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Dump spotty water-monitoring regime
News Articles | Edmonton Journal | Graham Thomson | August 31, 2010
Read the full article on the originating site
EDMONTON – He is our own canary in the coal mine, or should I say the oilsands mine.
But this is not a canary to fall over dead when he senses danger. This canary sings.
And David Schindler is in fine voice this week: “Contrary to claims made by industry and government in the popular press, the oil sands industry substantially increases loadings of toxic PPE (priority pollutants) to the AR (Athabasca River) and its tributaries via air and water pathways.”
That quote is from the conclusion of a report co-written by Schindler being published this week in the scholarly Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The report is academic, dense and impossible to set to music. But it should be required reading for anyone who believes government and industry assurances that exploiting the oilsands has little or no environmental impact.
“There’s no way industry can be belching out hundreds of kilograms of toxins every year and this not be detectable in the environment unless the monitoring program is totally incompetent,” said Schindler, who then went on to say the government’s monitoring program is indeed pretty much incompetent.
That quote is not from the report but from Schindler’s news conference at the University of Alberta on Monday afternoon.
Like most academics, Schindler gives much more interesting quotes in person than in print. And these days he seems to be even more interesting than usual. Perhaps it’s because he’s closer to retirement or he’s getting more frustrated with government and industry. Or maybe it’s because he now has some compelling evidence the oilsands are polluting the environment of northern Alberta by emitting a periodic table of 13 pollutants including arsenic, lead and mercury.
Government and industry have long claimed that pollution in the area is the result of the Athabasca River cutting a path through the oilsands releasing naturally occurring bitumen into the water. However, after an extensive study — undertaken by the University of Alberta, Queen’s University and the nonprofit group, Oceana — Schindler has concluded the oilsands industry isn’t simply a bystander.
“The highest concentrations always occur near development, they don’t continuously increase down the river as the government spokespeople are claiming,” said Schindler as he walked reporters through a slide presentation of his findings. “They claim that they’ll just increase going downstream because as water moves downstream it’s exposed to more and more of this natural bitumen. That’s not the case. The levels stay high, some of that may be due to natural sources, but the big inputs are here right around development.”
Schindler presented a compelling case based on science, not emotion. He is not paid by Greenpeace, neither is he on the payroll of government or industry.
In an increasingly polarized debate that tends to pigeonhole people as being either totally for or against the oilsands industry, Schindler, a world-renowned expert on water, is an unimpeachable and refreshingly independent scientific voice.
He says what’s happening in the oilsands is wrong: “All of this is in clear violation of the Fisheries Act. The Fisheries Act is not based on amounts released or concentrations in the river; it just says flatly that there will be no deposition of any deleterious substance to a river or near enough to a river to get into it. Period. ... You have to ask where is Environment Canada on all of this?”
You also have to ask, where’s Alberta Environment in all of this. The government has cut its budget for environmental monitoring while spending money to promote the oilsands.
“You have to wonder why do we have money for propaganda and not for proper science?,” asked Schindler during the news conference as his comments — perhaps driven by frustration over the gap between government propaganda and scientific evidence — strayed into the area of public policy.
“Government has been putting money into their propaganda campaign to tell people everything is OK. I just think that’s not the way democracy should work. If people can see what’s really going on and they still choose to develop in the oilsands that’s democracy. But making people think that everything’s OK when it really isn’t and therefore getting them to agree to this is not the way the government of this country or this province was set up to work.”
If it’s not “OK” in the Athabasca River, how bad is it?
That’s a question Schindler can’t answer because he doesn’t have enough information, a situation he blames on Alberta’s Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program (RAMP) run by a quasi-private group of government, industry and stakeholders. Schindler has called the program a joke because of its spotty monitoring, secrecy and a “scathing” federal government review of RAMP’s failings in 2004.
Schindler is not advocating an end to the oilsands industry, just an end to the apparent secrecy over emissions. And an end to RAMP which he calls incompetent: “It’s time to get rid of RAMP altogether, replace it with a professionally designed and run monitoring program.”
The Alberta government is reviewing Schindler’s report, being careful not to dismiss Schindler or his comments.
After all, this is a canary with teeth.
Tagged with: david schindler, athabasca river, oilsands, pollution report, toxins
