Hypocrisy is nothing new; perfection exists only in our imagination or in the occasional saint.
Still, that fact is not the same as an excuse to abuse such reality to any end. Case in point? Co-operative Credit Investments, a United Kingdom-based credit union, has often slammed Canada’s oilsands. Its criticism includes a report that once proclaimed “such investments are both environmentally and economically unsustainable and can only serve to undermine international efforts to combat climate change.”
That was in a 2008 report Co-operative helped fund and publish with the World Wildlife Fund. Also, in an effort to show at least part of its shareholders’ money would be put where the bank executives’ mouths were, it then helped fund a legal challenge to the oilsands by partnering with Beaver Lake Cree, a northern Alberta First Nation that has sued the Alberta and federal governments and claims all sorts of deleterious effects from oilsands development.
There’s only one problem, at least for Co-operative Credit Investments: the U.K. bank and its funds invest in multiple projects that it publicly decries. For example, it owns tens of millions of dollars worth of stock in the French petro-giant Total, BP, Shell and plenty of other oilsands companies.
This rather large inconsistency is revealed by journalist, lawyer and soon-to-be-Sun TV host Ezra Levant in his new book, Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oilsands.
Levant, never one to back away from a good challenge, found himself in a conversation several years back with folk who thought the development of Alberta’s/Canada’s oilsands was the nearest thing to a secular hell on earth. So Levant being Levant decided to investigate the oilsands and write a book. In it, he forces readers to confront real-world choices.
The hypocrisy of investment fund managers such as Paul Monaghan and Colin Maines, two of the bankers at Co-operative, who have preached against the oilsands while their funds are heavily invested in the same (Total is the third-largest holding in one of their funds) are only some of the tidbits Levant offers up for readers.
Others include how Co-operative also invests in companies that own coal-fired plants, firms with nuclear reactors (including the rather famous Three Mile Island plant) and its UK Growth Trust fund with its largest holding in BG Group – which busily drills into the Arctic.
“Co-operative’s BG Group makes Sarah Palin look like a tree-hugger,” remarks Levant in one of his standard, to-the-point witticisms.
And here are some other factoids uncovered.
Greenpeace kowtows to the Chinese government, offering nary a serious environmental criticism of that political body on its China-based, Chinese-language site, while its English site would give one the opposite impression.
In fact, Greenpeace has gone as far as offering propaganda room to the Chinese government on Greenpeace letterhead to promote wind energy in China.
Beyond the Levant attack on hypocrisies found in duplicitous “ethical” funds or in some advocacy groups, the author’s most serious and salient points arrive when he reminds readers that until oil, coal and gas can be done away with, real-world choices in the interim come down to this: where should we, or Americans, who consume much energy, buy such products?
There are consequences to one’s answer. Saudi Arabia, a medieval, anti-liberal, anti-women, gay-killing repressive theocracy, has spent a sheikh’s fortune lobbying Washington, D.C.
“The Islamic oil kingdom had 11 different lobbying firms and public relations companies all aimed at keeping the White House and Congress friendly to America’s biggest Arab energy supplier,” writes Levant.
That might explain why the Saudi lobby has targeted Canada’s oilsands – because our oil is a threat to Saudi flows into the U.S. if Americans ever figure out which oil is more ethical: crude extracted in Canada’s north with a host of safeguards (and no, not perfectly as no extraction is harm-free) and accompanied by a plethora of human rights safeguards implicit and explicit in Canadian liberal democracy or oil from countries with little regard for environmental standards, human rights or much of anything else?
With a view to worldwide production of oil and the many questionable regimes that oversee such extraction, in comparison with boy scout Canada, Levant puts it this way: “Every drop of oil from Alberta is one less drop from some fascist theocracy, or some brutal warlord; one cent less into the treasuries of Russia’s secret police and al-Qaeda’s murderers.”
Is Canadian oil ethical? In a world with few boy scouts, yes, actually, it is.