Ian Robinson
The Calgary Sun
A “sanctimonious Hollywood leftie” has attacked Alberta, and our leaders simply smiled meekly, said Ian Robinson. High on the success of his “simplistic enviro-fable, Avatar,” director James Cameron recently lashed out at the Canadian oil industry, saying our extraction from oil sands was environmentally unsound and that we should be building wind turbines instead. We all know “celebrities tend to be morons,” but that outburst was particularly stupid.
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Wind turbines are hardly eco-friendly—they “slaughter flying wildlife in numbers that beggar the imagination.” And Alberta’s oil sands are not some huge, diverse ecosystem; they’re “a lousy 600 square kilometers of torn-up ground that the oil sands companies are rehabilitating as they go.”
The real issue, though, is not that Cameron dissed us, but that Alberta’s leaders “continued our long-standing tradition of weak-kneed responses to ignorant and vituperative attacks on our economic prosperity.” Rather than “reacting with a touch of testicularity,” Albertan Environment Minister Rob Renner merely murmured that wind turbines were important, too. Why the diffidence? The developing world needs oil, and we have it. “If there was ever a time when Alberta could cheerfully extend the middle finger to the rest of the world, it’s right now.”
