We create our own reality these days. The conditions that people call “reality” are subject to interpretation; a fact for you can be a lie to me. We live in a post-fact society where something can be made to sound true and a population can be found to believe it.
That’s the thesis of a book called True Enough by author and blogger Farhad Manjoo.
It’s also the thesis of the Alberta provincial government, when it comes to the oilsands.
In today’s world, global warming is both fact and lie. True Enough opens with the story of a girl who died because her parents believed the link between HIV and AIDS was a conspiracy. Yes, George Bush did steal his presidential election — or not.
In Alberta, oilsands mining is a relatively benign environmental event and top government scientists will discount claims to the contrary at gatherings of the scientific community, and have articles printed in respected journals discounting studies finding grievous environmental harm due to oilsands development.
True enough, until someone calls a lawyer.
Preston McEachern, head of Alberta Environment’s science, research and innovation department, spoke last March at the University of Alberta ripping to shreds a study titled Does the Alberta Tar Sands Pollute? The Scientific Evidence. One of the study’s authors, Peter Lee of Edmonton-based Global Forest Watch Canada, was in the audience.
“To put it bluntly, I was gob-smacked,” Lee told a reporter for the Globe and Mail. “I was actually speechless. It was quite shocking.”
Lee and co-author Kevin Timoney of Treeline Ecology Research of Sherwood Park say they’ve been accused of manipulating and even lying about the data they gathered for their report.
McEachern’s address was further published on the website of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, a respected source of industry information.
In a time when information from one site shows up in others all over the world, the attack gained a pastiche of truthiness that further allows people to create a reality in which tarsands mining is environmentally benign.
Because McEachern could not back up his claims regarding Lee and Timoney’s paper, he was forced to recant, and the article on the website has been taken down. Plus, he (or the government on his behalf) paid the authors a whopping $1,000 to cover legal expenses in launching their lawsuit against him.
I say the authors settled too easily. All they really wanted was an apology — and they got one.
“The statements in my presentation . . . were false and I regret very much that I made these statements. I unequivocally retract them,” McEachern wrote. He won’t repeat his retraction for the public media, though. He now has to check with officials about “what I am allowed to say without getting into more trouble.”
That sounds more like our government.
But the website article has had ample opportunity to circle the globe and it’s impossible to retrieve it all.
Therefore, legitimate scientific inquiry into the tarsands has suffered discredit, enough to cast doubt on all studies that disagree with the official line.
Previously, global warming was just dinosaur farts in our legislature.
Now, the buildup of toxins, the damage to the water ecosystem of Alberta’s north, the greenhouse gas emissions from processing and upgrading — all of them can be said to be less harmful than advertised by non-government researchers. Or at least less harmful than other activities, like offshore oil drilling.
There’s no reality like the one you make yourself, right?
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.