The Canadian Consulate’s letter dated April 23, 2014, repeats the same message it has to the states and municipalities along Portland-Montreal Pipeline’s (PMPL’s) route: that it is the sole arbiter of fact and myth regarding pipeline safety and the environmental impact of tar sands extraction and the controversial business plan to reverse the pipeline. Although the Consulate may disagree, “facts” and “bottom lines” are not the sole possession of the Canadian government, and Current readers should be warned of the extremes to which Canada’s Tory-led government has gone to commandeer the scientific message and to squelch dissenting science.

Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and all share a disproportionately large exposure to risk of spill and reap no benefit from tar sand export from Casco Bay, especially when compared with other development possibilities as PMPL’s historic business model disappears in the new energy landscape. Any decision to reject or approve Canada’s pipeline reversal plans are values-driven, and affected communities must deliberate based on those values, and if those communities so decide, they can resist being bullied by the foreign corporate power that Consulate Binns represents.

The greatest local concern for all of the localities along the pipeline is whether pipeline reversal and conduit of tar sands poses greater risk than historic westward transport of conventional crude oil from South Portland to Montreal. The consulate’s letter cites a June 2013 report by the National Academy of Sciences that was commissioned to examine one narrow aspect of pipeline safety, and that is whether tar sands-derived diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) is more corrosive to pipes than conventional crude oil. Their conclusion was that it was not, but the report itself warned that its investigative focus was narrow and should not be construed as a broad endorsement of pipeline safety, as the consulate’s letter does. That is because internal corrosion accounts for only 16 percent of pipeline failures, and corrosivity is not the most concerning factor regarding the difference between “dilbit” and conventional crude.

Weld and material failures account for 39 percent of pipeline failures, according to this same report. Weld failure and metal fatigue – not corrosivity – were the key factors resulting in rupture of the Enbridge Line 6B on July 2010. The resulting spill in the Kalamazoo River, Mich., is the largest and most expensive land-based spill in U.S. history– and it is still not cleaned up. This environmental disaster showed that tar sands-derived dilbit indeed behaves differently in natural waters than had been predicted based on theory and laboratory simulations. The volatile components that are added as diluents evaporate and the heavier tarry bitumen apparently sinks to the river bottom, making conventional oil spill cleanup protocols ineffective. This difference prompted the EPA to warn the State Department to treat dilbit as a different category of petroleum than crude oil. The important distinction between the consequences and probability of spill are deliberately sidestepped by the consulate’s letter in order for you to feel assured that New England will not be exposed to such a risk as the Kalamazoo River spill.

Portland-Montreal Pipeline is, through a series of majority ownerships, owned by ExxonMobil. So, too, is the Pegasus Pipeline that ruptured in March 2013 in Mayflower, Ark., spilling thousands of barrels into suburban neighborhoods and down storm drains into nearby reservoirs. ExxonMobil has been effective in filtering and restricting the flow of information while the federal investigation is still under way, and was even effective at closing off airspace above the spill as a means to control media coverage of the spill. ExxonMobil is the 23rd wealthiest nation on Earth and its influence in global politics should not be underestimated. So, too, PMPL’s motto of “safety, environment, customer, community” should be compared with ExxonMobil’s media blog from June 17, 2009, which emphasized the Pegasus Pipeline company’s “…primary focus on operating its pipeline in a safe and environmentally responsible manner” three years after its reversal and four years before its rupture. Accidents happen whether through corrosion, weld failure, or poor management, and dilbit spills are worse than conventional oil spills.

As to the other cherry-picked statistics and “facts” in the consulate’s letter, please be aware that Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Tory Party leadership has systematically closed or de-funded critical sources of scientific information within his own regulatory agencies and has allowed private oil interests to exploit its own treaty-protected land for short-term private profit at an intentionally faster pace than legal safeguards afforded by Canadian courts. This shocking assault on the science backing (or, rather, not backing) Canadian environmental protection was exposed in a recent CBC investigative report entitled “Silence of the Labs” (broadcast date Jan 10, 2014). More credence should be given, then, to independent, non-industry-funded research that is slowly picking up speed.

Canada’s long-enjoyed reputation as our environmentally conscientious neighbor to the north has been sullied by Harper’s Tory Party actions. Canada was proudly the first nation to sign the Kyoto Protocol but was also ignominiously the first and only nation to withdraw as of December 2012 – a move that helped place Canada at the bottom of rankings for environmental protection among 27 industrialized OECD nations. The Harper Administration’s Environment Minister Peter Kent called Kyoto “radical and irresponsible” in that it would “…transfer $14 billion from Canadian taxpayers to other countries…” in the form of global efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions to help save the planet and its fragile economy from the effects of global climate change. Kent claimed that Kyoto would have “…no impact on emissions or the environment…”. The logic here is that as long as the U.S. and China are not meeting their emissions targets, then Canada should not only make no effort to meet its own targets, but should enable the U.S. and China to fall short of their targets as well by profiting from oil export to fuel China and the U.S. as we grapple with our own oil addictions.

The remaining statements in the consulate’s letter regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions’ impact exploit uncertainties and lack of standards in calculating and reporting such values and selects only those estimates that leave the impression that the carbon footprint of Canada’s tar sands is acceptably low. It is true, for example, that coal burning for energy generation historically in the U.S. and what is projected in China outstrips the tar sand carbon footprint so far, but huge gains in U.S. coal emissions regulations and hopeful gains in China’s Kyoto commitments do not justify the exploitation of Canadian tar sands for global export. The biggest challenge of GHG emissions regulation worldwide is in the transportation sector, where increased fuel efficiency standards and alternative fuels will realize the greatest gains regardless of loci of petroleum reserves. This does not make Canada’s “world’s dirtiest oil” justifiably clean.

Comparison of well-to-refinery carbon footprint of per-barrel Canadian tar sands is 2-3 times the U.S. average and 2-100 times the footprint of other sources, including Middle Eastern sour crude and heavy crudes from Mexico and Venezuela. But other impacts of tar sands mining operations – including steam-extraction methods – are more damaging and include large-scale toxification of rivers and groundwater, contamination of the food web, wholesale destruction of large tracts of boreal forest with low success of restoration and displacement and poisoning of First Nations populations in violation of treaty rights. These, too, should be part of our communities’ values-driven decision on whether to reject or approve of PMPL’s flow reversal plans.

In summary, please consider the source of your information and that source’s motivations as we contemplate PMPL’s flow reversal. Everyone benefits from mitigating risk to our health and safety and to the health and safety of the planet. A select and exclusive few benefit handsomely in the short term while others suffer – and all suffer inevitably – with the full exploitation of the Canadian tar sands. Many of us in South Portland are doing our part to ensure that the PMPL does not reverse its flow and bring this environmental and ethical abomination to global markets. We hope that Canada likewise will recover from its cavalier industrialization of its wild and sacred lands.

Eben C. Rose

is a volunteer for Protect South Portland

and 350Maine.