You know you’ve got the attention of the fossil fuel industry when the Financial Post’s Claudia Cattaneo pens a dismissive column about your efforts.

On Tuesday, Cattaneo — recently dubbed “everyone’s favorite oil and gas shill” by American Energy News — bestowed the honour on a new report about TransCanada’s proposed Energy East pipeline, published by the Natural Resources Defense Council and 13 other environmental organizations including 350.org, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

“Canadian [sic] are also right to wonder why a deep-pocketed U.S. group with an army of lawyers is meddling in an all-Canadian pipeline project,” she opined in her 820-word column, shortly after insinuating the Natural Resources Defense Council “needed to conquer and make money off a new dragon” following the presidential veto of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015.

The idea that Energy East only concerns Canadians is a curious perspective. But it’s certainly not a unique one.

The Energy East project, requiring 1,500 kilometers of new pipeline and the conversion of 3,000 kilometers of existing natural gas infrastructure in order to transport up to 1.1 million barrels of dilbit per day, has been heralded by many as a quintessentially Canadian project, comparable to the Canadian Pacific Railway in scope and significance. Even Rick Mercer argued for its construction.

Unlike the Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans-Mountain Expansion, however, there’s been a fair bit of obfuscation about what the desired market is for the transported product.

That’s a key problem for a big picture defence of the project.

Some have contended that Energy East will transport products for consumption in Eastern Canada, helping to foster energy security by breaking a reliance on imports from the Middle East. Such a reality would indeed seem like an “all-Canadian pipeline project” and justify Cattaneo’s confusion about why U.S. organizations are getting involved in the battle.

But as the Natural Resources Defense Council’s new 24-page report (ominously titled “Tar Sands in the Atlantic Ocean“) sketches out, the U.S. has many, many reasons for concern: threats to marine mammals, vulnerable ecosystems and progress on climate change, for starters.

“From the U.S. perspective, [Energy East] is a huge project that right now feels as if it’s being snuck in,” says Josh Axelrod, a Washington, D.C.- based policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-author of the report in an interview.

”We’re worried if it remains on the down-low that our regulators will basically find out about dilbit tankers the day something goes wrong and will not be prepared for it. We would like to, at the very least, have them prepared, if not express their disapproval of the idea.”

Sinking Tarballs, Whale Collisions: Potential Impacts of #EnergyEast on the U.S. Coast Detailed in New Report https://t.co/wCTtKXg8bG

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 28, 2016

Tankers Could Move 328 Million Barrels of Oil Per Year in U.S. Water

Axelrod’s quick to point out there’s “no compelling case” for the suggestion that Energy East is planned to transport oil for Canadians to use.

In TransCanada’s May 2016 consolidated application to Canada’s National Energy Board, the company estimated it would ship up to 281 tankers every year.

Axelrod says the proposed tanker configuration amounts to 900,000 barrels a day.

By the report’s estimates, tankers could move up to 328 million barrels of oil to refineries in New Jersey, Delaware, Louisiana and Texas: the U.S. Gulf Coast sports 25 refineries, 17 of which have a history of processing heavy oilsands crude.

Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s Irving refinery doesn’t have the capacity or even necessarily the desire to process dilbit (Axelrod adds the reversal of Enbridge’s Line 9B in September makes Energy East less useful to the Montreal refineries).

This matters a great deal. If TransCanada was intending to transport and sell dilbit to Canadian refineries for Canadian usage, it would indeed be odd for a report to call for a moratorium on tankers; Cattaneo strangely suggested in her column that the proposed ban is “a bit surprising given that oilsands tankers would be leaving from a Canadian port, making it harder to block by the U.S. administration.”

For at this point, the facts seem clear: tankers will be leaving a Canadian port and travelling through American waters with potentially catastrophic impacts in the case of a spill or accident.

Dilbit Spills Notoriously Difficult to Clean Up

The report points to two major incidents that have occurred in the past few years — the 2010 Enbridge spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, and the 2013 ExxonMobil spill in Arkansas — as examples of the difficulties of containing and cleaning up a dilbit spill.

