canadians to better understand how they viewed tar sands development. Not surprisingly, Canadians, regardless of political affiliation, wanted oil companies to limit the environmental impacts of developing Canadaโ€™s tar sands. In short, they wanted them developedย responsibly.

The natural response was to tell Canadians what they wanted to hear. Rather than address the growing environmental concernsโ€”particularly growing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing evidence of toxic pollution in ground and surface water, not to mention the impending extirpation of the regionโ€™s threatened caribou populationsโ€”the Alberta government continued to approve record-breaking numbers of tar sands projects, and the oil industry, and the Alberta and federal governments began using the terms โ€œclean,โ€ โ€œresponsible,โ€ and โ€œsustainableโ€ to characterize tar sandsย development.

Ezra Levant, a former tobacco-lobbyist and virulent tar sands promoter, added the term โ€œethical oilโ€ by writing a book arguing that Canadaโ€™s tar sands crude was the most ethical oil on the planet. He argued that because Canada was a democracy with strong environmental laws and regulation and an excellent human rights record, tar sands oil was better than oil from authoritarian dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact his analysis was roundly criticized by professional ethicists, the term caught on and was adopted by media pundits and evenย politicians.

The latest greenwashing torpedo came recently from Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, who pitched the tar sands as a โ€œgreenโ€ energy source, and then told an audience in Chicago that โ€œCanada is the environmentally responsible choice for the U.S. to meet its energy needs in oil for years to come.โ€ That this is the greenest of greenwashing has been ably debunked here, there andย everywhere.

Itโ€™s clear that the rhetoric from Canadaโ€™s pro-tar sands politicians has continued to escalate over the years, from a subtle name change to outlandish and unsupportable claims of environmental virtue. While this may seem like an unimportant debate about semantics, it is really an illustration of how dangerous these tactics are. When this kind of messaging is injected into speeches, media coverage, and well-funded advertising campaigns, it works. Polls, many of which use greenwashing techniques of their own to conceal the true environmental risks and impacts of the tar sands, indicate the majority of Canadians believe that itโ€™s possible to increase oil and gas development and still protect the environment, so they support tar sands development as long as โ€œa continuous effort to limit the environmental impactโ€ is beingย made.

It doesnโ€™t matter whether language is being used honestly and with integrity, or whether the environmental impact of the tar sands is actually being reduced (it is not). What matters is that greenwashing is having a dangerously misleading impact on Canadiansโ€™ perceptions of tar sandsย development.

Part II of this series will explore whether the greenwashing activities of Canadian politicians and governments would get passing grades from the federal governmentโ€™s Environmental Claims Guidelines for Industry andย Advertising.

Image Credit: Cumulative Environmental Management Association report on tar sands tailingsย ponds

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