While you’re all probably on pins and needles waiting to learn what made the #1 spot on our 2013 Year in Review Top Ten List, we’re prolonging the suspense to weigh in on another topic. You see, Enbridge has done its own review (though they’re a year behind) and just released its 2013 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. So that you don’t have to– and trust us, you don’t want to– we’ve taken a look through it.

Mostly, it’s a lot of foggy, unspecified claptrap and self-flattering puffery delivered in barely comprehensible corporate-marketing jargon, full of sentences like this: “Enbridge manages the impacts of our operations on communities through three areas of enterprise-wide activity that have complementary programs and practices.” That sort of thing goes on for 205 pages. Just how bad is it? Well, the word “impact” (or variants of it) occurs on 71 of those 205 pages, usually multiple times; on one page, for example, the word is used 12 times, which yields painful sentences like this: “These measures will be implemented within five years of the impact occurring.”

But if you can get past the atrocious corporatized prose, the most striking thing about the Report is the almost complete and total absence of any mention whatsoever of the Line 6B replacement project– an exceedingly bizarre omission considering the fact that it amounts to a nearly $3 billion capital investment for Enbridge. Of course, the Report does mention the Line 6B rupture in Marshall a handful of times, but beyond that, there isn’t a word about the fact that Enbridge spent most of 2012 constructing a brand new Line 6B through a significant stretch of Michigan. Obviously, this is a curious omission for a number of reasons. But let’s focus on just one:

Enbridge spends a lot of time in the report explaining how it conforms to the guidelines set forth by the Global Reporting Initiative, which is apparently a pretty big deal. We’re not quite sure why and a quick visit to the GRI website isn’t much help. Here’s how they describe their mission. We’ll award bonus points to anyone who can make heads or tails out of this:

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a leading organization in the sustainability field. GRI promotes the use of sustainability reporting as a way for organizations to become more sustainable and contribute to sustainable development.

Evidently, if you repeat the word “sustainable” enough times, magical things will happen; you may even be safely returned home to Kansas.

Anyway, according to Enbridge’s CSR Report, one of the “tests suggested by the GRI” to ensure completeness of information is that “The report does not omit relevant information that would influence or inform stakeholder assessments or decisions, or that would reflect significant economic, environmental and social impacts.” Again, the prose here is terribly and needlessly unclear, but the gist of it seems to be that if you leave out pertinent information in your report, people might not be able to trust what you are saying. Which is one of the reasons why it is so very strange that Enbridge would leave out information as relevant to their corporate conduct in 2012 as the major project they started in Michigan.

This omission is most disturbing when it comes to the section of the Report on “Community and Landowner Relations” (including a section titled– what else?– “Assessing Impacts”). There, Enbridge says that its philosophy “is to be as transparent as possible with our stakeholders. . . We accomplish this by undertaking timely, honest and open communication with them and with communities located near planned projects that may have an impact on them.” And how, exactly, does the report go about assessing the transparency, timeliness, honesty, and openness of its communications? Well, it doesn’t. It does provide a “Scorecard” that purports to provide “results” of these efforts. But there’s no score recorded on the scorecard; there’s no data and barely even one single example of how Enbridge has communicated honestly or openly with landowners.

Even worse is Enbridge’s discussion of the “public concerns” over three of its most high-profile projects: Northern Gateway, the Line 9 reversal, and the Marshall spill. That discussion is titled “Challenges and Our Responses” and it is Enbridge’s attempt to demonstrate how they deal with “contentious issues and projects.” Here is the entirety of what Enbridge has to say about the “contentious issues” associated with the Marshall spill and its aftermath (which presumably includes the replacement of Line 6B):