by Kevin P. Timoney
MCGILL-QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY PRESS
2021/$39.95/424 pp.
By now it is well established that fossil fuels are the leading cause of global warming and that they need to be phased out if we are to rescue a habitable planet. Peer-reviewed research published in Nature in 2022, for example, shows that more than 83 per cent of Canada’s oil reserves must stay in the ground to avert heating of over 1.5oC. But while the emissions spewed by the production and consumption of fossil fuels are now well understood as an existential threat, the oil and gas industry has largely escaped criticism and accountability for the more local impacts associated with the truly staggering amount of oil, gas and salt water it spills into the landscape every day. In Hidden Scourge, Alberta ecologist Kevin Timoney documents this slow-moving environmental catastrophe that is going largely unnoticed and that regulators have systematically failed to account for and address.
The book reads like a scientific detective story, but it’s not one for the faint of heart. Nearly a decade ago, Timoney noticed that in data reported by the Alberta Energy Regulator, for thousands of spills, recovery volumes exactly matched the reported spill volumes. The data couldn’t be right—it’s almost impossible to clean up every drop of spilled oil—and Timoney set out to find out what was wrong with the reporting. Over several years, he analyzed more than 100,000 industrial spills from Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Montana and the Northwest Territories. He collected environmental data at oil and gas infrastructure sites, subjected energy regulators’ data to statistical analysis, and spoke to government and industry insiders and to leaders with the Dene Tha’ Nation, which has kept a keen eye on industry’s operations in northern Alberta. The result is this impressive book: a damning indictment of governments and regulators, especially in Alberta, for abandoning their duty to protect the environment and ensure industry operates in the interest of the public.
In painstaking detail, Hidden Scourge shows the cumulatively severe and widespread damage that industry has done to the environment. In Alberta, for example, from 1975 to 2018 an average of 1.9 spills of oil and 1.7 spills of salt water were reported per day (accounting for 290,578 m3 and 979,849 m3 respectively of oil and salt water). But those are just the spills that industry self-reported. As Timoney shows, the volumes spilled and recovered are not actual measurements, but rather values made up by the parties that spilled them. Thousands of spills are missing from the regulator’s records, including massive ones that would dwarf the cumulative reported volumes of spills already known to the regulator. Timoney’s investigations also show that those charged with regulating the industry have been complicit in the destruction—not bothering to collect the data, monitor the industry or fine the companies responsible.
Contamination of farmers’ and ranchers’ fields, of hunting grounds, reserves, wetlands and public lands, although mostly hidden from the wider public, are the kinds of immediate damage that people experience as a profound loss—after all, there is no such thing as restoring oil and gas sites to what they once were, something Timoney concludes from his field research. The landscape effects of spilled oil and salt water persist long-term—habitat and native prairie can be lost permanently and soil is contaminated for generations, affecting crops. If people suffering from these local impacts can unite with global climate change activists, then we might have a fighting chance of forcing a transition away from fossil fuels.
Emily Eaton is a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina.
