“If you want to protect the environment you’re an enemy of the state”
Claims that Alberta’s oil sands are environmentally harmless are “lies” David Schindler of the University of Alberta, one of this country’s most famous ecologists, said. “Why are people allowed to lie to the public like this? I just don’t understand this. We have to challenge them,” he said. “Obviously the people who used to challenge them, the civil servants, are no longer allowed to.”
At Fisheries and Oceans Canada “there’s nobody who knows any science in about the upper 10 levels of management ... They’re accountants, they’re business people.”
A few years ago, Schindler decided it was time to test claims that the oilsands industry is benign. He joined toxicologist Peter Hodson of Queen’s University and Jeff Short, a pollution chemist with experience from the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill. They took snow samples up and down the Athabasca River valley to see what airborne pollutants were falling, in an echo of old acid rain research. Melted down, the snow showed more toxins near the oilsands and downstream than in clean snow upstream. They published results in the journals Nature and PNAS.
“The samples near the oils ands actually had an oil scum floating on top of the melted snow,” said Schindler, showing a photo of oily droplets on water. Also, “when it starts to melt in the spring the snow turns black.”
Yet federal and Alberta politicians branded opposition the work of “radicals,” he said.
Claims that Alberta’s oil sands are environmentally harmless are “lies” David Schindler of the University of Alberta, one of this country’s most famous ecologists, said. “Why are people allowed to lie to the public like this? I just don’t understand this. We have to challenge them,” he said. “Obviously the people who used to challenge them, the civil servants, are no longer allowed to.”
At Fisheries and Oceans Canada “there’s nobody who knows any science in about the upper 10 levels of management ... They’re accountants, they’re business people.”
A few years ago, Schindler decided it was time to test claims that the oilsands industry is benign. He joined toxicologist Peter Hodson of Queen’s University and Jeff Short, a pollution chemist with experience from the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill. They took snow samples up and down the Athabasca River valley to see what airborne pollutants were falling, in an echo of old acid rain research. Melted down, the snow showed more toxins near the oilsands and downstream than in clean snow upstream. They published results in the journals Nature and PNAS.
“The samples near the oils ands actually had an oil scum floating on top of the melted snow,” said Schindler, showing a photo of oily droplets on water. Also, “when it starts to melt in the spring the snow turns black.”
Yet federal and Alberta politicians branded opposition the work of “radicals,” he said.
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