Home » News » Geeking out over Alberta’s ‘black eye’
News
Geeking out over Alberta’s ‘black eye’
Opinion | National Post | Kevin Libin | September 29, 2010
Read the full article on the originating site
Perhaps it was all a misunderstanding. An out-of-context quote. But then, if it hadn’t been for media reports in April of James Cameron calling Alberta’s oil industry a “black eye” on the country where he was born, he may not have found himself on a helicopter yesterday morning “geeking out,” as he put it, delighting in the technical details of oil-sands extraction processes with all the scientific enthusiasm of the nerds on TV’s The Big Bang Theory.
Hollywood’s most powerful titan had come to northern Alberta at the invitation of First Nations activists in Fort Chipewyan. Since his sympathetic cinematic hymn to the indigenous aliens in Avatar, and their noble resistance to the cruel rapacity of space-travelling resource miners, he has found himself drawn into the world of earthly conflicts between aboriginals and industry. This spring, he wore warrior paint and spear-danced with aboriginal Amazonians to support their battle against a dam project. “This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be,” he told them.
Natives in Fort Chipewyan, downstream from oil-sands operations, who claim that numerous public-health calamities have floated their way since this decade’s oil-sands boom — from aberrantly high cancer rates to sickened wildlife— persuaded Mr. Cameron to come witness their anti-oil sands battle, too. En route, he detoured, requesting a meeting with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. With CAPP, representatives of oil-sands behemoths Cenovus and Syncrude, and the provincial Environment Minister in tow, he was given the industry’s and government’s version of things before jetting off to meet with the Fort Chipewyans.
“All of these sources have their own specific agenda,” he said. “I’m trying to get a balanced view.”
The industrial and government groups were ready to show off their best face: a former Syncrude oil sands mine, turned upside down decades ago by colossal drag lines, returned through reclamation to a timberland state, now roamed by bison. And, for the time being, by a throng of celebrity-hunting reporters, despite Mr. Cameron’s assertion that he had hoped to make a “low-key” visit. “My goal was to come here stealthily,” he said, perhaps revealing some rare naivete about how his visit would so naturally be a magnet for the politics around the oil sands and those eager to exploit him.
Still, if anyone expected a vacuous Hollywood celebrity merely hip to spouting borrowed green-chic opinions, they would be surprised instead to find a man with a complex grasp of physics and chemistry, drinking up minute details of dilution processes, tailings pond management, and the mystifying scale of the entire oil-sands enterprise, from the mining itself to the intricacies and resources required to reassemble an entire ecosystem from the ground up.
“I hadn’t contemplated complexity of having to recreate a habitat from nothing,” he said, before recalling a similar challenge he faced in making Avatar when he had to “grow forests using certain algorithms for the propagation, distribution of plants in such a way that they would compete with each other so that the forest would look natural.”
By the time he toured Cenovus’ Christina Lakes site, where engineers have developed ways of injecting steam underground to melt the oil from the sand and draw it out, while leaving the forest on top intact, the director’s technical bookishness was irrepressible. After trading his Prada loafers for steel-toed wellies, he drilled his hosts with questions about diluents, and hydrological effects, dewatering, flow rates, flocking agents and how the cement casing used around the pipelines reacted to temperature changes.
“Usually what happens when I’m on a trip like this is I burn through all the time just asking questions,” he said. Science, he explained, had been his first passion — since majoring in physics awhile in college. He had immersed himself in aquatic sciences when building submersibles for Titanic. He reads Scientific American monthly. It takes his mind “away from the craziness of Hollywood.”
His business mind churned, too, as he wrestled with the issue of capital cost amortization for enormous projects (at one point Syncrude’s Cheryl Robb joked that a plant upgrade had cost “three times your net worth— $1.5-billion,” though Mr. Cameron assured her “those numbers are highly speculative”) and whether it was better to incentivize producers by taxing carbon or by rewarding innovation.
He was thrilled whenever the producers raised an example of better environmental management — reducing water usage, or energy inputs —that had translated also to bumper cost savings.
He imagined converting the oil sands feedstock inputs to nuclear or wind power, instead of carbon-reliant natural gas, and seemed just a bit frustrated when it was explained to him why the economies, or weather, for such things hadn’t materialized yet.
But these were, he said sounding like an industry spinster, the best ways to make the oil sands more palatable to the public, something he seemed keen to do.
“You need to future-proof yourself,” he told the extractors. “You have a good story to tell.” There was a need to “reduce the angst” the public had about this project. He was impatient to see that happen. Shutting the oil sands down never seemed to cross his mind. Amidst all the questions, there came not one word of criticism.
Yes, he favoured higher carbon taxes, and was “firmly in the camp” that believes the world needs to wean itself off of a carbon-based economy, but admitted that this wouldn’t be possible for some time.
The oil sands would likely have to be a “bridge” to that future. On this, his oil-industry hosts agreed, though there were some differences over how soon that idyllic future was coming (Mr. Cameron called it “short term”; they went for “medium”). Only Mr. Rennert, the minister of a government thoroughly dependent on oil revenues, didn’t seem quite so sure.
By the end of it, that “black eye” comment began to look less like an insult and more like the concerns of someone aware of, and troubled by, the public opinion the oil sands was earning.
“The perception is like this is some out-of-control process, and it clearly isn’t,” he said. “I don’t think anyone here is being reckless or foolish.” If only more people could see what he did today instead of “sound bites on TV.” The trip would, he said, “reframe the way I think about this.”
After that, Mr. Cameron boarded a charter flight to spend the afternoon with the anti-oilsands groups of Fort Chipewyan.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Geeking+over+Alberta+black/3593949/story.html#ixzz10vlCG4wP
Tagged with: first nations, alberta, avatarsands, national post
