Oil sands safe from U.S. law, advocates say
Environmentalists claim victory as Canadian officials fail to weaken legislation that limits Washington's fuel choices
JOHN PARTRIDGE
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
October 1, 2008 at 6:58 AM EDT
U.S. environmentalists have declared another victory in their efforts to protect legislation that threatens Canada's booming oil sands, but oil sands advocates say there is no triumph to celebrate.
The legislation in question bans the U.S. government and its agencies from buying alternative fuels that produce more greenhouse gases than conventional fuels.
Environmentalists have argued vociferously that this includes fuel refined from oil from the oil sands, or tar sands, as they call them.
Alberta's representative in Washington, Gary Mar, along with Canada's ambassador, Michael Wilson, and oil industry executives have been lobbying hard for the past nine months for the repeal of the provision: Section 526 of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. U.S. President George W. Bush signed the section into law last December.
In the meantime, however, the provision has made its way into a massive defence spending bill - and an official of the Washington-based National Resources Defence Council (NRDC) said on Friday the Alberta and Canadian governments and the oil industry failed two days earlier to overturn or weaken it.
What makes this so important is that the U.S. military is by far the largest consumer of transportation fuel in the U.S. from whatever source.
The $612-billion (U.S.) defence authorization bill was passed last Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives and sent on to the Senate, which is expected to approve it before adjourning for the U.S. election and pass it along for signature to Mr. Bush.
The House version of the defence bill contained a provision under which Section 526 could have been, in effect, largely defanged. However, the Senate version did not.
The provision also did not make it into the "agreed" version of the bill, reached in a conference of the armed services committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
This is where the NRDC sees its victory.
"I think the reality is that you have the two armed services committees of Congress basically saying, 'We don't see what the problem is [with Section 526],' " NRDC lobbyist Liz Barratt-Brown said on Friday in a telephone interview from Washington.
Ms. Barratt-Brown also figures the defence bill was likely the section's opponents' last and best chance to have it repealed or weakened, given that Congress is about to adjourn in advance of November's election and is currently preoccupied with the financial crisis and the proposed $700-billion bailout of Wall Street. "The next session, when they come back, we'll have a new president," she said. "The era of having the oil guy in the White House is coming to an end."
Both Republican presidential candidate John McCain and the Democrats' Barack Obama have said action needs to be taken on global warming, Ms. Barratt-Brown said. "That's going to put pressure on Alberta to clean up the tar sands."
But Mr. Mar, the Alberta envoy, rejected the NRDC's version of last week's events.
He argued in a telephone interview that the original target of Section 526 was to bar U.S. government agencies from purchasing liquid fuels derived from coal.
The reason the section was not amended in the final, agreed-upon version of the Defence Authorization bill, he said, is that it was never, in fact, intended to preclude oil sands production from fuel sources the Pentagon was allowed to tap into.
What this all adds up to, Mr. Mar added, is the clearest "statement of the legislators' intent ... that Section 526 was not intended to preclude the Department of Defence from purchasing [oil sands] fuel - and we expect them to continue to do so."
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