A 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences emphasized that dilbit sinks in water and doesn’t biodegrade easily, making a spill far more disastrous than its conventional counterpart.

And that’s not even to speak of issues like ship strikes (when ships hit whales or other marine mammals), noise pollution or the accidental transportation of invasive species.

These are all issues that one would hope regulators would consider in their review of projects. But Axelrod says the National Energy Board (NEB) has “really flubbed this,” using a process that fails to consider cumulative impacts or acknowledge difficulties with cleaning up other dilbit spills.

“The NEB likes to make it seem like their processes are straightforward but they’ve really made it into a disaster,” he says. “There’s pro forma discussion of some of the impacts but a very limited scope.”

Energy East Exempted From Environmental Assessment Overhaul

There is still lots of time to correct such problems: the NEB’s consultation process will be continuing until 2018, while the very earliest Energy East could start transporting dilbit would be 2021.

But companies including TransCanada and Kinder Morgan have already been told by the federal government that “no project proponent will be asked to return to the starting line,” with the exception of the evaluation of their upstream greenhouse gas emissions.

“I hope it’s being used as a way to look at a project’s impacts on provincial and national climate goals and international commitments, and if that’s the case it could be a useful tool,” Axelrod says. “But it really misses a lot of the project’s climate impacts.”

And given the NEB will almost certainly approve the project — since 2012, the body has had to conduct environmental assessments and consultations, tasks that are far outside of its original mandate — that’s a problem the federal cabinet will have to confront.

Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion will be decided upon before Energy East. But that’s a far more complicated project due to dozens of unresolved First Nations land claims. The Alberta NDP also appears to have put more long-term hope in Energy East due to such factors.

But if Canada does end up approving Energy East — and, of course, depending on who’s elected as president of the United States — it may end up seeing a similar conclusion to what happened with the Keystone XL pipeline: pushed for by Canada and rejected by America due to potential impacts on environments and wildlife.

Maybe, by then, it will have all started to make sense for Cattaneo and her pals.

Image: NRDC

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An article published last week in the National Post that claims a “secret” deal was struck between oil companies and environmentalists has ruffled many feathers — from corporate big wigs in Calgary to environmental activists on the West Coast.

According to Claudia Cattaneo’s story, Alberta’s climate change plan — which introduced a carbon tax, phased out coal-fired electricity and put a cap on oilsands emissions — was “the product of secret negotiations between four top oilsands companies and four environmental organizations.”

I’m not sure how secret any of that was given that all of those players could clearly be seen on stage with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley when she announced the plan, but the story goes on to state: “The companies agreed to the cap in exchange for the environmental groups backing down on opposition to oil export pipelines, but the deal left other players on the sidelines, and that has created a deep division in Canada’s oil and gas sector.”

The remainder of the story goes into how various oil companies have their knickers in a twist over the deal.  You’d think environmentalists would be dancing in the streets about that, but no — it’s actually hard to say who’s more outraged: environmentalists, who bristle at the idea of a secret deal and who don’t think the agreement is strong enough, or oil companies, who don’t think the new regulations will help them gain the market access they’re so desperately seeking.

Let’s just all hold our horses for a second.

First off, let’s look at the source. Cattaneo has spewed quite a bit of industry drivel over the years and her interpretation of Canada’s energy politics leaves much to be desired. Has she exhibited much understanding of how social movements actually work? Nope.

Secondly, was there a deal to stop opposition to oil export pipelines? There were at least five environmental groups on stage for the announcement: Forest Ethics, the Pembina Institute, Clean Energy Canada, Equiterre and Environmental Defence.

Forest Ethics has publicly stated that its campaign against Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline won’t change.

Environmental Defence’s executive director Tim Gray told DeSmog Canada that its work on pipeline issues from a climate, water, biodiversity and community impact perspective will continue. The organization is now looking to the feds for a revised review process for pipelines, which includes a climate test that takes into account all infrastructure, including trains, and respects Alberta’s cap on oilsands emissions.

