Fuel for thought

With H2Oil, Montreal filmmaker Shannon
Walsh explores the Alberta oil sands’ threat
to the environment

DIRTY PLAYER: Tar sands refinery, from H2Oil

by MATTHEW HAYS

Now the largest industrial project in the world, the Athabasca oil sands project presents a massive dilemma for Canada. On the one hand, the oil in the sands is worth billions of dollars, and the oil is so plentiful that it has made Canada the number one supplier of oil to the U.S.

But the oil doesn’t come easily from the sands. For every barrel of oil extracted, it takes four barrels of clean water. And the oil sands’ carbon footprint can only be described as massive. When the polluted water has been through the process, it is dumped into tailings ponds—some of which are so huge, they can be seen from space. Living downstream from the ponds can prove treacherous, as nearby native communities have found, as they now grapple with unusually high cancer rates.

Simply put, the oil sands are an ongoing environmental calamity. And as Montrealer Shannon Walsh’s feature-length documentary H2Oil suggests, it is threatening Canada’s reputation as an international good guy. “Soon, Canadians are going to be ripping the flags off their backpacks when they go travelling,” Walsh says. She’s not kidding.

Critical distance

In 2006, Walsh, a doctoral student in anthropology and education at McGill, began learning more about the oil sands, and became intrigued. She had been studying issues around our rapidly depleting water supplies, and then started studying the oil sands, and saw the connections. What she found was that the oil sands touches on a vast number of different issues that we now face, including oil and water supply, the perils of an economy based on consumption, mistreatment of aboriginal people and why governments seem so hapless at addressing all of the above.

Walsh manages to fuse these questions in H2Oil, weaving together interviews with local residents, experts and government officials. And a pattern certainly emerges: there’s a whole lotta denial going on around the oil sands and their environmental impact, precisely because of the money that’s locked up in them.

“I find the entire argument around how much money they’re worth a really odd one,” Walsh contends. “After all, there’s no economy if there’s no environment to live in.”

Some of her interviews border on the surreal, with officials making bizarre statements about the environment. “It really did become absurd. It felt like an over-the-top comedy or something. At times I was like, ‘Okay, you’re joking, right?’ One person suggests that if we take the oil out of the earth, then that is actually helping to make the Earth cleaner. Others questioned the rising cancer rates, even though they’re fact.”

Walsh was also surprised at the level of collusion between the Alberta government and the oil industry. “What made it impossible for me to stop thinking about [the issue] was how little distance there was between industry and government,” she says. “I was in utter disbelief. I didn’t think I was going into it naively. Our elected officials aren’t doing the work for us.”

The release of Walsh’s film couldn’t be more timely, given the pending Copenhagen summit on global warming, and her film cites reports suggesting that the solutions floated by Prime Minister Harper won’t fly. The idea of compressing carbon emissions and then burying them beneath the earth, for example, has been widely discredited by scientists, who say the method has not been proven effective.

As Walsh points out in the film, another daunting question surrounds how the toxic mess left behind will be cleaned up. “It will cost huge sums to clean the pollution up. And the companies that are taking the oil aren’t going to pick up the bill for it—it’s going to be the taxpayer.”

Head in the tar

One of the people Walsh interviews in the film is native anti-oil sands activist George Poitras, who describes the Alberta government and the oil industry as “collaborators.” Contacted for this article, Poitras describes the Alberta oil sands as “the largest industrial project in the world—and the most destructive.”

Poitras acknowledges that many take a head-in-the-sand approach to the oil sands—with some seemingly incapable of grappling with the project’s epic fallout. “I think films like H2Oil have done a very good job of generating publicity about what the oil sands will mean,” he says. “They show the industry for what it really is. Alberta has been selling the oil sands as the silver bullet in the emerging energy crisis. They say it’s sustainable, but that’s far from the truth.

“The Conservative government has hinted that it will take such a weak position in Copenhagen. It’s a sad commentary about where we are.”

H2OIL OPENS FRIDAY, DEC. 4