Canadian conservationists plot protests over oil sands

CALGARY, Alberta -- Conservationists will be rolling out an advertising campaign and dispatching polar-bear-suit-clad protesters this week in an attempt to derail Alberta's mission to Washington that is aimed at propping up the province's environmental image south of the border.Ron Stevens, Alberta's deputy premier and Minister of International and Intergovernmental Relations, said he will stress his province's commitment to "environmentally sustainable development of the oil sands" when he meets with U.S. government officials, industry representatives and policy analysts this week.But he will also be trailed by protesters and a full-page newspaper ad featuring an oil-soaked maple leaf that describes Canada's oil sands as a major contributor to global warming and a supplier to the United States of the "world's dirtiest oil."The $12,000 ad that will run Tuesday in Roll Call, a Washington newspaper that specializes in political news, is backed by a coalition of environmental groups, which also criticize Alberta's soon to be launched $25 million advertising campaign aimed at improving the province's "brand" and "perception.""We can't compete with a $25 million PR budget that the Alberta government's allocated to try and convince lawmakers in Washington that everything's okay," said Aaron Freeman, policy director of the Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based advocacy group that is backing the U.S. advertising."But at the end of the day, we don't need that kind of budget because you can't paint a black hole green and the tar sands is a very big, black hole."Industry plans to spend $100 billion over the next decade in northern Alberta's oil sands with an eye to tripling oil production. Meanwhile, a fraction of that has been spent on developing clean and renewable energy. Still, Stevens plans to tell U.S. officials about Alberta's commitment to clean energy, its greenhouse-gas-reduction policy and its $148-million investment in developing technology that could capture and store emissions. ForestEthics, an international non-profit environmental group also behind the ad, is promising to don polar bear suits as they follow the Alberta delegation."We have bad climate policy in Canada largely because of the tar sands," said Gillian McEachern, who campaigns on climate and boreal forest issues. "The federal government can act to clean it up."Critics also want to ensure that new U.S. energy legislation designed to cut down consumption of fuel derived from dirty sources will apply to the oil sands. But Stevens will be lobbying so that new fuel requirement in the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act doesn't affect Alberta, which is a major energy exporter to the United States.Mark Cooper, a spokesman traveling with the deputy premier, said there's "no doubt" Alberta needs to do more on the environmental front, but this mission aims to "correct the myths, inaccuracies and distortions" about the province's record. "We're not going to allow props and polar bear suits to get in the way of telling the true story," he said.A "stop the tar sands" campaign dogged Premier Ed Stelmach's provincial election campaign this year and public opinion polls routinely show concern about the rapid pace of development, but his Progressive Conservative Party still won in a landslide, grabbing 72 of the legislature's 83 seats.Still, attacks on government and industry are not relenting.At the Premier's fundraising dinner in Edmonton last week, two Greenpeace members descended from the rafters and unfurled a banner that read, "$telmach: the best Premier oil money can buy" as 1,000 party faithful looked on.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)