Recent announcements by Kimberley council and the RDEK highlight an issue that few people, even the councilors, understand enough to make well informed decisions. The price for our municipalities, hospitals and school boards to become carbon neutral is likely in the hundereds of thousands of dollars and will continue to erode the budgets for years to come. So why are local governments, school boards and other companies having to spend precious funds on such a controversial issue? In 2007 then Premier Gordon Campbell took us down the Al Gore school of climate change with the British Columbia Climate Action Charter. The idea behind the charter was sound to reduce the emissions and look for ways to be greener in how governments operate. Had they stopped there and looked at ways to reduce emissions as opposed to set unrealistic carbon neutral deadlines it would have gained public favour. They set in place a bureaucracy that feeds off money those schools, hospitals and municipalities can ill afford to spend. Elected officials can buy offsets, at an inflated price, from Pacific Carbon Trust, a crown corporation to keep their commitment to be carbon neutral by 2012. The PCT has a list of approved projects that they invest in at a devalued price. The Darkwoods project in Creston is the only project in the Kootenays on the PCT list hence the RDEK funding to Darkwoods. Kimberley made the right decision and held back the $38,000 that they committed to spending on carbon offsets yet the RDEK cut a cheque to Darkwoods for $18,000. The RDEK board could have refused to pay with no consequence but fely committed. Had they looked a little deeper into the Darkwoods project they would may have made a different decision. In my mind and many others, carbon offsets are hurting our economy at a level that is not sustainable. The funds that are given to Pacific Carbon Trust are in essence green money laundering of funds that could be better spent locally. Our local councils and boards need to pull their “commitment”from the Climate Action Charter” and use the funds for local projects like Kimberley has done, it just makes common sense.
One does not have to search too deeply into the internet to see that others feel the same about the PCT and carbon offsets.
Below is an article on the carbon offsets and why the RDEK should have thought twice before giving giving the funds to the PCT and subsequently to Darkwoods. Thank you for reading the article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues – to help educate people in the Kootenays about the other side of issues.
Paul Visentin
Member of the Thinktwice group
BC's Strange Business of Carbon Offsets
Hospitals and schools must pay the Pacific Carbon Trust, but what are they really buying?
It is spun in government press releases as a "first" for any jurisdiction in North America, an achievement that places British Columbia "on the leading edge" of efforts to combat climate change. But scratch the surface just a little, and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake's recent claim that "from this point forward, every government building in our province will be carbon neutral." Since it is almost impossible for government buildings -- cash-strapped schools and hospitals among them -- to not be net consumers of energy and therefore net greenhouse gas emitters, purchasing carbon credits to allegedly counteract those emissions is essential to the province's claim to carbon neutrality and its self-anointed status as continental environmental leader. By law, the provincial government requires institutions to buy those credits from just one entity -- the Pacific Carbon Trust or PCT, a Crown corporation set up for specifically that purpose. This gives the PCT a monopoly position for a segment of the carbon market, which at present is largely a voluntary market dominated by private sector carbon sellers and buyers.Bob Simpson, Independent MLA for Cariboo North, says not only is the PCT's monopoly position hurting cash-strapped school districts and health authorities that are forced to pay the PCT as much as four times more money than they would otherwise pay for the same credits from a private credit marketer, but the legitimacy of a good number of the credits that the PCT has bought and sold may be of questionable merit as well.
'Money from kids and patients': MLA Simpson
An examination of the PCT's "2010 Carbon Neutral Government Portfolio" published in June of this year reveals that fully 55 per cent of the 729,782 tonnes worth of carbon offsets that it has purchased and marketed to meet the provincial government's "carbon neutral" goal for 2010, came from just one project known as Darkwoods, a chunkof privately owned forest land purchased three years ago by the Nature Conservancy of Canada when, Simpson says, the PCT "was nothing more than a just fledgling organization." Simpson also says that the project does not appear to meet the PCT's own standards for qualifying carbon offset projects. That standard is known as additionally. Part of the additionally test is that any project supported by the PCT must face "economic, investment or technological barriers to implementation that are overcome or partially overcome by the money from the sale of offsets." "The trust must prove that without its money this purchase would not have happened and therefore the credits would not have been generated. I don't buy that in this case," Simpson says. "And we're talking money from kids and patients to make this happen?"
