Global Research
Click to read this article in your browser.
As we know, big lies can run free across borders with few joining the dots.
For
example, no media reports that China’s growing dispute with Canada is
based on Canada’s enforcement of the Trump administration’s unilateral
and illegal embargo against oil-competitor Iran. A cynical reply is that
this is predictable. Canada attacks any designated US Enemy in junior
partnership with global corporate command.
But this time there is a new twist. Canada is attacking itself without knowing it.
A
US Big-Oil backed juggernaut of Conservative provincial governments and
the federal Opposition are well advanced in a Canada campaign to
reverse longstanding parliamentary decisions, environmental laws,
climate action initiatives, Supreme Court directions, first-nations
negotiations, and bring down the government of Canada. Yet no-one in
public or media circles has joined the dots.
Canada’s
vast tar-sands deposits are world famous as surpassing Saudi Arabia
oil-field capacities in total barrels of potential yield. Great Canada!
Yet few notice that over two-thirds of the entire tar-sands operations
are owned by foreign entities sending their profits out of Canada, and
almost all its raw product is controlled for refining and sale in the
US.
What
is especially kept out of the daily news is the incendiary fact that
the infamous, election-interfering Koch brothers have a dominant stake
in the toxic crude of the Alberta tar-sands seeking a massive
BC-pipeline out to their US refineries.
Koch-owned
industries have already extracted countless billions of their near
$100-billion fortune from the tar-sands and deployed their well-known
voter-manipulations to change the balance of power in Canada as they
have done in the US.
The
objective is the same in both cases – ever more tax-free, publicly
subsidized and state-enforced control by US Big Oil of Alberta’s massive
oil resources with no government regulations or interferences in the
way.
A Short History of the Background Facts
Prior
to the wide-mouth pipelines of toxic Alberta crude planned through BC
mountains, lands and waters to US processors, oil has to be extracted
from the tar-sands first. This demands a continuous gargantuan
depleting and polluting of the great Athabaska Lake, River and watershed
to steam-boil the tar out of the vast open-pit mines. The immense
open-pit mines are not formed or pumped out of desert as in the Middle
East. They are torn in state-size chunks out of the earth’s mantle by
monstrous wrecking machines ripping out the boreal forest lands by the
roots to destroy the carbons sinks and water-hold stabilization they
provide in the Northern region as well as pump out ever more
climate-changing gases.
Lake Athabasca (Public Domain)
To
boil the tar out of the endless open-pit mines already demands the
equivalent of twice the amount of water the entire City of Calgary uses
and recycles in a year. But water consumed by the tar-sand boiling is
permanently polluted and wasted, and its fresh- water take from the
great Athabaska watershed will only increase as the tar-sands
‘development’ is maximized, accessible oil fields are exhausted and
prices rise. So too the annihilation of the boreal forests acting as a
sink for carbon and holding the watershed together will be permanently
lost.
Yet
this is only the beginning of what ends up being the biggest single
point-source of carbon pollution and climate destabilization in the
world. It pollutes 2.5 times more carbon gases than natural oil.
Extraction mechanisms cost almost 8-times more fossil fuels than natural
oil, and use overall almost as much energy as is produced!
For
many years now, the Kochs have made most of their vast fortune
from processing billions of barrels of tar-sand crude in the US, not
Canada. This is why their octopi funding fronts have relentlessly pushed
for ever more pipelines through others’ lands (including Dakota’s
indigenous Standing Rock) to control this bigger and safer business than
tar-sand extraction itself.
This
is also why the Kochs have led the huge financing of climate change
denial against the known science, in which tar-sand extractions and
burning produce far more toxic carbon gases than high-grade oil. Most of
all, the Kochs have acted out of sight to ensure control over elected
governments that might regulate and control their
above-the-law activities. They spent more than the Republican Party
itself on the 2012 US elections.
They
invented and funded the Congress-upending Tea-Party, and finance
endless attack ads against all resisters to their will to dominate the
US Congress and Senate (and behind the scenes the Trump presidency).
Canada’s Love-in With US Big Oil as ‘Alberta’ and ‘National Unity’
In
Canada, the governing corporate media and parties have had such a
media-transmitted love-in with Big Oil that even Alberta’s NDP Premier Rachel Notley militantly
demanded over years that the US-dominated tar-sands mega project
receive ever more rights and public subsidies to run its toxic tar-sand
crude over neighboring BC mountains and the inland whale-inhabited ocean
channels as a moral obligation to Alberta.
