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Albertans need to stand up for oil sands

I just finished reading Ezra Levant’s latest book “Ethical Oil” and love him or hate him no one can take away Ezra’s passion or his intelligence. As an Albertan I take great exception to those out there who paint our oil sands with a “dirty” brush.

I just finished reading Ezra Levant’s latest book “Ethical Oil” and love him or hate him no one can take away Ezra’s passion or his intelligence.

As an Albertan I take great exception to those out there who paint our oil sands with a “dirty” brush. Levant has the same view and he walks through the whole anti-oil sands rhetoric step by step.

I think it is the highest level of hypocrisy for groups like Greenpeace to climb on their high horse and chastise our oil for being dirty. As Levant points out in his latest offering the Greenpeace industry (now a multimillion dollar business) has made a living out of attacking western interests. Groups like this have done an exceptional job of promoting this, we buy into the David Suzuki, Al Gore mentality without much of a second thought. It is far too easy to point the environmental finger our way, but what about ethics and human rights? Where does the U.S. and to some extent eastern Canada get their oil?

They buy oil from dictatorships who murder their own citizens on the street, as we have witnessed in Libya in the last few weeks. They buy oil from countries that treat women like second class citizens and bankrolled the 9/11 terrorist attacks, yes I am talking about Saudi Arabia. In reality, the number of oil producing democracies is tiny compared to the autocratic or dictatorial countries that produce oil. No one wants to talk about the moral, ethical side of oil they just want to focus on the environmental side. How can we, in good conscience, look the other way while still doing business with the likes of Victor Chavez of Venezuela? I will try to give the reader’s digest version.

Can you imagine the “Greenpeaces” of the world heading into the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to set up a campaign with the national media to stop the abuse of women. They won’t of course because the media is controlled by the same group that oppresses women. It is not like Greenpeace will get funding there either — I don’t know of any bleeding heart sheiks. Perhaps they should go into Libya and get Moammar Khadafy to let his citizens have a democracy. Again it’s not likely you see the environmental lobby groups there because they simply value their lives.

So then why not target Canada? They don’t have a state run media, they actually allow freedom of speech and it’s pretty easy to stir up things there. Not only that, there is no worry about being shot in the street, or imprisoned because you are critical of the government. In fact, you can force ethical oil companies to pay big dollars to try and appease the multitude of theoretical issues we bring forward.

We have to watch the ethical funds as well, it sounds so logical because we love to get behind the fair trade companies of the world. At least on the surface these groups seem to be above board, but when we get into income statements and balance sheets we see some of the investments at the end of the day are far from ethical.

They criticize the tar sands but still have investment in all the major players involved with the project, but claim their venture in these corporations is made to have influence over day-to-day activity.

I think you are likely getting my point by now. Levant has put arguments like these, and many others to get us thinking in a different direction. As for the idea Albertans are the environmental bogeyman I echo Preston Manning who said, “conserve is the root word of conservative” and last time I checked we were fairly conservative around here.

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