Mark-up is not transparent
As a matter of policy, PCT does not disclose what it pays for its carbon credit purchases, says its managing director of business development, David Moffat. However, enough facts are known about the Darkwoods project to give a good idea. The sale of the credits was announced June 8 in a jointly issued press release that included the NCC and PCT. The press release notes that the NCC as "Canada's leading private land conservation organization", had just completed the largest ever forest carbon project to date in North America, with the successful marketing of 700,000 tonnes of carbon credits. The sale of the credits not only raised the bar for conservation in Canada, the press release claims, but it "contributes in excess of $4 million for NCC's conservation work." Based on the number of credits sold and the selling price, the sale worked out to roughly $5.70 a tonne. While PCT will not disclose what it paid for the 403,112 tonnes of credits it purchased from the NCC, the price that PCT's captive public sector "clients" are required to pay is known. That price is $25 a tonne, or more than four times the average price generated from the Darkwoods carbon credit sale, meaning that public sector entities including school districts and health authorities will fork out $10.07 million to help meet the government's carbon neutrality goals.And that's just the beginning of where things get murky from a public policy perspective.
Darkwoods billed as 'immense carbon sink'
Just how much additional carbon has actually been stored at Darkwoods since the NCC stepped in to purchase them in 2008? Well, it turns out the answer to that question is, at best, hypothetical. Here's why. Darkwoods encompasses 55,000 hectares of land between the communities of Creston, Salmo and Nelson in B.C.'s Kootenay region. The lands also border a lengthy strip of Kootenay Lake's shoreline, and cut deep into mountainous terrain. For decades prior to the NCC purchase, the lands were logged under the ownership of a German aristocrat, Duke Carl Herzog von Wurtemberg.
In July 2008, the NCC announced that it had purchased the extensive parcel of private forestland -- a rarity in B.C. where 94 per cent of land is publicly owned -- for $125 million (a price that included projected future management and carrying costs of $385,000 per year, of which $150,000 was property taxes.) On its website, the NCC hailed the purchase as "the largest single private land" conservation acquisition in Canadian history. The group benefited enormously from a $25 million contribution toward the purchase from the federal government. In announcing the purchase, the NCC highlighted the climatic benefits of a conserved Darkwoods estate, saying its forests represented "an immense carbon sink" of some two million tonnes -- an amount "equal to the annual carbon footprint of nearly half a million Canadians." It also clearly stated that its vision for the property was one that could fairly be characterized as "business as usual" for an organization dedicated to protecting biological diversity. (This is important because according to PCT standards a successful offset project must demonstrate an "incremental benefit" in terms of carbon storage and cannot be "the outcome of business as usual.") "Darkwoods," NCC president and CEO John Louds said at the time, is "part of a greater vision that will set new standards for conservation success." What the NCC didn't say then was that it wished to turn that green asset into greenbacks, and plenty of them. By monetizing the carbon storage capacity of Darkwoods, the NCC could in effect have its very own green ATM generating cash to help it pay for Darkwoods and other conservation acquisitions.
Worth of offsets based on hypotheticals
And here's where things get murkier, because while Darkwoods' trees had pulled a great deal of carbon out of the atmosphere and stored it in their trunks, branches and needles, the incremental or additional carbon stored would be relatively small based on a "business as usual" conservation approach. "Harnessing the power of the carbon market," became NCC's goal and that of its advisors Ecosystem Restoration Associates or ERA, a Vancouver-based company described as a "pioneer" in the development of forest-based carbon offsets, and 3GreenTree Ecosystem Services, a Vancouver company billed as a "full service forest ecosystem asset development, acquisition and management company." To boost the future market worth of Darkwoods, a strategy was hatched that cast into the future and honed in on a hypothetical situation in which an entity other than NCC succeeded in buying Darkwoods. This hypothetical buyer then embarked on a massive, unsustainable logging operation as well as subdividing tracts of land for resale to wealthy individuals wanting their own little slice of lakeside paradise; in general a company intent on making off like bandits to the delight of its short-sighted, profit-driven shareholders. The scenario is outlined in a voluminous "project description" posted on the Verified Carbon Standard website. VCS self describes itself as founded in 2005 "by business and environmental leaders." Its stated mission is to "ensure that carbon credits bought by businesses and consumers can be trusted and have real environmental benefits."