The Pembina Institute’s executive director Ed Whittingham told DeSmog Canada that Pembina’s oilsands advocacy work will continue. Pembina’s advocacy around pipelines has always been out of concern for upstream impacts — not surprising for a group founded in Alberta, on the heels of a deadly sour gas well blowout.  While many of Pembina’s climate-related concerns have been addressed by Alberta’s climate plan, “lots of air, land and water concerns remain,” Whittingham said.

Clean Energy Canada never campaigned against pipelines in the first place. And Equiterre couldn’t be reached, but I’d hazard a guess they’re in the same boat as the others.

So, sounds to me as though there was no deal of the sort that Cattaneo described.

Thirdly, even if there was a deal, a deal with four environmental groups wouldn’t be worth the hypothetical notepad it was jotted on given the breadth of opposition to new oil pipelines in this country — from municipalities like Vancouver and Burnaby to First Nations to grassroots activists to the umpteen environmental groups that weren’t on that stage.

“People who think climate policy in Alberta will ‘buy market access’ through B.C. don’t understand concerns around Indigenous rights, tanker traffic, oil spills or the grossly unequal distribution of economic risk and benefit,” said Kai Nagata, energy and democracy director at B.C.-based Dogwood Initiative.

It’s not helping the industry’s case that a landmark study released on Tuesday by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences confirms that diluted bitumen, such as that carried by Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, sinks in water if not cleaned up immediately, making for a nightmare scenario.

The study, Spills of Diluted Bitumen from Pipelines: A Comparative Study of Environmental Fate, Effects, and Response, concluded that diluted bitumen poses unique risks compared to other blends of crude oil.

Which brings me back to my point: the pipeline deal-breaker in B.C. has always been the risk of oil spills. Alberta’s action on climate change doesn’t move the needle on that.

Now, to the climate plan itself. Many environmentalists aren’t terribly impressed with it. Take this revealing infographic by Barry Saxifrage, which shows how Alberta’s emissions will continue to grow until 2030. (Canada has promised to reduce emissions 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.)

However, we must take into consideration that Alberta has already issued permits for another six million barrels a day of oilsands production. The new cap means that, at current emissions levels, three million barrels of those barrels will stay in the ground. That’s a seriously bold move in a province that has an economy 70 per cent based on oil — and that has already seen 40,000 layoffs in the energy industry this year.

All of the enviro grousing of late has reminded me of Rebecca Solnit’s stellar piece in The Guardian a few years back, written to her dismal allies on the U.S. left.

“If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears,” Solnit wrote. “Can you imagine how far the civil rights movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger!”

Environmentalists are fighting the richest industry in the world — an industry that has spent millions of dollars to confuse the public about climate change science. They are finally starting to see some victories. The climate change plan enacted in Alberta was unimaginable a year ago. It has the “100 per cent” support of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam.

If we want any policy to stick — not to be struck down like former Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s royalty review — it needs to have broad support. Part of the job of the environmental movement should be to help build that support.

To quote Solnit again: “Being different (from the radical right) means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.”

The fact industry and environmental leaders met informally over the past year, found some common ground and ended up standing on stage together to announce a major step forward on Alberta climate policy is a great thing. (And saying that does not mean I don’t acknowledge that while great, it’s not sufficient for Alberta to do its fair share to keep the planet from warming more than two degrees.)

As Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor in the faculty of environmental studies at York University, wrote recently: “To say a policy is great does not mean there is not more work to be done.”

Without further ado, may the pipeline battles continue.

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With U.S. President Barack Obama expected to deny a permit to the Keystone XL pipeline this fall, Canada’s oil industry is looking for someone to blame.

The National Post’s Claudia Cattaneo wrote last week that “many Canadians … would see Obama’s fatal stab as a betrayal by a close friend and ally” and that others “would see it as the product of failure by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to come up with a climate change plan.”

The latter is the more logical conclusion. Obama has made his decision-making criteria clear: he won’t approve the pipeline if it exacerbates the problem of carbon pollution.

