Jun. 21, 2011 - Issue #818: Brian Wilson
Political Interference
Believe us
Lies, damned lies, and carbon capture
In a story that was neither broadly reported nor discussed, it was revealed last week that, starting in September, the Government of Alberta will spend half-a-million dollars on educating Albertans.
Before you get too excited, however, I should clarify. They are not talking about education in the sense of investing money in school boards to save teaching positions and keep class sizes down. This $500 000 investment will go toward educating Albertans about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology.
More specifically, it will "increase Albertans' knowledge about carbon capture and storage and its role in addressing climate change, as well as foster confidence that CCS projects are being managed in a safe and responsible way."
Apparently, the government is concerned that there is a lack of public support for its decision to hitch its entire climate-change strategy on CCS technology, and its commitment to give a $2 billion subsidy to private companies to set up commercial-scale CCS projects in Alberta.
The logic at play here, Alberta Energy's Lisa Elliot told the Calgary Herald last week, is that if people actually had "a balanced view of what CCS is about," they would no doubt get behind it and support the government wholeheartedly.
What the government seems to be missing is that perhaps Albertans already have a clear sense of what CCS is all about, and that's why they don't support it.
Here are the basics of CCS: you grab the CO2 at the smoke stack before it hits the atmosphere, you super compress it until it's a liquid, you build an expensive grid of pipelines around the province to transport that compressed CO2 to old oil wells where you inject it underground to get more oil out. The CO2 emissions are tucked away forever and we all get filthy stinking rich from all the extra oil we're getting.
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The cost of this type of technology is huge—there's a reason that industry is not doing anything about implementing it unless they can get a guarantee that the government will subsidize it. It's also a technology that has never been proven on this scale—a small controlled project at Weyburn is not enough to give Albertans confidence that it will work. A further concern is that the government felt the need to pass legislation last fall stating unequivocally that if any problems arose from storing the CO2 underground, it would be the government and taxpayers of Alberta that would be on the hook financially. Alberta is already a province with holes poked all over it, and new ones are being drilled daily—it boggles the mind to think how anyone could believe that if you put CO2 underground it will just stay put forever.
If this is the type of information that the government wants to pass on to Albertans, there are some good indicators that they've already got it. A good indicator of this is a recent CCS demonstration project near Calgary that had to be cancelled because the community expressed concerns about the environmental impacts of the project. Another good indicator is the fact that all of the province's opposition parties, from the NDs to the Wildrose Alliance, are opposed to the government's CCS strategy. The NDs because they don't believe it will actually work, and the Wildrose because they don't believe we should be giving a $2 billion subsidy to one of the world's most profitable industrial sectors.
Clearly the government's intent here is not so much to provide fair and balanced information to Albertans about CCS, but rather to launch yet another public relations campaign designed to change public opinion. It's no coincidence that the "education" campaign is scheduled to begin shortly before the government begins public consultations on carbon capture regulations. It's not the first time that this government has spent a considerable amount of money telling Albertans what to think before asking them what they think.
Despite the government's assertion that its focus on CCS is about addressing climate change, the literature makes it clear that it's first and foremost about getting more oil out of the ground, while trying to hide greenhouse gases instead of taking action to actually reduce emissions. What's especially disappointing is that even some of the province's environmental organizations, like the Pembina Institute, are supporting and actively participating in this strategy.
The government continues to focus on PR because it has worked in the past—effectively changing people's minds on Kyoto, health care and royalties just to name a few. It's high time someone actually called this government out on its arrogance in assuming that the reason people don't agree with it is because they are uneducated and misinformed. Albertans already know that CCS is not likely to work and will therefore be a waste of money, and hopefully no thinly-veiled propaganda campaign can change that. V
Ricardo Acuña is the executive director of the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan, public policy research institute housed at the University of Alberta.
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