CDN NEWS | 
US NEWS 
By David Yager
Fake news has played a major role in the continuing economic challenges facing Alberta. As more people comprehend the degree to which intentional disinformation is shaping the future, Alberta should offer itself as a case study of how much damage decades of fake news can create.
After branding it as the dirtiest petroleum on Earth, targeted negative propaganda has resulted in the vilification of the oil sands as a major threat to the climate. The cost to Alberta has been massive, particularly grating when considering the indifference to the other 97 million barrels produced worldwide each day.
Fake news has also led to the growing belief by far too many that fossil fuels is a sunset industry, so Albertans can and should do something else. All we need is enlightened political will and we can replace hydrocarbons with renewables. Frequently and disingenuously labelled a “just” transition, everyone will be better off.
It is amazing and regrettable that false information can have such a destructive impact. But how it works was clearly explained by former federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in a Screech-fueled video rant in a bar in St. John’s NL that was posted on Twitter (and later removed).
When discussing if it was true that St. John’s was the oldest city in North America, McKenna said, “But you know, I actually gave them some real advice. I said that if you actually say it louder, we’ve learned in the House of Commons, if you repeat it, if you say it louder, if that is your talking point, people will totally believe it. So go (with) it; St. John’s, oldest city.”
Now you know.
Fake news is a new entry into the official political lexicon of the 21st century. Popularized by US President Donald Trump after his 2016 election win, the Cambridge English Dictionary’s on-line edition defines fake news as follows; “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.”
Except that fake news is rarely funny.
Recognizing a growing public appetite to learn more, HBO released a documentary earlier this year titled, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. It is a serious and weighty work that runs for 95 minutes.
Focused on US politics, it highlights several events that attracted widespread media attention and public interest that were, according to the producers, complete fabrications.
The most egregious was called the Comet Ping Pong incident, named after a Washington DC pizzeria. During the 2016 US election campaign, a rumor began circulating that Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was associated with a child slavery/prostitution ring working out of a secret room in the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant.
This made the rounds for weeks on social media. Finally, an angry, gun-packing concerned citizen from North Carolina drove to the capital to personally shut down this abhorrent activity. Brandishing his assault rifle, he entered the building, demanded the customers leave, then inspected the premises looking for the room in which the abuse was taking place.
By this time the police were alerted and surrounded the restaurant. Finding nothing unusual, the gunman surrendered. Thinking he was going to be a hero, he had recorded and narrated the entire event including the drive to the US capital. His footage is used in the movie.
Other fake news events that went from fiction to fact (for many) included a secret US military training exercise in Texas in 2015 that was branded as the Obama administration practicing to lock up dissidents; how a senior Democratic campaign worker was murdered by his own party during the 2016 election; that the Sandy Hook grade school mass shooting in 2012 was staged and never happened; and that Russian election interference investigator Robert Mueller had committed sexual assault.
The movie itself is political. It alleges the original creators of political fake news were Republicans, but it also featured Democrats confessing to inventing completely fabricated stories and narratives to win state elections.
What choice did they have? Let the Republicans win? The end always justifies the means.
Fake news has become so commonplace that a new term has been invented to identify the stuff that is super fake. Called “deepfake”, this uses artificial intelligence to create digital images of well-known and important people saying things they have never said. With what sounds like their own voice. Feed a few videos into a computer and what comes out can be anybody saying whatever the programmer commands.
A May 25 article in Forbes is titled, Deepfakes Are Going To Wreak Havoc On Society. We Are Not Prepared. It starts with the story of a computer-generated TV ad in which the upcoming 2020 election outcome was correctly predicted in 1998. It was popular but controversial. Where would this go next?
The early deepfake images were clumsy and easy to detect. But the technology is advancing quickly and it is getting harder to tell the fakes from the real thing. The article speculates on the potential damages.