Even the U.S. State Department’s very conservative analysis states the Keystone XL pipeline would “substantially increase oilsands expansion and related emissions.” The Environmental Protection Agency has agreed.

While Canada’s energy reviews take into account “upstream benefits” — such as jobs created in the oilsands sector as a result of pipelines — they don’t even consider the upstream environmental impacts created by the expansion of the oilsands.

For all the bluster and finger-pointing, there’s no covering up the fact that Canada’s record on climate change is one of broken promises.

Oil and Gas Regulations Promised Since 2006

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised since 2006 that he’ll regulate oil and gas emissions. Those regulations still haven’t materialized nearly a decade later —and there’s only one person to blame for that.

In recent years, Harper has taken the approach that Canada can’t regulate its oil and gas sector unless the U.S. does too. This argument is fundamentally flawed.

First, it presumes that Canada should outsource its climate policy to another country. On issues from health care to acid rain, Canada has moved independently from the U.S. and prospered as a result.

Secondly, copying U.S. climate policy has never really made sense from a greenhouse gas perspective because the countries have very different emissions profiles.

Chiefly, the oil and gas sector only accounts for about three per cent of U.S. emissions, so it isn’t a top priority for the country to regulate. Instead, the U.S. is focused on reducing emissions from power plants — including coal and natural gas-fired electricity — which account for one-third of emissions.

In Canada, the oil and gas sector accounts for nearly 25 per cent of Canada’s emissions, hence the need for a focus on that sector when addressing emissions.

What’s more, while coal-fired power plant emissions in the U.S. are already dropping, oilsands emissions are projected to more than double from 2010 to 2020, making them Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas pollution.

Canada and the Copenhagen Accord: More Broken Promises

Let’s not forget: when Canada has aligned itself with the U.S. on climate commitments, it has broken those promises.

As part of the 2009 Copenhagen agreement, both countries agreed to reduce their carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020.

The U.S. has implemented a plan to meet those commitments by aggressively tackling its biggest source of emissions (coal-fired power plants), along with a range of other actions, including taking on methane emissions, which account for the majority of emissions from its oil and gas sector.  

Meantime, Canada is on track to substantially miss its Copenhagen commitments, due in large part to its unchecked support of oilsands expansion.

Instead of actually addressing growing emissions from the oilsands sector, the Canadian government has focused on PR — spending millions to lobby internationally for approval of new pipelines and undermining clean energy policies in Canada, the U.S. and the European Union. More than that, the federal government has eliminated environmental protections and undermined public review processes.

Harper would have better served the interests of all Canadians (including the oil industry) by investing that time and energy into writing climate regulations, instead of sticking his head in the sand.

Harper Treats Climate Change as Race to Bottom

All in all, it’s little wonder that Obama is expected to refuse the Keystone XL pipeline when Harper has treated Obama’s chief concern, climate change, as a race to the bottom by employing the faulty logic that because we can’t solve the whole problem, we should do nothing.

If our leaders had employed that same logic in the 1940s, Canada would never have sent troops to the Second World War, where Canadians accounted for just two per cent of the Allied effort.

After a summer of unprecedented wildfires and drought across North America, it’s never been more apparent that climate change is already costing us all.

Citibank just released a new report showing that taking action now against the growing threat of climate change would save $1.8 trillion by 2040. And yes, that report takes into account the potential lost revenue from leaving resources in the ground — including 80 per cent of coal reserves, half of the world’s gas reserves, and a third of global oil reserves — and still concludes that the global economy would see a net gain.

While the fossil fuel industry continues to pay off pseudo scientists and unethical PR firms to create confusion about climate change, the science is clear. And the time to act is now.

The federal government’s utter failure on climate change has given rise to fruitless, polarized pipeline debates, such as the prolonged one over TransCanada’s Keystone XL. The only person who can be blamed for that is Harper himself.

Main image: A 2009 Greenpeace billboard calls on world leaders to secure a fair, ambitious and binding deal at the Copenhagen Cimate Summit. Via Flickr.

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