Oilsands foes ready hostile reception for Harper in D.C.

Sheldon Alberts, September 14, 2009, CanWest News, WASHINGTON — A coalition of North American environmental groups plans to welcome Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Washington this week with an advertising blitz targeting Alberta's oilsands and Ottawa's climate change policy.

"Our top line message is that Canada's tarsands are inconsistent with President Obama's clean energy vision," says Gillian McEachern, senior climate campaigner at ForestEthics.

Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Harper, said the prime minister plans to use his meeting with President Barack Obama on Wednesday "to continue to promote Canada as a secure and stable supply of energy" to the United States.

To coincide with Harper's visit to the White House, McEachern's group, along with the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), have bought ads in the online editions of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico.com, a website well read among lawmakers in the U.S. capital.

The spot contends Harper's goal is to "keep America addicted to oil" and seeks to undermine U.S. climate change legislation by campaigning to block any measures that would hinder oilsands exports.

"As elected leader, he denied climate change. Now he's pushing Big Oil's latest trick," says the ad, which features an image of Harper in a cowboy hat.

In conjunction with Harper's visit, the environmental groups are also distributing anti-oil sands DVDs to Capitol Hill lawmakers involved in negotiations on a final climate change bill. They also plan to hand out copies of the video to tourists outside the White House during Harper's visit.

It's the latest salvo in a long — and expensive — public relations war being waged by environmentalists, the oil industry and governments in Canada over the carbon-intensive oilsands.

Canada has sought alliances with Obama on the climate file, particularly by launching the Clean Energy Dialogue following Harper's February summit with Obama in Ottawa.

"We haven't seen anything come out of that. It's really a technical information exchange process," says Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of the Canada program at NRDC.

Both the Harper government and the government of Alberta, meantime, have protested efforts in several states and on Capitol Hill designed to limit American imports of oil derived from oilsands, which have higher life cycle emissions of carbon dioxide than conventional oil.

To date, efforts to include oilsands-specific measures in U.S. climate legislation have failed.

Earlier this year, Congress stripped plans to include a low carbon fuel standard in climate change legislation approved by the House of Representatives — a development welcomed by Ottawa.

"The fact Harper is trying to paint himself as akin to President Obama on climate change is misleading," says McEachern.

Meanwhile in Canada, a new report from Greenpeace says the oilsands have made Canada into a "global carbon bully."

The report, called Dirty Oil: How The Tar Sands Are Fuelling the Global Climate Crisis, contends that the oilsands release more greenhouse emissions per year than several small European countries, and by 2020, more than what's produced by Austria or Ireland.

"Canada is now one of the world's leading emitters of GHGs (greenhouse gas), and a global defender of dirty fuels," writes author Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary-based writer who last year published Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent.

Canada's emissions from greenhouse gases have increased by more than 26 per cent since 1990. Canada's goal is to reduce emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020, a target that environmental groups say falls far short of what Canada must do to combat climate change.

"This report shows how Canada is not doing its part in the fight against climate change — in fact, it is allowing foreign oil companies to massively invest in the tarsands," said Virginie Lambert-Ferry of Greenpeace Quebec.

Extracting oil from the tarsands requires "extreme" amounts of hydrogen, electricity, steam, hot water, diesel fuel and natural gas, Nikiforuk writes. To meet future energy needs in the oilsands, several companies have already said they are interested in building nuclear reactors in northern Alberta to provide the energy needed to extract oil.