Source: Shutterstock
The
spell of ‘national unity’ to sell Alberta’s US-controlled oil sands is
not broken even as the forest fires and floods in BC and Ontario rage
beyond all records from the fossil-carbon-destabilized climate. Now six
new pro-developer premiers of Canada and the leader of the federal
opposition are shouting that any more delays to the Big-Oil pipelines
are “breaking up the country”.
US
Big Oil led by the Kochs’ political war chest and already covertly
dominating the US Senate and Presidency, has long gotten its way by such
polarizing propaganda. Yet in Canada the line is swallowed whole and
spread by the national media as the “unity crisis” facing the country.
Big Oil’s crucial step in putting the tar-sands into the driver’s seat of Canada politics has
been gone beneath the radar. First of all it assumes a premise which
no-one questions that all all the toxic raw product must be piped
through Canada unprocessed “to market” (i.e., US refineries), and that
Canada must duly enforce this off-shore refinement “as a national
priority”. Once this full false premise is established as a given, it
follows that the toxic Alberta crude must be piped raw across the BC
mountain forests and aquifers, and then into its paradisal inland ocean
channels for oil-tanker transport – now demanding a rising and rarely
mentioned seven-times more oil-tanker traffic with toxic product that
cannot be cleaned up.
Any
‘delays’ to this (never named) US-Big-Oil agenda with Canada juniors
are then attacked as against ‘national unity’. They are called
‘illogical’ and ‘punishing Alberta’- even when the time is legally
required for amending legislation that has been ordered by the Supreme
Court of Canada and for negotiating with the first nations whose lands
and waters will be overrun by the the dirty-oil project in a period of
‘national reconciliation’.
In
fact, the governing premises here are lawless and driven by what the
Kochs specialize in – a fanatic anti-government agenda claiming to be
for tax-payers and citizens. The rule of law is implicitly dismissed.
Carbon pricing legislated by elected government – which sane oil
corporations now accept as economically required – is ferociously
attacked.
Even
Parliament’s long-passed Bill C-48 protecting the Northern BC Coast
from heavy oil-tanker traffic (tankers carrying over 10,500 metric tons
of tar-sand crude) – a bill supported and voted for by over two-thirds
of MP’s – is attacked in the Senate of Canada backed by Big Oil and
Alberta.
Thus
the single most important legal protection of Canada’s greatest
environmental treasure, one that has been the negotiated decision of
Parliament and a condition for the oil-pipe through BC, is marked for
elimination. The federal Conservative Party goes along, and its
ever-smiling leader Andrew Scheer has promised if elected in the
approaching federal election to abolish Bill C-48.
The
worst part of the whole multiplying Big-Oil tar-sands mega-project may
be the mammoth toxin-filled tankers ploughing through and despoiling the
world’s most awe-inspiring green inland coasts in BC. It is like the
Vietnam coast in this sublime natural beauty, but even more than
Vietnam, it is an ecological paradise carrying a world of
whales, eagles, biodiverse life and breathtaking music of nature with
thriving indigenous peoples protecting the environment since ancient
times in a breathtaking music of life from rising green peaks to the
fish depths of the ocean.
That
the current Big Oil forces, Alberta Conservatives, the federal
Conservative Party, many in the Senate of Canada, and various corporate
media and fronts are all seeking to reverse the already-legislated Bill
C-48 protection of even the Northern BC coasts from this grossest abuse
of majestic life and beauty at every level and scale of Creation
demonstrates how cancerous the Big Oil tar-sands mega-project has
become.
Yet
in the unseen, historic shell-game going on behind the scenes, there is
a convenient perpetual side-show of attacks on PM Trudeau whose
unforgiveable sin is not to push the oil-pipes and tankers through
BC fast enough.
Led
by Jason Kenney as Premier and the so-far invisible Koch brothers, the
Conservative Party across provinces and federally has formed into an
implicit war against any public control over and regulation of Big Oil.
Any legal impediment to the massively toxic extraction and export
through Canada’s most pristine natural environments to US control,
refineries and far more profitable foreign sale is reverse portrayed as
an attack on Alberta and a strike at Canada’s unity as a country.
The
assumed absolute necessity of this pipeline and tanker extension of the
multiplying tar-sands project is,in fact, the demand of US-led Big Oil
to loot and pollute Canada’s natural resources for value added in the US
(including for oil sale back to Canada at multiplied prices). Yet
every politician is supine before the transnational Big Oil powers
involved. Even Liberal leader Stephan Dionne who won the Liberal
leadership in 2006 on an environmental platform dared not question the
Koch-led tar-sands mega-project. “There is too much money in it”, he
responded to environmentalist concerns.
