Protesters at MCW Energy ribbon-cutting ceremony in Vernal, Utah, on October 1, 2014
I have received one of the best emails all year. The subject line: “EXCLUSIVE INVITE * Witness the Opening of America's First Environmentally-Friendly Oil Sands Extraction Project.”
The invite explained that the “VIP Guests” of the “special ribbon-cutting ceremony” on October 1 would enjoy a complimentary stay at the Salt Lake City Radisson before boarding a “luxury bus” to Vernal, Utah, for a tour of the tar-sands plant and its “proprietary, enviro-friendly technology.”
As it turns out, this isn’t a new hoax from the Yes Men, the parodists responsible for the Halliburton SurvivaBall or ExxonMobil Vivoleum, a fuel rendered from global-warming victims. Instead, it’s from MCW Energy, a Canadian company involved in one of the first tar-sands mines in the United States.
MCW Energy is also trying to push forward the first tar-sands project on federal lands nearby. The Bureau of Land Management is still deciding whether to approve this; the provisional approval language does not consider the project’s greenhouse footprint, which is consistent with President Barack Obama’s stated self-defeating climate policy.
The publicist who sent the email sent this further promotional brochure:
What underlies MCW’s bizarre claim of being “environmentally safe” and “friendly”? The company uses a proprietary set of chemical solvents to “
liberate bitumen” from strip-mined tar sands; the solvents are reused and the “
cleaned sands” can be replaced at the mining site. Their water-free technology should reduce or eliminate the need for the
toxic tailings ponds that are contaminating the lakes and rivers near other tar-sands projects.
This is all for the good, but it doesn’t make their tar-sands strip mine on public lands “environmentally friendly.” It’s still a strip mine. And global warming won’t stop until we stop extracting and burning fossil fuels. And tar-sands crude is significantly more polluting than regular crude oil.
In other words, MCW Energy may have found a way to make climate-destroying tar-sands strip-mining less toxic. But with friends like these, the environment doesn’t need enemies.