The Truthiness of Ethical Oil

Questioning the coherence of the oily campaign and the self-serving proponents behind it.

We really didn't want to have to weigh in any further on this imbecilic dust-up between the “Ethical Oil” campaign and the government of Saudi Arabia, but apparently, there's still air that needs clearing. Much of the stink emanates from this Sun chain editorial, which celebrates EthicalOil.org's “fact-filled and unspun” ad (as if those ought to be lauded and not just de riguer) calling Saudi oil unethical because in the Kingdom of Saud, women can't drive, vote, or even leave the house without a man. The Saudis then wrote to the Television Bureau of Canada telling them to ban the ad, and two networks have followed suit. “But not Sun News Network,” say the editorialists in their continuing attempts at cross-branding. “Sun News and Sun Media have the balls to stick to its principles, with Sun News defiantly still airing the ad.” Wow! What defenders of freedom we have here! If having “balls” means airing an ad that totally glosses over the oil sands' degradation of northern Alberta's environment, and Canadian oil companies' complicity in funding such “bastard” regimes as Bashar al-Assad's in Syria, then by all means, Sun chain, you have two big oil-drenched...we digress.

Tasha Kheiriddin of the National Post is similarly supportive of the Ethical Oil campaign (which is the brainchild of former Conservative spinmaster Alykhan Velshi but was made a household phrase by Sun Media personality Ezra Levant), but is more nuanced in how she approaches it. “The ethical thing to do is not to eschew all fossil fuels, but to make choices between their sources, just as we have done with other products,” says Kheiriddin, noting the effectiveness of other boycotts, for example in ending South African apartheid or improving work conditions at Nike factories. And that's an entirely fair point. Her colleague, Jonathan Kay, however bats away the notion that we even have any choice over where our oil comes from. “Even if Westerners tune in to the messaging at EthicalOil.org and then demand that their local gas stations purge all Saudi-origin content from their supply chain, there won't be a single Saudi Sheik who loses a nickel,” says Kay. “If you want to hurt the Saudis, there is one thing you can do: Depress the global demand for oil by using less of it.” Otherwise, you're just needlessly poking an oil-rich bear with a stick while obfuscating the very essence of what it means to act “ethically”.

Thankfully, Canadian Business' Chris MacDonald, who conveniently runs the magazine's business ethics blog, observes that posing one type of oil as ethical and another as not is a bit of a false equivalency. “We could look at this as a matter of "'choose your poison',” says MacDonald. “Do you want the oil that's associated with human rights violations, or the oil that's associated with environmental destruction?” And since we can't choose where our oil comes from, “it's a moot point,” anyway. It just would have been a lot easier getting to this conclusion if it didn't take a minor international incident between two of the world's largest petroleum producers over a snarky, misguided and self-serving (ahem, Sun News) ad campaign.