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Monday December 10
brought reminders of several
earlier articles about oil. First, this was the
day that Prime Minister Harper
authorized the purchase of Alberta’s
Nexen company by the Chinese Government
owned CNOOC which the Globe & Mail’s
Margaret Wente strongly supported in the
piece which my July 2012 article took to
task. We have been assured this kind of
sale won’t happen again. But regardless,
this is not your normal corporate
investment. This
is essentially selling to China. One
doesn’t like foreign acquisitions by
conquest. Is the purchase of national
assets by a foreign power very
different? No one has compared this with
the nineteenth century purchase of
Alaska from Russia. Of course that was
all of Alaska – not just an important
natural resource – some oil reserves. Second, this was the
day when Mark Hume wrote under a
headline “Fissures appear in Scientists’
assurances about the safety of fracking”
in my online copy of the Globe &
Mail. It seems Charles Groat of the
Energy Institute of the University of
Texas reported at a major conference at
the Vancouver Convention Centre earlier
in 2012 claiming that the widely held
environmental concerns about fracking
were unfounded. As Hume noted: “Now
a review panel appointed by the
University of Texas has taken a hard
look at Dr. Groat’s report, and has
concluded his study ‘fell short of
contemporary standards for scientific
work.’ Not only was the work suspect,
reported the panel, but Dr. Groat
himself was in a troubling conflict of
interest.” “The
Globe and Mail and other major media
covering that [earlier in 2012] press
conference reported that the University
of Texas had found there was no evidence
to support concerns that fracking
damages groundwater. ‘You were misled,’
said Kevin Connor, director of the
Public Accountability Initiative, who
raised questions on Dr. Groat’s
conflict. ‘The science isn’t there.’ “ Mr.
Connor said Dr. Groat’s report, which
the University of Texas has now
withdrawn, is similar to a fracking
study at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, which was also recently
withdrawn because of questions about its
credibility. ‘I think the oil and gas
industry is really desperate to go full
speed ahead with fracking, and through
various means and mechanisms are trying
to get out in to the public debate,
academic studies that absolve the
industry,’ he said.” This kind of deceit
by big oil was uncovered in the book Climate
Cover-up which I wrote about in my
July 2010 article. In that book, the oil
industry was shown as going to
considerable lengths to promote
reports which suggest ambiguity in
the evidence that global warming results
from human activity with fossil fuels. The oil
industry funded
scientists and seemed to be behind
the Fraser Institute attack on a UN
scientific report about climate
change. The findings
of ambiguity in the science were in the
face of the US government’s own
unambiguous reports since 2003. The U.S.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) released a 2009
report on the state of the climate 28
July 2010, and the facts showed the
speed of actual climate change. In
2010, the evidence of the oil industry
misleading public opinion was there.
Here it is again in 2012. Now, not
only
is there the intent of the oil
industry to keep on producing more and
more oil from more risky sources like
fracking, but there are efforts to
promote faulty science which minimizes
environmental risks. Those risks will
add to the environmental risks already
experienced and feared in pipeline
proposals and will add to the fears of
large ocean oil transport vessels at the
pipeline terminus. Third, as I noted in
my July 2012 article, economist Jeff
Ruben wrote that the availability of oil
was not relevant. The cost of its
extraction was. I add that the
atmospheric heating cost of continuing
to use the present levels of fossil
fuels is a threat to the survival of
human societies. It
is
satisfying to note that Rubin wrote more
recently substantially alone the lines I
did. He wrote on November 22 in the
Globe & Mail under a heading “Why
Shale Oil won’t save you at the Pumps.”
But he wrote it well and he deserves
repeating: “Move
over
OPEC: North America is about to become a
net exporter of oil.
At
least, that’s the word from the
International Energy Agency’s latest
outlook. According to the IEA, the
drilling boom for shale oil in states
like North Dakota is putting U.S. crude
production on track to pass Saudi
Arabia. North of the border, output from
Alberta’s oil sands is expected to notch
a similarly grand expansion.” “…
But regardless of the political rhetoric
we endured from both presidential
candidates, energy independence isn’t
really the issue confronting the U.S.
economy or North American motorists. The
real issue is the cost of oil – not its
country of origin.
Unfortunately,
that’s
already more than we can afford.” So much for Wente’s
July 2012 piece in the Globe & Mail
about the new US self-sufficiency in
oil. As
I concluded then, drawing on Ruben's
book, it’s all about cost. So
the year moves towards its end with
another chapter on big oil. China gets
a bigger hold on Canadian low grade
reserves. Big
oil is revealed to be still supporting
misleading science on the impact of
the continuing use of fossil fuels on
the human experiment this time the
impact of fracking technology. Scary
stuff. Maybe it’s time to start
thinking about oil companies and their
impact on the public environment in
the ways we got into for the tobacco
companies with respect to our public
health and health care costs.
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