This hypothetical situation then became the "baseline" against which NCC's light-handed approach would be judged. A hypothetical logging rate was assigned the phantom company and set at 300,000 cubic metres per year -- a cubic metre equalling one telephone pole's worth of wood. By comparison, the NCC said it would engage in only low levels of logging to a maximum of 10,000 cubic metres per year for "conservation and management" purposes. The difference between the hypothetical baseline rate and the NCC's proposed rate then served as the basis for calculating additional carbon storage. This scenario was ultimately given a green thumbs up by, among others, Scientific Certification Systems, a third-party "validator" of the Darkwoods carbon project. The company's senior vice-president, Robert Hrubes, hailed the "unique methodology" developed by the carbon project team and said he believed it "will benefit the entire carbon industry."
How credible are the calculations?
The hypothetical rate, however, represented an astonishing increase over what had actually occurred on the same lands over decades. Searches of a provincial government database on logging rates reveal that the company managing Darkwoods -- Pluto Darkwoods Corp. -- logged nearly 396,500 cubic metres of timber between 2001 and 2007, the last full year of operations before NCC took over. That worked out to an average of just 56,631 cubic metres per year, less than one-fifth of the hypothetical rate used to generate those $4 million worth of carbon credits. Tom Swann, the NCC's associate regional vice president for British Columbia, maintains that Pluto's logging record was not indicative of most private forest land owners and that the company's logging rates were "well below what they could have been doing if they were a commercial logging company." That was because the aristocratic German owner placed a higher premium on conserving forests, and therefore chose to log less than others might. Be that as it may, Simpson remains concerned that a conservation organization buying lands with the express purpose of conserving them should on the basis of a hypothetical scenario involving liquidation logging by someone else then be able to lay claim to millions of dollars worth of credits, many of which are paid for by tax dollars directed to public institutions, which are then clawed back. And he is not alone in worrying about the precedents this sets. NDP environment critic Rob Fleming, says the government's carbon neutral claim has achieved very little in terms of actual greenhouse gas emissions reductions, which are "a tiny part of the overall total."
Furthermore, Fleming says, the requirement to buy credits from the PCT applies only to government buildings, which represent less than one per cent of the total greenhouse gas emissions sources in the province, leaving unaddressed the emissions from big industrial emitters. Meanwhile, the same document outlining the hypothetical industrial logging rate that generated all of the carbon credits generated at Darkwoods and subsequently purchased by the PCT notes that for decades running the NCC hopes to market large numbers of additional credits -- 400,704 credits, on average, per year over just the next 10 years alone, which based on the NCC's most recent carbon credit sale would be worth another $2.28 million per year.
Whether the PCT will buy more such credits in future years to meet the government's future "carbon neutral" goals remains to be seen. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png)
A few weeks ago, Dennis Avery and I visited the oil sands project with several CFACT colleagues – and saw for ourselves how baseless these charges are. In this article, Dennis addresses several of the most common denunciations of oil sands operations, but focuses on the woods bison that happily graze amid the mining operation, and on the amazing reclamation work being done in this area, several hundred miles north of Edmonton, Alberta.
Thank you for posting his article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
(Editor: Dennis Avery can also be reached at 540-337-6354 or by email: cgfi@mgwnet.com)
Paul Driessen Senior policy advisor, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
Woods bison, muskeg swamps and Canadian oil sands prove energy and wildlife coexist
Dennis T. Avery
The last woods bison in the United States was apparently shot by a hunter in West Virginia around 1835. For many decades, the woods bison was presumed extinct – until an airplane spotted an isolated herd in the muskeg swamps north of Alberta, Canada.
My farm is near a Virginia village called Buffalo Gap, documenting the existence of these ”buffalos” long ago and this far south. These cousins of the Great Plains bison prefer wooded areas and they’re much larger than the species hunted by the Sioux Indians and Buffalo Bill.
So I was delighted to actually see another herd of the nearly extinct animals calmly munching on hay – right in the middle of the oil sands mining project in northern Alberta, which I visited a few weeks ago. Much of this oil is destined for the USA, to reduce imports from dictatorships, and more will come in the Keystone XL Pipeline, if President Obama ever approves it.
