This past Tuesday, the merits of Canada exporting oil from New Brunswick into the US market were debated between Canadian oil industry advocate and founder of Canada Action Cody Battershill, and Anthony Swift, a lobbyist based in Washington, DC. The debate (or conversation) took place on Rob Breakenridge’s AM 770 show and covered several different points surrounding the topic.
Who is Anthony Swift? Swift works for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and maintains that his organization’s latest campaign, a plea to the White House to “impose a tar sands oil tanker moratorium in U.S. and Canadian waters” is wholly necessary. As an aside, the NRDC was one of the more influential lobby groups working to convince the world that Keystone XL should never be approved.
But for the NRDC’s latest campaign against what the lobby group deems ‘dirty energy’, it all starts with TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline. If the pipeline were to be approved, the NRDC is convinced that among many other atrocities, it would result in “a 300 percent increase in crude oil traffic in Nova Scotia’s ecologically critical Bay of Fundy [that would] pose a significant threat to endangered marine mammals and regionally critical fisheries in the form of deafening ocean noise and an increased risk of oil spills and ship strikes.” This is one reason why in their view, a ‘tar sands’ oil tanker moratorium is of the utmost importance.
As Swift said in Breakenridge’s program, “Energy East is going to be connected to a dramatic increase in tankers moving oilsands diluted bitumen over US waters, and one of our concerns is that the environmental impact of that part of the proposal isn’t currently being considered in the overall environmental review process for Energy East.”
For Cody Battershill, he immediately expressed his to desire to first know why Canada is being targeted by the NRDC in the first place. “I find it quite concerning for Canada to be singled out,” he said when responding to Swift’s opening remarks. “Every day the US is importing about 2 million barrels of heavy oil similar to Canadian heavy oil into the Gulf Coast and groups like the NRDC have never opposed a tanker from Venezuala or oil exports from these other countries that have weaker carbon regulations and weaker environmental regulations,” he said.
For Battershill, the matter is fairly simple. If not from Canada, then the heavy oil refining capacity entrenched on the US Gulf Coast will simply be filled by heavy oil sourced from other jurisdictions with far weaker environmental standards. Singling out oil sourced from Canada’s oilsands would therefore seem like a fool’s errand in looking to combat whatever crusade the NRDC is embarking on against ‘dirty oil’. And this point is made prior to any discussion involving the obvious incremental benefits that both Canadians and Americans would accrue if Energy East were to be built.
Commenting on the debate, Battershill wrote the following in an email: “So I asked Anthony why [his lobby group is singling out Canada]. And he talked about something else. So I asked again. Again he wouldn’t answer why the NRDC’s sole focus is on blocking Canadian oil exports when we have the highest environmental standards of any top oil producing nation. Mr. Swift couldn’t answer that question—because their campaign makes no sense. But I bet it makes the NRDC a lot of money.”
Battershill makes a good point, and if you would like to listen to the debate, click here.