A news story yesterday told us that an international public relations firm has won the first stage of what will be a $22 million contract to promote the output of Canada’s tar sands. Natural Resources Canada has announced that the Ottawa office of Fleishman-Hilliard has been awarded an initial contract of $1.695 million to oversee the first phase of the program that is supposed to be directed at markets in Asia, Europe and the United States. The international public relations firm has been selected to promote Canada’s supposedly ‘responsible’ resource development in Alberta’s Athabasca Region tar sands and Canada’s faltering environmental record.
Exactly how the firm will deal with the growing environmental concerns with the Athabasca region exploitation is the question.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper told a New York business audience recently that he wants the Americans to set the standards for environmental protection so that Canada can just tag along. That sounds a bit more likely than the early statements that have been made that the government is waiting for the companies exploiting the tar sands to propose regulations. For more than two years now, promised deadlines for such regulations have been forgotten and ignored. This is the ‘responsible’ resource development that the public relations firm is supposed to promote.
This must be a serious challenge for a firm that promotes it self as believing in “true.”
It is obviously easier for the companies such as Shell and Chevron who are busy digging in the tar sands. It also seems easier for the pipeline companies that want to ship the bitumen output of the tar sands to where it can be loaded on tankers for world markets. They find it easier to lie.
The exploiters simply ignore the vast settling tanks of polluted fresh water that have been used to wash the sand from the bitumen. They like to call bitumen ‘heavy oil.’ While bitumen can be refined into synthetic oil, it is by no stretch ‘heavy oil.’ The bitumen coke residue of refining bitumen creates a carbon footprint that can march across continents. Europe is too environmentally conscious to welcome bitumen. The United States does not want it. Asia will take it, if the price is right.
Fleishman-Hilliard has its work cut out. Maybe, a few millennia from now, as our world shrivels to dust in the fading glow of a dying sun, we will need to use bitumen energy as the remaining humans prepare to give up the planet that nurtured them. That will be our saddest farewell.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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