Stop a random person on the street. Ask them for the first thing that pops into their head when they think of Alberta’s oilsands.

Unless they’re an industry analyst or an over-enthused real estate agent turned corporate shill, chances are that they’ll describe either buffalo roaming on a restored tailings pond or helicopter shots of open-pit mining. Individuals are more likely to describe a visual element of the resource as opposed to, say, the barrels per day of oil or annual megatonnes of greenhouse gasses the region produces.

It’s this notion — that pictures, videos and other media representations often have extremely powerful influence on discourse about the oilsands — that compelled Patrick McCurdy to launch the MediaToil project.

“The premise of my work is that media is a site of social struggles,” McCurdy, an associate professor in the department of communications at the University of Ottawa, told DeSmog Canada. “It’s a battle for our imaginations and what we think about a certain topic and the actions we’re willing to take. I wanted to try to map that.”

Working with a two-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanity Research Council, McCurdy and his team identified all the different stakeholders involved in the oilsands (of which there are many: corporations, industry associations, media, environmental non-profits, Indigenous groups), combed their websites and created an Excel database with the links.

Online Oilsands Campaigns Can Disappear from Web

McCurdy said one of the key challenges his team encountered was the lack of digital posterity of online oilsands campaigns and ads.

Unlike analyzing something like historic tobacco advertising — which is often still available via microfilm or print — many digital campaigns are no longer live, meaning companies and industry organizations can effectively eliminate controversial points in history from the record.

Take the 2010 television campaign by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) which compared the consistency of oilsands tailings waste to yogurt: the Sierra Club of Canada filed a complaint to Advertising Standards Canada, arguing that it misrepresented the toxic nature of tailings. CAPP eventually revised the ad, removing the yogurt reference.

“But this ad no longer exists,” McCurdy said.

“The challenge is it has an impact on the public imagination. Of course, the Advertising Council ruled in CAPP’s favour, but no matter — if you wanted to for your own interest watch this ad, it doesn’t exist. It’s been removed.”

New Public Database Charts Decades of #Oilsands Advertising #cdnpoli #bcpoli #ableg #oilandgas https://t.co/g5si0itH5B

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 13, 2016

Rise of ‘Apocalyptic Imagery’ in Oilsands Campaigns

Despite such challenges, he says it’s possible to detect trends in communication strategies.

Back in the 1980s, depictions of the oilsands emphasized “images of accomplishment by industry: man over nature, ability to make money from dirt,” McCurdy said.

But that kind of rhetoric saw a decline in the early 2000s, when companies like Suncor attempted to balance community responsibility with environmental burdens (which McCurdy calls “caring for toads”) and didn’t engage in the “trend ad warfare” we see now.

Everything changed following the rise of “apocalyptic imagery” in 2008 and 2009 by organizations like Greenpeace, which executed huge banner drops and other image-heavy events. (The Syncrude duck disaster of 2008 also provided visual fodder for organizations unsatisfied with the province’s approach to environmental regulations.)

Industry and its network of associations first responded with photos of smiling CEOs backdropped with lush forests and freshwater. But they quickly ditched that strategy, opting for what we’re stuck with now: lifestyle rhetoric, boosterism and appeals to potential supporters instead of engagements with critics.

Screenshots from Canada Action, left, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers Raise Your Hand campaign, right.

Meanwhile, Indigenous communities and organizations tend to be significantly underrepresented, with the exceptions of media events like the Tarsands Healing Walk and appearances in ads by environmental organizations like WWF or Greenpeace.

“Looking at these ads certainly tracks and captures these shifts in strategies,” McCurdy said. “For me, the value of tracking this over time is you can look at what are the political decisions that have been made, what are the milestones in the timeline of the oilsands that relate to this?”

70-Page Comic Book To Be Published Alongside Database

But McCurdy wanted to broaden the project even beyond the database and the peer-reviewed papers that will eventually come, as it was important to think of another way to engage the public given the debate currently resembles a “red team vs. blue team thing.”

For that, he contacted Nicole Marie Burton and Hugh Goldring of Ad Astra Comix on Twitter to create a 70-page graphic novel loosely based on the themes of the MediaToil project.

