Man Up, Oil Sands!

It's time to stop playing the victim and start going green. Also, please keep making us rich.

A Royal Society report on the environmental impact of the oil sands should lead environmentalists to finally shelve their rhetoric, according to the editors of the National Post. As far as the Post is concerned, claims that the oil sands are destroying the environment or causing cancer are effectively laid to rest. “If anything, it’s the environmentalists who are making people sick,” write the editors. They mean this quite literally, pointing to a section of the report that noted a “strong and recurring perception of potential cumulative health risks [related to the oil sands] which itself can lead to stress-related health issues.” With all due respect to the Royal Society and the Post, it seems a little harsh to blame your peptic ulcer on David Suzuki.

“The [report’s] most significant observation is the repeated failure by government to act,” says the Calgary Herald. It’s well and good that the report cleared up what the Herald calls the “misinformation and mythmaking” about the industry’s negative effects, but the paper's editors suggest the study be seen as a call to rectify the lack of oversight and disaster awareness from Edmonton and Ottawa.

The report won’t silence the industry’s critics, who point out that it was based on pre-existing studies and new evidence might reveal suspected links to cancer in local populations. But the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson has some sound advice for the oil sands if it wishes to improve its image once and for all: be like the forestry industry, and stop playing the victim. “A decade ago, [the forestry industry] was under assault,” he writes. Initially it “went into defensive mode. It claimed to be misunderstood and unappreciated. It talked about all the jobs the industry had created. It launched a public relations campaign. All to no avail.” Logging companies only muted their critics when they took a hard look at themselves and started aggressively researching ways to become more sustainable. Simpson says that by working with critics to develop greener policies, the oil sands industry could turn its image as an environmental boogeyman into that of a responsible, and lucrative, steward.