Alberta’s new government sings such high praises for the province’s oilpatch that one could be forgiven for getting the impression it’s become a lobbying arm for the industry.
Of course the government is not technically wrong to point out that our oil industry’s environmental track record ranks among the best on earth.
But that does not for one second mean that we cannot do even better, and that the job is done and we can all contentedly pat ourselves on the back and call it a day.
Because if we’re being honest with ourselves, there is plenty of room for improvement.
Being better than poorly regulated or unregulated places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or Nigeria is not the benchmark by which we should be measuring our success.
The fact is, the uncertainty of the future cleanup bill for abandoned wells and pipelines — estimates range from tens to more than 100 billion dollars — looms ominously overheard on the horizon, the elephant in the room that is being ignored. Adding insult to injury, there is, wishful thinking aside, no concrete plan — at all — to address this serious situation.
Even worse, out of all the lands exploited in the oilsands -- the result of which is growing toxic tailings ponds that cannot even be guaranteed not to seep into and contaminate surrounding groundwater -- barely a fraction has actually been reclaimed to a natural state.
If Indigenous communities up north universally celebrated the patch, instead of having a long history of expressing grievous concerns about the deteriorating quality of their water — the lifeblood of the their communities — it would be a different story.
But it sadly is not.
At some point, we’ll have to face the reality that our oil might not be quite as immaculately clean and perfect as many people apparently like to convince themselves.
And dismissing legitimate concerns as hysterical climate alarmism is a rather disingenuous deflection that amounts to ignoring problems that our descendants will have the misfortune of dealing with.