The bison living at the oil sands recovery site are direct descendents of the remnant herd found in 1957. They were busily browsing about 300 yards from a huge diesel shovel that loads 400 tons of oily sand at a time into a lineup of huge trucks. The trucks carry the sand toward a giant “cooker” where the oil is steamed out.
Then they haul the now-clean sand to an enormous pile where it is reserved for later reclamation work. Even the topsoil that covered the sand is set aside to recreate the hillocks, ponds and swamps much as they were before mining.
Once a sizable area of the enormous oil sands deposit has been cooked, and the oil has been further processed for shipment via pipeline, the sand and topsoil are put back into the mined area. The Canadian government resumes title to the land when its habitat and wildlife experts have ensured that each wilderness recovery is complete and sustainable.
The only thing missing is the smell, taste and ooze of oil, which has always permeated the local soils and often seeped into local streams. There was absolutely no noticeable oil or diesel smell anywhere at the mine, except inside one of the wellhead control buildings we visited. That’s where you would certainly expect to find it, but even there it was minimal.
The bison seem willing to“loan” this moving five-square-mile of surface mine (what some environmental activists prefer to call an “open wound”) in the midst of their vast muskeg swamp. They certainly don’t let it spoil their lunch or breeding. They may even sense that the intrusion is only temporary.
This part of Alberta features spindly black spruce and tamarack trees, intermingled with the muskeg--sphagnum moss and sedge grasses. It’s actually about 40 percent water, when you add up the ponds, lakes, streams and marshy areas. It isn’t much to look at, but it harbors lots of beaver, wolves that prey on the beaver and, hopefully soon, wild herds of woods bison that will continue to grow in number.
The open pit mining cycle travels slowly, with about 25 years of mining followed by another 25 years for complete site restoration. The miners and drillers bring up their own processing water from deep brackish groundwater formations, and they’re increasingly reusing the water.
The tar sands are a geological marvel: an 84,000 square miles deposit – an area the size of Kansas – but the sand is soaked with 5–25 percent heavy petroleum. In total, the Alberta sands are estimated to contain 169 billion barrels of oil, making it one of the largest petroleum deposits in the world. Experts say the oil sands’ operations could produce 465,000 U.S. jobs in construction, refining, petrochemicals and other sectors by 2035, if President Obama finally lets the Keystone XL pipeline go forward.
Where the sand is near the surface, as in the woods bison area, it’s mined with huge shovels and trucks. However, 98 percent of the oil sands lie in a thick bed 200 to 400 feet below the surface. That oil is recovered via drilling and steam injection.
Crews drill a pair of wells a precise five feet apart – one above the other. Each well goes straight down about 150 feet, and then turns to run horizontally for about a mile! Steam is pumped into the upper line. It escapes through perforations in the pipe, then heats and liquefies the oil. The hot liquid oil drips down to the lower pipeline, where more perforations collect the petroleum and pump it to the surface.
The steam recovery units occupy clearings in the muskeg forest, each several miles apart, and covering only about two football fields’ worth of land. These “wounds” also move slowly over the years. As each section of oil sands is steam-cleaned of about 75 percent of its petroleum, the drilling, steam and processing pad is vacated. Then it’s turned back into muskeg and forest.
Eco-activists loudly decry the oil sands, but it’s hard to understand why. If 84,000 square miles of wildlife habitat was being permanently converted to fields of corn and switchgrass for biofuels, I’d understand their concern about lost habitat. Taking that much land out of food crops has radically raised the price of corn, and thus of all the world’s meats, dairy products, corn syrup, tortillas. Even bread.
Instead of high-cost biofuels, the tar sands produce enormous quantities of petroleum for transportation, petrochemicals – and for the fertilizers and diesel fuel needed to produce high-yield crops on the world’s prime soils.
This modern farming method has saved nearly 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat (nearly twice the area of the entire United States) over the past 50 years. The high-tech farmers do this by raising far more food per acre than any other farmers in all history. To cap it all off, the tar sands’ pipeline product has a greenhouse gas profile much like that of Arab Medium, one of the oil market mainstays: in other words, not many greenhouse gases.