“It does not require much imagination to grasp the harm that could be done if entire populations can be shown fabricated videos that they believe are real. Imagine deepfake footage of a politician engaging in bribery or sexual assault right before an election; or of U.S. soldiers committing atrocities against civilians overseas; or of President Trump declaring the launch of nuclear weapons against North Korea. In a world where even some uncertainty exists as to whether such clips are authentic, the consequences could be catastrophic.”
The article quotes US Senator Marco Rubio. “In the old days, if you wanted to threaten the United States, you needed 10 aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles. Today….all you need is the ability to produce a very realistic fake video that could undermine our elections, that could throw our country into tremendous crisis internally and weaken us deeply.”
As the understanding of fake news grows, people increasingly appreciate that much of what they see and hear is not true. But there is also a default acceptance if you sympathize or agree with the message. Depending on the moral righteousness of the cause, the end justifies the means.
Alberta and its oil sands producers know how much damage can be done with hyperbole, exaggerated claims, the internet and a public growing increasingly concerned about climate change.
When I wrote From Miracle to Menace, Alberta – A Carbon Story, as the title suggests I wanted to learn how major oil producer Alberta could so quickly go from hero to zero. With no rules and with the self-appointed critics of fossil fuels wrapped in their shrouds of righteous climate salvation, I learned anybody could say anything and make it headline news.
And they did.
In 1988, Dr. James Hansen from NASA and other scientists testified before a senate committee investigating global warming. According to a New York Times report, Hansen stated he was 99% certain the cause was the continuous buildup of GHGs. I wrote in my book, “The article continued that by 2025 to 2050 if the current buildup of GHGs continues, ‘the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7o to 5oC)…the result would be a major increase in ocean levels as the ice caps melted. Inland, droughts would cause water levels in the Great Lakes to decline.’”
It’s a bit early, but thirty-two years later NASA reports the world is only 1oC warmer since 1880 which included four distinct cooling trends, and the oceans have risen only about one inch in a near-linear fashion in the same period. Many believed that Hansen’s intentions were noble, and still do.
By 2011 Hansen had become an outspoken and relentless critic of the Keystone XL pipeline and Alberta’s oil sands. He wrote the New York Times, “…if Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate. Canada’s tar sands…contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.” If it were fully developed (which will never happen) the oil sands, along with oil, gas and coal, would increase CO2 levels that would “…eventually reach higher levels than the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when the sea level was at least 50 feet higher that it is now.”
US Climate activist Bill McKibben, recently discredited in the Michael Moore movie Planet of the Humans, was very aggressive in persuading US President Barack Obama to cancel construction of Keystone XL. In 2015 McKibben wrote, “The Keystone pipeline would also be a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet…”
Opposing oil sands became an industry among environmental activists. The now infamous Tar Sands Campaign emerged in 2008 to institutionalize the vilification of one specific type of oil. This spread to Europe when at one point the EU considered an oil sands import ban, for the good of the world of course.
Following the 2010 rupture of an oil pipeline in Michigan, the story was created that the pipe burst because oil sands producers were so greedy they didn’t take the sand out of mined bitumen so it literally wore holes in the steel from the inside. Opponents of Trans Mountain and Northern Gateway popularized the story that bitumen didn’t float, therefore a tanker spill on the west coast would be incredibly devastating and impossible to clean up.
The carbon content of oil sands was so high it had to be stopped first. Serious research coined “wells to wheels” included all factors including methane emissions from flaring or venting, which is common among producers of lighter crude grades in regions without gas pipelines or markets. Early last year the Permian Basin alone was flaring 900 mmcf/day, apparently enough waste gas to heat 2 million homes in the US.
According to Earth System Data Science, major oil producers like Russia, US, Venezuela, Iran and UAE emit much more methane while producing oil than does Canada, thus increasing their total carbon footprint. Incomplete combustion when flaring or venting releases large amounts of methane.
But nobody boycotts or campaigns against their oil. Like McKenna advised us, just keep repeating that oil sands are worse than awful and watch what happens.
