Bob Weber, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Published Thursday January 17th, 2008
EDMONTON - Ed Stelmach could soon have much bigger worries than the protester in a polar bear suit who waved an anti-oilsands sign during the Alberta premier’s visit to Washington, D.C., this week.
Some of the world’s most influential environmental organizations are targeting customers for the oilsands, the banks that finance them, the home offices of the multinationals that develop them and the refiners and pipeliners that move the product - and the Alberta government admits it’s falling behind in the public relations battle.
“This is now an international campaign,” said Liz Barratt-Brown of the Natural Resources Defence Council, one of the largest environmental organizations in the United States. “It’s certainly bigger than an Alberta issue.”
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Posted by mhudema on January 18, 2008
A heavy hauler pulls away from a hydraulic shovel at the Muskeg River mine site approximately 75km north of Fort McMurray. (CP / Adrian Wyld)
Updated Thu. Jan. 17 2008 8:58 PM ET
The Canadian Press
EDMONTON — Canada’s environmentalists and oil industry executives are playing a name game with what they want people to call the source of the sticky black bitumen that is processed into crude oil — tarsands or oilsands.
What’s at stake? The hearts and minds of the public, who in turn pressure governments to impose higher environmental standards for the growing number of multibillion-dollar bitumen extraction projects.
“We’re in the business of producing oil, so we feel that the term ‘oilsands’ is the most accurate depiction of what business we’re in,” says Alain Moore, spokesman for Syncrude Canada, the largest player in Alberta’s bitumen recovery business.
Environmentalists disagree. They paint the huge energy projects as a rape of the landscape and a major source of global warming emissions. Greenpeace activist Mike Hudema says “tarsands” is more accurate because bitumen is nothing like conventional oil and neither is the method used to take it from the ground.
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