With
all these unseen premises against Canada’s common life interests now
cast as inalterable necessity, the trap is well set. As a federal
election must occur before October 21, all the wheels are being oiled
for Conservative toppling of the Liberal government and override of any
resistance to the biggest force-play of US-led Big Oil in Canada’s
history.
The Unspeakable Contradiction: Jobs, Environment, and Prosperity Lost by Raw-Crude Pipeline and US Refinement
No-one yet recognizes the
Koch-led US Big Oil plan to extract Saudi-like treasure from Canada’s
boreal forests and to transport its toxic crude through and out of
Canada with ever-rising environmental damages at all levels
is actually throwing away all the Alberta “jobs”, “investment”, “tax
revenues” and “prosperity” which it promises to deliver. All of these
economic benefits would actually materialize and multiply many times if
the tar-sands were processed and refined for Canadian, US and global
sale inside Alberta.
Most
ironic of all, the biggest immediate danger of Alberta tar-sand crude
is that is irreversibly toxic because it is not processed first before
transportation over land, aquifers, shorelands, and inland ocean
channels. This is what the BC resistance on the ground is most motivated
by – the irreversibly disastrous consequences when this unprocessed
toxic crude spills anywhere along the rocky, ocean-tempest way. The
spills are an historically demonstrated certitude, but like climate
destabilization itself are denied by the Big-Oil beneficiaries in future
tens of billions in private profit.
As
always in the ruling narrative, there is ‘no alternative’. ‘It must be
done now to create jobs and get product to market’. Astonishingly,
no-one in government or the mass media observes the fact that many more
well-paying permanent jobs, far more oil revenues, and infinitely more
safety from tar-oil spills and dirty-oil carbon effluents are assured by
processing the raw bitumen in Alberta itself.
On
closer examination not yet considered, the political stampede for the
trans-mountain pipeline of toxic Alberta crude through the BC mountains
and coastal waterways is based on a very big lie. If Alberta and
Canada’s government, globally competitive Canada oil firms and working
people reallywant to “create jobs”, “get product to market’, “achieve
environmental security”, “provide needed investment and revenues for
the Canadian people”, and “reduce climate-destabilizing gases” the
option is economically self-evident.
Process
the tar-sand product in Canada and Alberta where the uncleanable toxins
can be stripped out first by rigorous regulation and safely
precautions before flooded through huge breakable pipes across
mountains, aquifers, forests, and ocean coasts and the world-renowned
lands and waters of a 5000-year-old ecological wonder larger and more
unspoiled than any in the world.
Yet
just as climate science does not matter to rogue Big Oil, so too the
prevention of toxic Alberta crude running through Canada by processing
it in Canada first is erased from discussion. No public voice even
mentions the environmental risks of pipelining the toxic crude through
the mountains and coats of BC when it could be cleaned up in Alberta
first. None yet flags all the lost Canadian fortune and economic
development going down the drain by raw-crude pipelines straight to the
control, refineries and global sale of foreign Big-Oil
multi-billionnaires like the Koch brothers. As for the foreign
interference in Canada’s elections manipulating every step, no-one
reports this either.
For
what? The driver is not “jobs and prosperity”, “creating and sharing
wealth”, and “making the indigenous people independent” (what a Canada
Senator incredibly just wrote to me). The truth is the opposite on every
count. Tens of thousands of high-paying jobs, escalated tax revenues,
immense new domestic profits and investment opportunities are now all
wasted for Canada by letting four times more of the value-added go South
to US Big Oil management, refineries and high-grade global sales.
The
real driver here is dispossession of Canada’s workers, first peoples,
taxpayers and the common wealth by ever more multi-billion private
profits extracted from its public lands at the lowest oil-royalties in
the world to further enrich the already obscenely rich who are mostly
not tax payers and are, in effect, lead destroyers of the life support
capacities of the planet.
*
Note
to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this
article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet
forums. etc.
John McMurtry is
University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph and elected
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His work has been translated from
Latin America through Europe to Japan, and he is the author/editor of
UNESCO’s three-volume Philosophy and World Problems as well as The
Cancer Stage of Capitalism; From Crisis to Cure.
Featured image: Creative Commons
***
Can you help us keep
up the work we do? Namely, bring you the important news overlooked or
censored by the mainstream media and fight the corporate and government
propaganda, the purpose of which is, more than ever, to “fabricate
consent” and advocate war for profit.
We thank all the readers who have contributed to our work by making donations or becoming members.
If you have the means to make a small or substantial donation to contribute to our fight for truth, peace and justice around the world, your gesture would be much appreciated.
