In Canada, we hear that booze in airplane bottles is called a “mickey,” a 24-pack of beer is a “two-four” and the bathroom is called a “washroom.” And you might need all three, in a row, to get through reading this, as the popular phrase to describe the shameless self-promotion of dirty fossil fuels isn’t “clean coal,” but instead “ethical oil.”
If you’re wondering who thinks oil can be ethical, consider this tweet from Canada’s version of a rich, racist, rightwing former oil executive and extremely-online troll who loves spreading lies and seriously wants to hang environmental protestors named W. Brett Wilson: “The global energy industry is clearly growing. But the @NDP and @liberal_party coalition want to kill Canada’s energy industry. Hypocrisy and stupidity abound. Our hydrocarbons respect women and children and the environment. It’s ethical oil. Must participate….”
Yes, you read that correctly, apparently Canada shouldn’t try and do its part to reduce fossil fuel use, because its “hydrocarbons respect women and children and the environment” unlike, apparently, oil produced elsewhere in less-ethical places where there’s conflict or oppressive governments with poor human rights records.
This is, of course, very stupid, and it only took one person in the replies to let him know about how oil workers are engaging in sex trafficking, disappearing and killing Indigenous women, disrupting communities, and mockingly sexualizing an underage Greta Thunberg. So while you could pretend the hydrocarbons themselves are totally respectful to women and children, clearly the industry workers are… not.
And of course no hydrocarbons “respect” the environment, there is no environmentally-friendly fossil fuels except those that are kept in the ground. So where did this laughable line come from?
You may be surprised, but it turns out that “ethical oil” propaganda comes from the combined efforts of Ezra Levant and Thomas Ross. Levant isa Koch-fellowship-trained conservative Canadian pundit who was briefly a tobacco lobbyist and has been convicted of libel. Ross is a lawyer who is buddy with oil industry clients. Ross, with frontman and conservative politician Alykhan Velshi formed the “Ethical Oil Institute,” which is based on Levant’s falsehood-ridden book of the same name.
They’ve been pushing this oil propaganda for over a decade now, and in 2014 were exposed as being behind a website attacking Neil Young for his activism, because they are absolutely the worst and have no respect for living legends.
That same year saw the publication of an extensive examination of the claim of Canadian oil being “ethical” by Johanne Sanschagrin of the Department of Women And Gender Equality Canada.
“At this point,” Sanschagrin wrote, “it is pretty clear that there is no such thing as ethical oil.The ethical oil rhetoric is based on some flawed logic, where a country, generally perceived as relatively ‘ethical’, is assimilated to its export production, assuming that it necessarily produces and exports ‘ethical’ products. But to build an argument from such logic for this case, isn’t one required to confront the so-called ethical practices of the corporations developing Alberta’s oil sands?”
Just like how the US oil industry’s recently rebranded as a climate savior, Sanschagrin made it clear that “rebranding oil sands as ‘ethical’ does not make it ethical in any way. What is happening in the Alberta oil patch is not ethical at all; it is neither morally correct nor honorable. As it currently operates, oil sands development permanently damages local and regional ecosystem; it extends our dependency on fossil fuels; it adds to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide; it jeopardizes the opportunities of future generations; it does not respect aboriginal ways of life and the inherited obligation to preserve ancestral lands. No matter how we try to twist the rhetoric of ‘ethical oil’, we must conclude that oil sands exploitation has never been about ‘ethics’. Instead it has merely been about money.”
Quelle surprise!
