This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and was published in the Toronto Star in March 17, 2023.
The Pathways Alliance of oilsands companies has blanketed the country with a false advertising campaign designed to influence government and manipulate public support for the industry with the highest carbon emissions in Canada, according to a complaint filed with the Competition Bureau on Thursday.
If found to have breached competition law, the oil companies could face a fine of up to three per cent of their worldwide revenues, or more than $9 billion.
Filed by Greenpeace Canada, the complaint targets the “Let’s clear the air” ad campaign that appeared as full page ads in newspapers, including the Star, TV commercials, social-media posts, billboards and podcasts, in which the six largest oilsands producers claimed they are “making clear strides toward net zero” and that they will “help our country achieve a sustainable future.”
“If the Pathways Alliance wants to ‘clear the air,’ let’s start by clarifying what their ad campaign really is: greenwashing,” said Priyanka Vittal, legal counsel for Greenpeace Canada, in a news release. “The Pathways Alliance’s members continue to expand fossil fuel production, their net-zero plan doesn’t even consider all emissions — and it still doesn’t add up to zero.”
Former federal environment minister Catherine McKenna, now the chair of the United Nations Net-Zero Expert Group, said in the release: “If you put your hand up and claim you’re a climate leader, there is a price of admission — you need to do the work.
“The Pathways Alliance of major oilsands companies fill the airwaves with net zero claims but instead their emissions are going up, they’re investing a fraction of their profits in clean solutions and are lobbying against climate action,” she added.
At last fall’s COP27 climate summit, McKenna unveiled the United Nations’ new principles for net-zero commitments, designed to put
an end to greenwashing and used the opportunity to single out oil companies.
Pathways Alliance spokesperson Mark Cameron said the group has not seen the complaint, stating in an email that the group acknowledges the oilsands “represent a significant share of our country’s emissions and that we must work collaboratively, including with governments, to achieve our goal of net zero from operations and deliver the world’s preferred barrel of responsibly produced oil.
“We will continue to speak on behalf of one of Canada’s most important industries and show how we’re addressing the climate challenge.”
Greenpeace’s filing is the most recent in a series of complaints made to the Competition Bureau against fossil fuel companies accusing them of greenwashing their businesses. Last fall, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) alleged that the Canadian Gas Association’s claims that natural gas is safe for your health, environmentally friendly and affordable are “false and misleading.”
CAPE has also signed onto the new Greenpeace complaint.
The complaint says the Pathways Alliance’s net zero claim fails to account for consumers’ burning of the oil they produce, which accounts for more than 80 per cent of emissions. The net zero goal also relies on a plan “based on untenable and not established assumptions about future technologies,” like carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) that has never been deployed at the scale proposed.
The ads, which ran during the World Cup, the Australian Open and the Super Bowl, do not mention that the oilsands companies are expanding production and increasing their emissions, which have more than doubled since 2005, reaching a record of 86 megatonnes in 2021 — more than 12 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions emitted countrywide.
“They give the impression that the Pathways Alliance is a climate leader and that their actions will clear pollution when they are not taking actions that do so,” Greenpeace said in the release.
In an interview with the Star this month, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said oil companies have failed to reduce their emissions on their own and pledged to “force” them to bring them down through a hard cap on emissions in the sector.
The entire oil and gas industry, including businesses refining and transporting oil but not burning it, accounts for more than 27 per cent of Canada’s annual carbon footprint, according to early estimates put out by the Canadian Climate Institute.
As emissions in the oil sector have risen, so have their profits. The six members of the Pathways Alliance made a record high $35 billion in profit in 2022, but spent only $500 million on their net zero plan.
Instead, the companies devoted far more money to share buybacks ($32.1 billion), which boost the stock price, and dividends ($16.7 billion), which are direct cash payments to shareholders.
Meanwhile, the alliance has said the federal government’s announcement of more than $8.6 billion in public subsidies is not enough to go ahead with their CCUS project, with one CEO saying the industry needs “more help.”
