What a great review of Ethical Oil in today's Toronto Star.
I'm a conservative. The newspaper is liberal. So how did it happen?
It happened, I think, because Ethical Oil makes the case for the oilsands using progressive arguments: it compares the oilsands to OPEC countries using liberal values like environmentalism, peace, fair wages and respect for minorities.
So of course the Star prefers Canadian ethics to Saudi or Iranian or Nigerian ethics.
Poseurs like Greenpeace hate that apples-to-apples comparison. They want an apples-to-oranges comparison, comparing the oilsands against some perfect fuel that hasn't been invented yet, that has no industrial side effects whatsoever. In other words, they are living in a science fiction world. They're not morally serious.
You can't fill up your car's gastank with solar panels or windmills or cold fusion or dilithium crystals. It's Canadian ethical oil, or Saudi terrorist oil.
The question isn't "why did the Star like the book?" The question is: "what the hell is wrong with Greenpeace, and where did they lose their way?"
...If country-of-origin labelling applied to oil the way it does to food and clothes, Levant says, American motorists would ignore the gas pump marked “Saudi Arabia” and line up at one marked “Canada.”
...“How does Iran’s treatment of women compare to Fort McMurray’s?” Levant asks rhetorically of Alberta’s main oilsands town. As a single mother living with her fiancé, the town’s top politician, Mayor Melissa Blake, “would be stoned to death in Iran,” he says.
...In his sweeping study, Levant finds hypocrisy in ethical funds, misinformation in a cancer scare, blindness toward China’s environmental scandals, untallied carbon emissions in supertanker shipping and an unbalanced perception of the oilsands’ risk to birds, after 1,600 birds drowned in a tailings pond when the scarecrow system failed.
...Fort McMurray might not be utopia, he says at his publisher’s office.
“But the air,” he says, “is fresher than in Toronto.”
