This Changes Everything (53 page)

Industry and government, for their part, have been extremely reluctant to acknowledge, let alone act upon, the stepped-up risks of extreme
energy. For years, rail companies and officials have largely treated fracked oil from the Bakken as if it were the
same as conventional crude—never mind the mounting evidence that it is significantly more volatile. (After announcing some mostly voluntary new safety measures beginning in early 2014 that were generally deemed inadequate, U.S. regulators claim to be in the process of developing a variety of tougher rules for oil-by-rail transport.)
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Similarly, government and industry are pushing the vast expansion
of pipelines carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands despite a paucity of reliable, peer-reviewed research assessing whether dilbit, as diluted bitumen is called, is more prone to spill than conventional oil. But there is good reason for concern. As a joint 2011 report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and others notes, “There are many indications that dilbit
is significantly more corrosive to pipeline systems than conventional crude. For example, the Alberta pipeline system has had approximately sixteen times as many spills due to internal corrosion as the U.S. system. Yet, the safety and spill response standards used by the United States to regulate pipeline transport of bitumen are designed for conventional oil.”
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Meanwhile, there are huge gaps in our knowledge about how spilled tar sands oil behaves in water. Over the last decade, there have been few studies published on the subject, and almost all were commissioned by the oil industry. However, a recent investigation by Environment Canada contained several disturbing findings, including that diluted tar sands oil sinks in saltwater “when battered by
waves and mixed with sediments” (rather than floating on the ocean surface where it can be partially recovered) and that dispersants like those used during BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster have only “a limited effect,” according to a report in
The Globe and Mail
. And there has been virtually no formal research at all on the particular risks of transporting tar sands oil via truck or rail.
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Similarly,
large knowledge gaps exist in our understanding of the ecological and human health impact of the Alberta tar sands themselves, with their enormous open-pit mines, dump trucks that can reach up to five stories high, and roaring upgraders. In huge swaths of country surrounding Fort McMurray, ground zero of Canada’s bitumen boom, the boreal forest—once
a verdant, spongy bog—has been sucked dry of
life. Every few minutes, the rancid air is punctured by the sound of booming cannons, meant to keep migrating birds from landing on the strange liquid silver surface of the huge tailing ponds.
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In Alberta the centuries-old war to control nature is not a metaphor; it is a very real war, complete with artillery.

The oil companies, of course, say that they are using the safest methods of environmental
protection; that the vast tailings ponds are secure; that water is still safe to drink (though workers stick to bottled); that the land will soon be “reclaimed” and returned to moose and black bears (if any are still around). And despite years of complaints from First Nations communities like the Athabasca Chipewyan, situated downstream from the mines along the Athabasca River, industry
and government continued to insist that whatever organic contaminants are found in the river are “naturally occurring”—this is an oil-rich region after all.

To anyone who has witnessed the scale of the tar sands operation, the assurances seem implausible. The government has yet to establish a genuinely independent, comprehensive system for monitoring mining impacts on the surrounding watersheds—in
an industrial project whose total worth is approaching $500 billion. After it announced a flashy new federal-provincial monitoring program in 2012, the PR effort quickly spiraled out of its control. Referring to new findings from government and independent researchers, Bill Donahue, an environmental scientist with an advisory role in the program, said in February 2014 that “not only are those
tailings ponds leaking, but it looks like it is flowing pretty much from those tailings ponds, through the ground and into the Athabasca River.” He added: “So, there goes . . . that message we’ve been hearing about. ‘These tailings ponds are safe, they don’t leak,’ and so on.” In a separate incident, a team of government scientists with Environment Canada corroborated outside research on widespread
contamination of snow around tar sands operations, though
the Harper administration did its best to keep the researchers from speaking to the press.
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And there are still
no
comprehensive studies on the impacts of this pollution on human health. On the contrary, some who have chosen to speak out have faced severe reprisals. Most notable had been the experience of John O’Connor, a gentle, gray-bearded
family doctor who still speaks with an accent from his native Ireland. In 2003, O’Connor began to report that, while treating patients in Fort Chipewyan, he was coming across alarming numbers of cancers, including extremely rare and aggressive bile-duct malignancies. He quickly found himself under fire from federal health regulators, who filed several misconduct charges against him with the
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (including raising “undue alarm”). “I don’t know, personally, of any situation where a doctor has had to go through what I’ve gone through,” O’Connor has said of the reputational smears and the years spent fighting the allegations. He was, eventually, cleared of all charges and a subsequent investigation of cancer rates vindicated several of his warnings.
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But before that happened the message to other doctors was sent: a report commissioned by the Alberta Energy Regulator recently found a “marked reluctance to speak out” in the medical community about the health impact of the tar sands, with several interviewees pointing to Dr. O’Connor’s experience. (“Physicians are quite frankly afraid to diagnose health conditions linked to the oil and gas industry,”
concluded the toxicologist who authored the report.) It has become routine, moreover, for the federal government to prevent senior environmental and climate scientists from speaking to journalists about any environmentally sensitive subjects. (“I’m available when media relations says I’m available,” as one scientist told Postmedia.)
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And this is just one facet of what has become known as Prime
Minister Stephen Harper’s “war on science,” with environmental monitoring budgets relentlessly slashed, covering everything from oil spills and industrial air pollution to the broader impacts of climate change. Since 2008, more than two thousand scientists have lost their jobs as a result of the cuts.
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This is, of course, a strategy. Only by systematically failing to conduct basic research,
and silencing experts who are properly tasked to investigate health and environmental concerns, can industry and government con
tinue to make absurdly upbeat claims about how all is under control in the oil patch.
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A similar willful blindness pervades the rapid spread of hydraulic fracking. For years the U.S. gas industry responded to reports of contaminated water wells by insisting that there
was no scientific proof of any connection between fracking and the fact that residents living near gas drilling suddenly found they could set their tap water on fire. But the reason there was no evidence was because the industry had won an unprecedented exemption from federal monitoring and regulation—the so-called Halliburton Loophole, ushered in under the administration of George W. Bush. The
loophole exempted most fracking from regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, helping to ensure that companies did not have to report any of the chemicals they were injecting underground to the Environmental Protection Agency, while shielding their use of the riskiest chemicals from EPA oversight.
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And if no one knows what you are putting into the ground, it’s tough to make a definitive link
when those toxins start coming out of people’s taps.