And it worked. The best way to contain the oil sands was to kill pipelines. Facing relentless opposition, Keystone XL and Northern Gateway were cancelled, Trans Mountain was opposed until Ottawa had to buy it, and Energy East died in part due to fierce opposition in Quebec which continues today.
Alberta has been clobbered. With no secure and predictable market access, international oil sands investors exited the province. As production grew but pipeline capacity did not, Alberta has been plagued with massive oil price discounts ever since. Up until the COVID-19 mess Alberta’s oil output was still curtailed to support prices.
Sensing significant public displeasure with the success oil sands opponents have enjoyed vilifying and obstructing Alberta’s most valuable single resource, during the last election UCP leader Jason Kenney promised a “war room” to fight back with the truth once elected. This was a popular promise.
Yet since the Canadian Energy Centre (CEC) was launched, it has become the subject of near-continuous criticism from multiple quarters. One of the more sanctimonious attacks surrounds how the $30 million could much better spent on health care and education.
The fact is that if fighting fake news about the oil sands somehow resulted in a $1 a barrel improvement in the price of Alberta oil, the war room investment would be recovered every two weeks, or 26 times a year. If we could fetch $10 more a barrel, the costs would be recovered every 18 hours.
The other frequently proposed but never quantified fake news nugget spread by the left is that oil is dead, and society can and should make the painless, beneficial and “just” transition to renewables through political will and enlightened central planning.
This the essence of the Green New Deal popular among US Democrats and similar to the Leap Manifesto, the Canadian version which has been pitched to the NDP as official policy.
The Leap Manifesto reads, “Canada’s record on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future … We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequity.”
How we’re going to get cost-effective, wind and solar-powered electric train service to High Level and the rest of rural Canada when Greyhound won’t even run buses any longer is never explained, nor does anyone bother to ask.
That Alberta should quit producing oil and retrain its workers in renewable energy is common advice from environmentalists and the left. But Alberta exists in its current form because it exports most of its oil and gas production. Of the 3.91 million b/d of oil produced in 2018, only 365,000 b/d was consumed locally as gasoline and diesel fuel. The rest is traded for cash across North America.
Renewables are primarily for electricity, but the people who buy our hydrocarbons already have lots. It is not economic or even physically possible to export interruptible wind and solar electricity from Alberta to Ontario, Quebec, California, Midwest America or the Gulf of Mexico.
Fact free lunacy. What makes it worse is our fellow Canadians – who don’t understand the intricacies of energy – support policies and positions that hurt western Canadians and the entire economy without comprehending the enormity of the consequences.
The US version, the Green New Deal, states it will be “… a new national, social, industrial and economic mobilization not seen since World War II …” The program will “…create millions of good, high wage jobs in the United States … and provide unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security …”.
The myths live on, and Alberta suffers. US Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden recently delivered a fake news double whammy by promising to kill Keystone XL yet again. Not only would this save Americans and the world from more toxic Alberta oil sands, but it was intended to appeal to the Democratic anti-oil Green New Deal voter base.
The US has enjoyed a powerful and measurable economic resurgence thanks to shale gas and light tight oil which have kept jobs and investment up and domestic energy prices down. This has given America a significant competitive advantage over other manufacturing countries in Europe and even China. Cheap gas has also allowed the US to become the world leader in emission reductions by replacing coal for power generation.
But as we learned in HBO’s movie, this isn’t about facts. This is about political power. And whatever collateral damage it may cause is irrelevant.
Alberta is uniquely and unfortunately positioned to know more than anyone should about the influence and damage of fake news. We would be well advised to do more to mitigate this problem than trashing the CEC, tangible evidence that somebody understands the challenge and is trying to do something about it.
Unless you don’t support Kenney or the UCP, then the CEC is a waste of money.
And so it goes.
David Yager is an oil service executive, energy policy analyst and author of From Miracle to Menace – Alberta, A Carbon Story. More at www.miracletomenace.ca
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