Goldring said the work will follow the experience of two young photographers in Edmonton that work for advertising agencies representing “opposite sides.”

“It tracks their conflict of conscience,” he said. “The whole reason we picked people in advertising in the first place was that it provided a way to look at the production of these images.”

Goldring added that while the database of images is important, it’s McCurdy’s work that applies the larger contextual frame.

“Patrick’s work in a larger sense is in the way the images are produced and what the larger semiotic meaning or context of the work that’s being put out by these ad agencies is.”

Burton said the graphic novel will feature a fair bit of ambiguity, and is ultimately intended to help provoke conversation and provide discussion topics for bigger picture questions about the framing and discourse of the oilsands.

The comic will come out sometime in 2017, wbe available for free online as a downloadable PDF. In the meantime, McCurdy hopes that the public will point out “blind spots” in the database and explore the ads and fact sheets further.

Energy East Debate Further Emphasizes Need for Analysis of Visual Rhetoric

And while data collection was only conducted up until 2015, the goal is to continue it. Especially given the country’s increased focus on TransCanada’s proposed Energy East pipeline. McCurdy said it’s “a true battle over statistics” that’s falsely presented as a national unification project that will reduce the country’s dependency on foreign imports.

A popular image that’s made its way around social media features a series of flags of countries that Canada currently imports oil from, with the implication that such imports would cease with the construction of Energy East. But recent reports suggest that a great majority of oil shipped east via the pipeline would actually be exported to the United States.

It’s these kinds of projects — along with the way that solar and wind technologies are visually communicated by fossil fuel companies — that McCurdy hopes to explore during his 2017 sabbatical.

“I think it’s time we actually try to pick apart this persuasive communication which is a proxy, very much, for public debate,” he says.

“It really clouds our ability to think critically about these things and becomes a back-and-forth. That’s part of the reason for the comic, and part of the reason for the database is to have some stuff out there for the public as opposed to just tucking stuff away in peer-reviewed academic journals.”

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To no one’s surprise, there’s been an awfully wide range of responses to what caused the catastrophic Fort McMurray wildfires.

Some blame climate change. Others peg it on the El Niño and forest management techniques. Still more suggest that now’s simply not the time to be having such a conversation.

But the one thing that appears to unite all sides is “our” alleged complicity in it as North American consumers.

For instance, the National Post’s Jen Gerson argued in a May 5 piece: “We are all responsible for climate change. Fort McMurray simply produces some of the products we all consume.”

On the same day, Elizabeth Kolbert — author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe — wrote in the New Yorker: “We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility and then we need to do something about it.”

Such rhetoric is technically correct. There’s no question that if everyone on earth lived an average North American lifestyle, we’d need four planets to sustain the population.

But that’s only if we’re looking at “average” consumption rates.

As anyone who’s worked with stats before knows, averages can be very deceiving. In this case, language such as “we” or “our” can disguise a wide range of income and consumption habits that misplace levels of responsibility for climate change.

In the process, it assigns moral culpability for climate change to regular individuals rather than governments, corporations and wealthy North Americans.

“Think about the global justice movement: if you wore Nikes or blue jeans you weren’t allowed to protest neoliberalism,” says Patrick McCurdy, associate professor at University of Ottawa currently researching the evolution of oilsands advertising. “Then you look at the Occupy movement: if you owned an iPhone then you couldn’t be part of Occupy.”

“Now, it’s ‘she used oil so she can’t speak,’” he said. “It reinforces this binary of ‘who is empowered to speak?’”

Fossil Fuel Advertising Taken A Personal Turn In Recent Years

Recently, oil and gas companies and industry associations have harnessed such assumptions to attempt to make an airtight case for their continued unchecked growth.

McCurdy says the linking of the industry to lifestyle choices started in the 1960s with an Imperial Oil campaign suggesting “you have oil to thank for everything around you.”

Such rhetoric has spiked in frequency in the last few years.

