The Pathways Alliance spent five years promoting the fossil fuel industry as “climate concerned” with its massive advertising campaigns and advocacy for carbon capture and storage. They covered transit and billboards and filled screens and radio waves with declarations that oil companies were here to provide climate solutions and had a plan to be net-zero by 2050.     

Now, the six companies that formed Pathways have gone for a rebrand, calling themselves the Oil Sands Alliance. The announcement affirmed that the name change was made “to better reflect the purpose and mandate of the organization to promote growing the oil sands industry.”

We were skeptical about the mission of the Pathways Alliance from the get-go. It was a rather obvious attempt to placate the public when the student climate strikers and a strong environmental movement were demanding accountability. 

Their not-so-subtle message was, “No need to worry, and certainly no need for any regulations. We’ve got this.”

But under the banner of the “Pathways Alliance”, they mislead the public about the fossil fuel industry’s support for climate action, all the while pushing to expand fossil fuel production – without any real concern for the climate pollution that comes along with tar sands extraction and refining. 

The Pathways Alliance was criticized by environmental experts and investigative journalists for greenwashing. Much was written about the dissonance between its political advocacy and its advertising. A greenwashing complaint to the Competition Bureau from Greenpeace spurred an investigation. Academics documented how Pathways was a “textbook” case of greenwashing. And now First Nations and community groups are starting to organize opposition to the Pathways Alliance CCS project that still bears its old name. 

Why the rebranding? It's hard to tell. But as the Oil Sands Alliance, they will carry forward the run-of-the-mill pro-oil advocacy that Big Oil has been doing for decades, writes Emilia Belliveau.

Perhaps it’s because the Pathways brand had become tarnished. Perhaps it’s because they’re going to be forced to throw in the towel on the CCS pipeline at the heart of the Alberta-Canada Memorandum of Understanding. Maybe it’s the great friendship they’ve forged with the new federal government. 

As the Oil Sands Alliance, they will carry forward the run-of-the-mill pro-oil advocacy that Big Oil has been doing for decades. Now they can continue with lobbying against emissions regulations and climate policies, as the companies do here in their list of demands to the new federal government, without appearing in conflict with the stated climate goals of the Pathways project. 

We could have seen this coming. The story of the Pathways Alliance/Oil Sands Alliance comes right out of the predictable Big Oil playbook. The whole thing was always an industry branding strategy intended to help gain social license, improve legitimacy in the public’s eyes and to access more government subsidies, despite already pocketing billions of dollars in profits.

Now it’s patently clear that fossil fuel companies will always advocate for more deregulation. No government grand bargain or concession on climate policy will lead industry to stop pushing for endless and limitless fossil fuel expansion, as well as fewer climate and environmental policy safe-guards.

This leaves one important lesson for our government: don’t fall for Big Oil’s ruse. 

The fossil fuel industry has clearly shown it cannot be trusted or satisfied when it comes to climate policies. Instead of furthering deals to grow fossil fuel exports for a volatile global market, now is the time to invest in the energy transition, a clean grid, clean transportation and infrastructure that will make us resilient to climate impacts. 

The choice is between staying shackled to the petro-past while putting Canada at risk of falling behind the emerging electro-states of the 21st century, or thriving in the future on clean power that secures our own energy sovereignty.

Emilia Belliveau is the energy transition program manager at Environmental Defence Canada. She has worked on climate and environmental justice issues as academic researcher, campaigner with environmental non-profits, a community organizer, and as a senior policy analyst in the British Columbia Ministry of Energy. 

© National Observer