A History Lesson for Steve Wuori

by Jeffrey Insko | Jun 9, 2014 | 1 comment

Recently, we told you about the Enbridge blog. No, not this Enbridge blog. We mean the official blog started by Enbridge and “written,” so they say, by various Enbridge muckety-mucks. It’s great fun– if you enjoy watching corporate public relations gears churning desperately and rather transparently.

The latest post to catch our eye, posted late last week, comes from big shot– and Michigan native!– Steve Wuori, who now holds the title of “Strategic Advisor, Office of the President and CEO,” whatever that means. You might remember Wuori from a while back, when he traveled back here to Michigan to sit down with some newspaper editorial boards, telling them all sorts of ridiculous things. Wuori’s blog post is titled “The big picture: Canada’s crude-oil landscape at a glance.” On the whole, the post says very little of substance, in keeping, apparently, with the Enbridge blog’s general editorial policy. In fact, it leads with this bit of vacuousness: “there are forces at work that I believe will keep energy in the forefront of public and policymaker thinking.” When has energy ever not been in the forefront of public and policymaker thinking?

At any rate, the interesting thing about the post is what Wuori says at the end, when he boldly addresses the “opposition.” His comments reveal that, while he might be a very effective “strategic advisor” and a perfectly good company man, he doesn’t know very much (or pretends not to) about his critics and the history of his own industry. Here’s what he writes in his blog’s penultimate paragraph:

All this is occurring against an intricate societal backdrop of opposition to oil transportation infrastructure development, which operates on the thesis that it is easier to oppose transportation (and pipelines in particular) than to oppose oil production directly. The Canadian oil sands have been inaccurately labeled “tar sands” (which has a nasty ring) by opponents, who seek to forestall further development of this vast resource.

Long time readers will recognize this sort of thing: it’s the old straw man tactic Enbridge likes to employ. Typically, this maneuver is deployed knowingly and strategically in a dishonest effort to make their critics look bad. Here, we’re not so sure. We suspect that, with all of its contradictory logic, this is what Wuori really thinks– which just goes to show how much he exists inside an industry bubble. Let’s break it down a little:

It’s not really clear where Wuori gets this “thesis” about opposing transportation rather than oil production. There is certainly plenty of oil production opposition taking place in North American and all around the world- like this and this. In fact, anyone who is even moderately informed about these matters understands that one of the reasons to oppose new transportation infrastructure projects is precisely to put a halt to production. After all, if all of that oil from, say, Alberta can’t be shipped, there’s not much point in digging it up in the first place (and there may be evidence to support this theory). And in fact, Wuori contradicts himself in the very next sentence, when he says that “opponents… seek to forestall further development” of tar sands oil.  Wuori’s narrow, simplistic, glib thesis reduces a complex and varied set of interests and approaches to nothing more than an assault on his own company.

Wuori’s version of the opposition is also perversely self-serving in that it allows him to portray himself and his fellow pipeline operators as embattled and mistreated.  The same is true when Wuori trots out the tired, untrue industry line about the term “tar sands,” repeating the industry mantra that it is “inaccurate” and somehow cooked up by fiendish radicals who just want to make a pretty thing sound “nasty.” One hears this sort of thing from the industry all the time– even though it is plainly and demonstrably untrue. For one thing, the accuracy claim is dubious at best. Sure, bitumen is used like oil, not tar. On the other hand, it bears far more resemblance, in terms of texture and look, to tar than it does to oil. See for yourself:

If you were to show this stuff to 100 people and ask them whether it is oil or tar, what do you imagine the vast majority of those 100 people would say? Despite what the industry wants to pretend, “tar” is a very accurate term for the stuff.

In addition to the claim of inaccuracy, Wuori would have you believe that the term “tar sands” was invented by opponents to tarnish (if you’ll forgive the pun) the reputation of bitumen. In this instance, we honestly don’t know whether Wuori actually believes this or if he’s simply ignorant of the history of his own industry. Most likely it’s both. But whatever the case, here’s a little history lesson:

The term “tar sands” is not some ugly-sounding label invented by petroleum opponents in an attempt to besmirch the industry as Wuori (and his colleagues) suggests. In fact, tar sands has been used to describe the resource in Alberta for the entire twentieth century. Earlier, in fact, according to about 15 minutes of our own research. In 1897, for example, the journal Science reported on a geological survey of Canada completed in 1894. The article describes a trial boring 1000 feet in depth, seeking petroleum. The explorers found that “the tar sands proved to be somewhat thicker than was expected.” In 1900, the American Journal of Science reported on another geological survey of Canada, this one from 1899: “The borings in Northern Alberta, in attempts to reach the petroleum-bearing strata at the base of the Cretaceous, have still failed to reach the ‘tar sands,’ which it is estimated lie at a depth of about 2000 feet in the Victoria Region.” A 1921 article in another journal notes that “Canada has enormous tracts of tar sands and shales.” One could easily go on, demonstrating that the term “tar sands” has been common usage for well over 100 years. “Oil sands,” by contrast, appears not to have been widely used until about the 1940s, although it occurs earlier as well.

And it’s not as if the industry doesn’t know this. They do. For example, an entry at the Suncor Energy blog (devoted to “constructive dialogue about the tar sands”), there’s an entry titled “Oil sands history: ‘tar sands’ term coined long before it was adopted by critics” that explores some of this same history. Even the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers concedes that “the term ‘Tar Sands’ has been used by the oil industry for decades.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Albertan government decided that it preferred “oil sands.” And it wasn’t until the 1990s, when the Alberta Chamber of Resources convened a National Oil Sands Task force to promote tar sands development, that the industry launched a concerted public relations campaign in favor of “oil sands.” So it’s the industry that decided that “tar sands” sounds nastier and started playing this silly name game. Which is itself pretty humorous, since there’s actual research that suggests that the public thinks “oil sands” is the nastier term. Whether tar sands opponents use the term because they think it sounds worse than “oil” is a dubious claim at best. More likely, they’re just adopting common usage– a usage that goes back more than a century. Or perhaps they just don’t think they should be told how to speak or what language to use by the paid public relations euphemizers of large corporations. We can certainly understand that resistance. We’re sure as heck not going to say “oil sands” just because Steve Wuori and his industry’s army of spinmeisters think it’s a more pleasing term.

So Steve Wuori is either completely, bafflingly ignorant of this history– a history that is perfectly well known, even by his own industry colleagues– or he is willfully misleading readers of the Enbridge blog. Of course, all of this might seem like it’s of no real consequence. Why do we even bother pointing out at such length all the untruths and misinformation that comes from Enbridge? Isn’t that just standard, every day corporate behavior? That’s a vital question, we think. In a follow-up post in the next day or two we’ll take it up and try to provide an answer as to why we think it’s worth the time.