Ever since the United States passed its Inflation Reduction Act, which includes generous subsidies for reducing emissions in the oil and gas sector, Canadian oil companies have pushed for additional public funds.
But a report put out this week by the Canadian Climate Institute and the Pembina Institute concluded that there are already more supports for CCUS in Canada than there are in the U.S.
Greenpeace also highlighted the fact that Pathways Alliance members have lobbied governments and opposed emissions regulations.
The UN net zero principles that McKenna helped develop explicitly prohibit companies from lobbying to undermine climate policies.
If the Competition Bureau upholds the complaint, Greenpeace wants the fine to be given to the Environmental Damages Fund and paid to organizations, preferably Indigenous-led, to clean up oilsands pollution.
The federal government pledged this week to investigate how a leak of toxins from an oilsands tailings pond went on for more than nine months before Pathways Alliance member Imperial Oil informed local First Nations who drink and fish in nearby waterways.
This article was written by Natasha Bulowski and John Woodside, and was published in Canada’s National Observer on March 10, 2023.
This article was written by Natasha Bulowski and was published in Canada’s National Observer on March 14, 2023.
This article was written by John Woodside and was published in Canada’s National Observer on March 16, 2023.
This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and was published in the Toronto Star on March 10, 2023.
Despite having more than doubled their profits last year, Canadian oilsands companies are spending little on a highly touted carbon-capture project to transform their oil from some of the world’s dirtiest to its cleanest.
The six companies that form the Pathways Alliance collectively booked a record profit of more than $35 billion in 2022, but spent only $500 million on a plan to capture emissions from the oilsands, pipe them across Alberta and pump them underground by 2030.
Meanwhile, the companies have asked for public funding to cover more than half of their $16.5-billion climate change mitigation project.
“One day, they are telling shareholders they’re making recordbreaking profits — in the words of (U.S. President) Joe Biden, they have more money than God — and then the next day, they go to the government, cap in hand, and say: ‘We need you to pay for us to clean up our operations,’ ” said Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at
Greenpeace Canada. “The entire cost of this big carbon capture thing that they’re proposing would be half of the profits they made last year.”
Over the past several months, the Pathways Alliance has gone on a public relations offensive, taking out full-page ads in newspapers and 30-second spots on podcasts to promote the carbon capture and storage plan, saying it will help Canada achieve climate change goals by reducing emissions in the oilsands to net zero by 2050.
“There will likely never again be a period where this type of profit is generated in the oil industry,” said David Macdonald, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The stars have aligned for the oil gas companies to make those investments if they wanted to — but it’s not happening.”
A look at the financial reports of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus Energy Inc., ConocoPhillips Co., Imperial Oil Ltd., MEG Energy and Suncor Energy Inc., shows the companies spent far more on priorities other than climate change.
Collectively, they shelled out $32.1 billion on share buybacks, which boost the stock price, and $16.7 billion on dividends — direct cash payments to shareholders. They also spent $17.5 billion reducing their debt and another $16.3 billion on capital investment in their oil and gas production.
But when it came to their plan to reduce emissions, their spending was only half a billion dollars — 1.4 per cent of their profits.
There’s a disconnect between what oilsands companies are saying and what they’re doing with “this tremendous amount of money,” Macdonald said.
“They don’t need more tax breaks. They don’t need anything from government, frankly, at all. They have all the money that they could ever wish for on hand right now to make these key investments. And they’re not making them.”
In response to questions, Pathways Alliance spokesperson Jerrica Goodwin said “our companies are spending significantly on our 2030 goal.”
Citing a recent $10-million engineering contract and other feasibility studies and Indigenous engagement efforts, Goodwin said the Alliance members plan to invest a total of $24.1 billion in the next seven years “with co-funding support from Canadian governments.”