The activists have made a big mistake in offering the public only solar and wind energy. Both are costly, land-intensive, erratic and unreliable – and incapable of supporting our cities and farms. Biofuels are even worse. They use enormous quantities of water and sharply increase food costs for the world’s poor.
If the Greens had supported nuclear power, which emits no CO2 at all, they might have already won their battle over using coal and natural gas to generate electricity.
As it is, the activists risk losing their credibility on energy and other issues, by opposing virtually every technology that has been developed to benefit humans, wildlife and the environment.
_____________
Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 2442; email to cgfi@mgwnet.com; and visit his website at www.cgfi.org
Perverse environmentalist oil sands ethics
Opposition to the Canadian oil sands and Keystone Pipeline reflects debased moral code
It’s high time we evaluated oil sands development and the Keystone pipeline on environmental and ethical grounds that compare them to real world alternatives to them – not to utopian energy resources that exists only in the minds of idealists, ideologues and special interest environmental pressure groups.
Of course, that’s the last thing those pressure groups … and their
“ethical” investor fund comrades … want to see happen. Which is why this article
is an important election season wake-up call.
Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your
friends and colleagues.
Paul Driessen,
Senior Policy Advisor, Committee For A
Constructive Tomorrow
The duplicity and hypocrisy of
environmental pressure groups seem to be matched only by their consummate skill
at manipulating public opinion, amassing political power, securing
taxpayer-funded government grants, and persuading people to send them money and
invest in “ethical” stock funds.
In the annals of “green” campaigns, those
against biotechnology, DDT and Alar are especially prominent. To those we
should now add the well-orchestrated campaigns against Canadian oil sands and
the Keystone XL
Pipeline.
Oil has been seeping out of Northern
Alberta soils and river banks for millennia. Native Americans used the bitumen
to waterproof canoes, early explorers smelled and wrote about it, and
“entrepreneurs” used it in “mineral waters” and “medicinal elixirs.”
Today, increasingly high-tech
operations are extracting
the precious hydrocarbons to fuel modern living standards in Canada and the
United States. Enormous excavator/loading shovels and trucks used in open pits
during the early years are giving way to drilling rigs, steam injection,
electric heaters, pipes and other technologies to penetrate, liquefy and extract
the petroleum.
The new techniques impact far less land
surface, use and recycle brackish water, and emit fewer air pollutants and
(plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide every year. Water use for Alberta oil
extraction is a tiny fraction of what’s needed to grow corn and convert it into
ethanol that gets a third less mileage per gallon than gasoline. Affected lands
are returned to forest and native grasslands at a surprising pace. And the
operations are removing oil that would otherwise end up in local air and water.
Instead of requiring perpetual subsidies,
á la the “renewable” technologies
that President Obama intends to redouble if he is reelected, the oil sands
generate vast sums in royalties and taxes: an anticipated $690 billion into
federal and provincial coffers all across Canada over the life of the project.
That’s on top of tens of thousands of jobs of every description, including
nearly 2,000 Native Canadians (Aboriginals), whose communities have enjoyed
soaring living standards since the operations were launched. In fact, the oil
sands project will ultimately generate 11,219,000 person-years of high-paying
employment from Alberta to British Columbia, Ontario and the Maritime Provinces,
say government sources.
This North American oil is displacing
millions of barrels of annual US oil imports from some of the least savory
countries on Earth, while adding billions of barrels a year to planetary
petroleum production, and thereby keeping world oil prices lower than they would
otherwise be.
These are huge benefits. The oil sands
project is hardly perfect. It causes environmental impacts, just as all human
enterprises do, especially those that provide energy. Indeed, even fantasy fuel
projects – wind, solar and biofuel boondoggles that provide comparatively
minuscule amounts of energy, but require billions in taxpayer subsidies – have
enormous ecological impacts.Here’s the most important point:
Canada’s oil sands (and the Keystone
Pipeline that will bring their petroleum to the United States) must be evaluated
on environmental and ethical grounds that compare them to real world
alternatives to them – not to some utopian energy resource that exists only in
the minds of idealists, ideologues and special interest environmental pressure
groups.