McCurdy points to 2010 — the same year as the ruling on Syncrude’s responsibility for the death of 1,600 birds in its tailings pond — as the real beginning, with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers launching the Energy Citizens campaign and Canada Action gearing up for its I Love Oilsands media blitz.

McCurdy says both effectively dismiss critics by suggesting that if oil is at all implicated in one’s life and employment then one should support the industry (or at least not speak critically of it).

In 2014 Enbridge launched its Life Takes Energy campaign on TV, YouTube and most infamously in the The Walrus. Each ad sported a similar premise: everything “we” enjoy in life — baking, warm baths, Thanksgiving dinners — is linked to the oil and gas industry.

Focus On ‘Average’ Individual Behaviour Ignores Roles of Government and Business

McCurdy describes such advertising as “high-consumption, aspirational, Pinterest sort of images.”

That’s a key problem.

For, in addition to ignoring technological alternatives (public transit, geothermal heating, passive solar homes) and other ways of living life (Indigenous land-based communities or inner-city attempts at minimalism like No Impact Man), such visual rhetoric implies that oil and gas companies simply provide the goods that people demand to maintain their “average” lifestyles.

But it wasn’t “average” North Americans who knowingly spread climate misinformation, funded climate denying organizations, leased record amounts of land to oil and gas companies, invested in highways over public transit, created and maintained subsidies to fossil fuel companies and promoted the construction of pipelines and export facilities that will neutralize any emissions reductions made in other sectors.

“We live in a society in which responsibility for everything is being offloaded onto the individual,” says William Rees, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and originator of the “ecological footprint analysis.” “It’s this ‘there’s no such thing as society.’ That’s just not true. The real things, the real game-changers here, would be regulations imposed by government.”

Fossil Fuel Companies Have Met With Liberal Government Hundreds of Times

But the “we” rhetoric  conveniently ignores the incredible access that oil and gas companies have to government via ongoing lobbying efforts.

For instance, since the Liberals were elected in October, Suncor has met with federal officials 54 times, including three times with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Imperial Oil and Shell Canada have contributed an additional 37 and 38 meetings, respectively.

Industry organizations have also done their fair share of lobbying, including the Petroleum Services Association of Canada (52 meetings), Canadian Gas Association (45 times), the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association (44 meetings) and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (36 meetings).

‘Huge Difference’ In Emissions Levels Between Rich and Poor

Most Canadians simply don’t have that kind of pricey access to pressure governments to shape policies. Nor can many throw large amounts of money at political parties during campaigns or pay thousands for exclusive access to premiers at fundraisers.

In 2011, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported the ecological footprint of the top 10 per cent of income earners in Canada is close to two-and-a-half times greater than the lowest 10 per cent.

To meet the 2020 target of 25 per cent carbon emissions below 1990 levels, the richest quintile of Canadians would need to cut 51 per cent of emissions, while the lowest only 12 per cent.

In other words, while we’re all indeed consumers of fossil fuels, “owning up to our responsibility” will look very different depending on where we fall on the income spectrum.

“Even within rich countries there’s a huge difference,” Rees says.

“If you have an extra car or extra house or extra computer equipment you’re going to be far and away more consumptive than an ordinary joe.”

Rees notes that he has a friend who lives in Texas who drives an electric car and sports a complete solar array that provides all his electricity. But that friend takes one flight to Europe and “his share of that wipes out all of his savings.”

Of course, there’s a baseline consumption rate in North America, including emissions associated with military, agriculture and buildings.

This results in levels among the poorest North Americans that exceed those created by even the richest members of “emerging economies” like China and India.

But there are particular lifestyle choices available to the richest Canadians — flying around the world for vacation, owning multiple cars, living in a large suburban home and using energy-intensive electronics — that dramatically increase emissions rates.

Courtesy of the universalizing “we,” such consumers are partially let off the hook.

So while it may be simpler to write statements like “we are all responsible for climate change” than to call out a handful of powerful people and corporations who have access to policymakers via direct lobbying and campaign donations, it ignores the powerful role that governments can and probably should play in implementing regulations and price mechanisms.

If we really want to build a more equitable and sustainable society, cutting through the blithe “we’re all responsible” lingo is a must.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.