And yet as more evidence emerges, it is coming down hard on one side. A growing body of independent, peer-reviewed studies is building the case that fracking puts drinking water, including aquifers, at risk. In July 2013, for instance, a Duke University–led paper analyzed dozens of drinking water wells in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus
Shale region. The researchers found that the level of contamination from methane, ethane, and propane closely correlated with proximity to wells for shale gas. The industry response is that this is just natural leakage in regions rich in gas (the same line that tar sands operators in Alberta used when organic pollutants are
found in the water there). But this study found that while methane was
present in most of the sampled water wells, the concentration was
six times higher
in those within a kilometer of a gas well. In a study not yet published, the Duke team also analyzed water wells in Texas that had been previously declared safe. There, they found that contrary to assurances from government and industry, methane levels in many wells exceeded the minimum safety level set by the U.S.
Geological Survey.
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The links between fracking and small earthquakes are also solidifying. In 2012, a University of Texas research scientist analyzed seismic activity from November 2009 to September 2011 over part of the huge Barnett Shale region in Texas, which lies under Fort Worth and parts of Dallas, and found the epicenters of sixty-seven small earthquakes.
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The most reliably located earthquakes
were within two miles of an injection well. A July 2013 study in the
Journal of Geophysical Research
linked fracking-related waste injection to 109 small earthquakes that took place in a single year around Youngstown, Ohio, where an earthquake had not been previously recorded since monitoring began in the eighteenth century. The lead researcher of a similar study, published in
Science
, explained,
“The fluids [in wastewater injection wells] are driving the faults to their tipping point.”
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All of this illustrates what is so unsettling about unconventional extraction methods. Conventional oil and gas drilling, as well as underground coal mining, are destructive, to be sure. But comparatively speaking, they are the fossil fuel equivalent of the surgeon’s scalpel—the carbon is extracted with
relatively small incisions. But extreme, or unconventional extraction takes a sledgehammer to the whole vicinity. When the sledgehammer strikes the surface of the land—as in the case of mountaintop coal removal and open-pit tar sands—the violence can be seen with the naked eye. But with fracking, deepwater drilling, and underground (“in situ”) tar sands extraction, the sledgehammer aims deep underground.
At first this can seem more benign, since the impacts are less visible. Yet over and over again, we are catching glimpses of how badly we are breaking critical parts of our ecosystems that our best experts have no idea how to fix.

In Blockadia outposts around the world, the initials “BP” act as a kind of mantra or invocation—shorthand for: whatever you do, take no extractive
company at its word. The initials mean that passivity and trust in the face of assurances about world-class technology and cutting-edge safety measures are recipes for flammable water in your faucet, an oil slick in your backyard, or a train explosion down the street.

Indeed, many Blockadia activists cite the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as either their political awakening, or the moment
they realized they absolutely had to win their various battles against extreme energy. The facts of that case are familiar but bear repeating. In what became the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, a state-of-the-art offshore oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers, while oil gushed from the ruptured Macondo wellhead about one and a half kilometers below the surface. What made the
strongest impression on the horrified public was not the tar-coated tourist beaches in Florida or the oil-soaked pelicans in Louisiana. It was the harrowing combination of the oil giant’s complete lack of preparedness for a blowout at those depths, as it scrambled for failed fix after failed fix, and the cluelessness of the government regulators and responders. Not only had regulators taken BP
at its word about the supposed safety of the operation, but government agencies were so ill-equipped to deal with the scale of the disaster that they allowed BP—the perpetrator—to be in charge of the cleanup. As the world watched, the experts were clearly making it up as they went along.

The investigations and lawsuits that followed revealed that a desire to save money had played an important
role in creating the conditions for the accident. For instance, as Washington raced to reestablish lost credibility, an investigation by a U.S. Interior Department agency found “BP’s cost or time saving decisions without considering contingencies and mitigation were contributing causes of the Macondo blowout.” A report from the specially created Presidential Oil Spill Commission similarly found,
“Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, [and its contractors] Halliburton and Transocean, made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).” Jackie
Savitz, a marine scientist and a vice president at the conservation group Oceana, was more direct: BP “put profits before precautions. They let dollar signs drive a culture
of risk-taking that led to this unacceptable outcome.”
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And any notion that this was a problem unique to BP was quickly dispelled when—only ten days after crews stopped the gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico—an Enbridge pipeline burst in Michigan, causing the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. The pipe ruptured in a tributary of the Kalamazoo River and quickly contaminated more than
fifty-five kilometers of waterways and wetlands with over one million gallons of oil, which left swans, muskrats, and turtles coated in black gunk. Homes were evacuated, local residents sickened, and onlookers watched “an alarming brown mist rise as river water the shade of a dark chocolate malt tumbled” over a local dam, according to one report.
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