These critics viciously attack Alberta and
the oil sands industry – accusing them of “blood oil,” environmental devastation
and unethical practices. In reality, oil sands petroleum is among the most
ethical and ecological on Earth, especially when compared to real-world
alternatives like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, Russia, Ecuador and
Venezuela, whose human rights violations, terrorism sponsorship and reckless
environmental records are legendary. And yet oil sands critics give them a free
pass, while heaping opprobrium on Canada.
Whole Foods says oil sands fuel “does not
fit our values.” Perhaps the grocer and its “ethical” colleagues prefer values
espoused in alternative oil-supplying nations on rights of women, children, gays
and foreign housekeepers; stoning, lashing and lopping off hands and heads;
treatment of civilians during wars in Chechnya and Darfur; massacres and
environmental degradation in the Nigerian delta region; rigged elections and
Swiss bank accounts for oil proceeds; or treatment of aboriginals, minorities
and Christians.
Perhaps Whole Foods, Sierra Club, NRDC,
Obama’s EPA and allied critics prefer to look toward China, which provides 95%
of the rare earth metals that are essential for wind turbines and solar panels.
Those operations have brought unprecedented air and water
pollution, cropland and
wildlife habitat wastelands, widespread radiation contamination, and cancer and
lung disease in workers and local residents.
28% of Canadian oil industry jobs held by
women is “not enough,” intones Kairos, a left-leaning coalition of churches.
Compared to what? Women’s jobs in Saudi Arabia or Iran? The 3.5 million more
American women who have ended up on poverty rolls since President Obama took
office?
Some 1,600 ducks died after landing in an
oil sands waste pit several years ago. A repeat of this isolated incident is
increasingly unlikely as open pit mining and oil-water separation pits are
replaced by in situ drilling and
steam. Nevertheless, using analytical methods that only IPCC climate alarmists would appreciate, the
“respected” Pembina Institute conjured up the fantastical “calculation” that
“more than 160 million birds would die from oil sands development” over the
coming decades.
The claim is not merely wild
fear-mongering. It ignores the growing impact of wind turbines on raptors, and
attempts by industrial wind developers to get US Fish & Wildlife Service
“programmatic
take” permits: 007 Licenses to
Kill thousands of eagles,
hawks, whooping cranes and other protected birds every year without fear of
prosecution.
Greenpeace routinely pillories oil sands
companies as “climate criminals,” while the US Environmental Protection Agency
uses their oil sands CO2 emissions to justify denying Keystone Pipeline permits.
(Greenpeace lost its Canadian tax-exempt status, but still manages to con
contributors out of vast sums, to retain its status as a $340-million-per-year
pressure group. EPA conducts illegal experiments on
humans, to justify
regulations that are killing thousands of coal mining and utility jobs.)
These positions reflect adherence to the
shaky hypothesis of catastrophic manmade global warming and unsupportable claims
that the oil sands contribute disproportionately to a looming climate
Armageddon. However, Alberta environment office show that “greenhouse gas”
emissions from oil sands plummeted 38% between 1990 and 2009, and are now 5% of
Canada’s total GHG emissions – and equal to or lower than CO2/GHG emissions from
petroleum operations in Nigeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
So-called “ethical funds” likewise
excoriate oil sands developers like Total, Syncrude and Imperial Oil, while
promising investors that their money will purchase shares in “responsible”
companies that don’t produce fossil fuels, do nuclear power or contribute to
climate change. Co-operative Bank’s is one of those modern day snake oil
“entrepreneurs.” Its über-ethical Sustainable Leaders Trust (don’t you love that
name?) makes that pitch – and then invests client cash in Third World coal mines
… and oil sands!
The rogues’ gallery of oil sands critics
and their shady dealings is so vast that someone could write a book about them.
In fact, Ezra Levant did exactly that. His Ethical
Oil is an eye-opening
companion to my own Eco-Imperialism, which chronicles the often
lethal misdeeds of other self-righteous pressure groups.
Their misrepresentations, double standards,
questionable practices and perverse ethics would get them brought up on fraud
charges, if they were oil companies or non-“ethical” investment “trusts.”
It’s time to apply the same legal, ethical
and credibility standards to these “socially responsible” outfits that they
insist on applying to the corporations they denounce. Keep that in mind the next
time you see EPA, Greenpeace, Co-operative Bank or anyone else taking pot shots
at oil sands or Keystone.
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