The centrepiece project would install carbon capture technology at a dozen sites in the Alberta oilsands and connect them via a 400-kilometre pipeline to a “storage hub” near Cold Lake, where the captured carbon would be injected into geological formations underground. Slated to be completed by 2030, the plan estimates it would reduce oilsands emissions by 10-12 megatonnes, or about 10 per cent of total emissions from the sector.
However, those are only the emissions caused by extracting and refining the oil and don’t include the emissions caused by burning the fuel in cars, furnaces and industry, estimated to be two to three times greater.
Goodwin says the carbon capture project cannot be started until all the permits are complete.
“Projects of this size require significant upfront work and a strong partnership between industry and governments to proceed,” she added. “It is impossible to invest in the construction of these projects, because they have not been approved by governments.”
Most of the spending on the project will come later, during the construction phase, she said.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, global oil prices spiked, almost doubling by early April. This led to windfall profits for oil companies around the world, even in places such as Alberta, which were unaffected by the conflict.
Imperial Oil CEO Brad Corson said the war has created circumstances that have been good for business.
Singling out “high commodity prices” driven by “ongoing geopolitical events,” Corson told investors on an earnings call last October that “the overall macro environment remains quite positive for our financial performance.”
Profits at the six Pathways Alliance oil companies more than doubled in 2022, led by Cenovus, which increased its bottom line by 999 per cent. Canadian Natural Resources was the laggard, with only a 43 per cent bump in profits over the previous year. ConocoPhillips’ oilsands profits increased 62 per cent. All the others either doubled or tripled their profit.
“This is a publicly owned resource that they are pulling out of the ground and they’re now making windfall profits,” Greenpeace’s Stewart said. “They aren’t reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They aren’t cleaning up their abandoned wells. And now we’re hearing that for the last nine months, Imperial Oil’s tailings pond has been leaking toxins into the drinking water of a First Nations (community) without telling them.
“When you look at these eye-watering profits, we should be saying: ‘How can we redirect those resources to helping people deal with inflation, which is being driven in large part by those profits, and investing in a clean energy transition?’ ”
Greenpeace is calling for an excess-profits tax on the oil and gas industry, much like the one imposed on the financial industry after its pandemic-related windfall gains.
Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has threatened to “force” the oil industry to reduce its emissions if they don’t start doing so themselves. Later this year, Ottawa will enact a hard cap on oil and gas emissions, he said.
The Pathways Alliance has said it will need additional public subsidies and tax credits to fund its carbon capture plan.
After the federal government unveiled $8.6 billion in carbon capture tax credits last year, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix said industry will need “more help.”
Calls for additional subsidies increased after the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides large tax credits for a variety of emission reduction and green energy projects.
“We continue to work with the federal and Alberta governments to ensure Canada’s co-funding programs and regulatory environment for (carbon capture and storage) are globally competitive and that emissions reduction targets for our industry are realistic and achievable,” said the Pathways Alliance’s Goodwin.
Meanwhile, emissions from the oilsands have been growing. According to the government’s national carbon inventory, emissions have more than doubled since 2005.
Crude from the Alberta oilsands is among the dirtiest oil in the world. While the industry contests the claim that Canadian oil has the biggest carbon footprint, several academic studies have shown that the process of mining and separating oil from sand in Alberta produces twice as much carbon per barrel than the average in North America.
While the oil and gas industry has made significant gains in curtailing methane leaks, cutting them by 28 per cent since 2015, emissions from oil and gas extraction have risen by about half that amount over the same period of time.
“This is an industry that in the long term, we need to wind down. It’s not going to end tomorrow. It’s not going to end this year. It’s not going to be in 10 years. But in 50 years it will need to end,” Macdonald said. “We’ve got this opportunity, this flood of corporate cash to make these changes and yet it’s not being spent on massive transitions away from fossil fuel towards other means of energy generation.”
‘‘ The entire cost of this big carbon capture thing that they’re proposing would be half of the profits they made last year.
KEITH STEWART SENIOR ENERGY STRATEGIST AT GREENPEACE CANADA
Mobilize, Canada! 