Photography by David Dean

Total E&P Canada Ltd. President Jean-Michel Gires says the oil sands are poorly understood around the world

Across North America and Europe, green factions trash Alberta. The province’s business and political scenes are studded with environmental warnings. At an Edmonton meeting of Premier Ed Stelmach’s economic council, its chairman, David Emerson, says Alberta is headed for a dead end that he experienced as a British Columbia wood-products executive. In industry and government alike, “We completely lost credibility.” Companies and regulatory agencies not only had to change contested practices like forest clear-cutting – they also had to swallow their pride and seek seals of approval from green non-governmental organizations, Emerson says.

At a Calgary summer forum staged for oil firms and money managers by TD Newcrest Capital Inc., Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner predicts, “Consumers will increasingly think about the origins of the products that they buy.” That includes shares, mutual funds and pension plans. “Investors are looking for a clean energy environment,” Renner says. “Clean energy will clearly help Alberta compete for investment and employment.”

As he speaks Corporate Ethics International, a San Francisco coalition of 155 groups from the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Research to Women’s Voices for the Earth, begins posting ugly billboards and web ads that urge tourists to avoid Alberta as a “dirty destination.”

Anxiety escalates. Total E&P Canada Ltd. president Jean-Michel Gires, fresh from a $1.2-billion corporate takeover to increase his firm’s Alberta bitumen-belt assets, tells the TD forum that oil sands developers face “a very, very strong international campaign.” He adds, “Something needs to be done.”

As former executive vice-president of sustainable development and environment for Total S.A.’s 96,000-employee energy empire in 130 countries, Gires tells reporters, “In different places wherever we go people don’t understand [oil sands] and ask, ‘Why don’t you pay more attention [to project effects]?’ It creates potential problems.” An annoyed corporate communications officer cuts off questions and spirits Gires away, saying he is on a tight schedule, before he can be quizzed about what he means by urging the Calgary business crowd to tackle its “collective challenge” by adopting “a more pro-active approach.”

But a siege mentality is not unanimous. For three years the founder of bitumen mega-mining, Suncor Energy Inc., has voluntarily and frequently ventured into a bigger lion’s den than Corporate Ethics International. The firm belongs to Boston-based CERES, pronounced “series” and short for Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies.

“[CERES occupies] an important niche of being a convener of dialogue … They also challenge us to think.”
– Gordon Lambert, sustainable development vice-president, Suncor Energy Inc.

They occupy an important niche of being a convener of dialogue between business and environmental organizations,” says Suncor sustainable development vice-president Gordon Lambert. “They also challenge us to think. They’re a sounding board.”

CERES spins an investor, community and environmental relations web in three layers. A 133-member public interest coalition includes green groups such as the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund. But more than half the members are money stewards such as the California Public Employees Retirement System, Florida State Board of Administration, New York City Comptrollers Office and Presbyterian Church (USA).

In a CERES corporate member roster of 73 firms, Suncor rubs shoulders with international household names such as American Airlines, Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo, Ford Motor Co., McDonald’s Corp., Sun Microsystems and Time Warner.

CERES adds a global dimension to its core North American operation as founder of the Investor Network on Climate Risk. Its latest conference, held in the New York City headquarters of the United Nations, was attended by 80 operations that manage assets exceeding $8 trillion.

Launched in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker crash and spill on Alaska’s rocky coast, CERES runs its network from historic Chauncy Street, an urban canyon walled by vintage office towers in the Boston financial district. Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call in 1876 in the building where the pioneer ethical investment house has its headquarters. The neighborhood is the birthplace of American finance from its celebrated Brahmins of conservative stewardship to the classic scam first perpetrated on Boston’s Italian community by Charles Ponzi.

While bigger, more flamboyant New York City long ago eclipsed Boston as a world money capital, the elder town is still steeped in wealth. The 2010 Boston wedding-of-the-year recalled scenes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about the American Dream, The Great Gatsby. For the reception at a family mansion in suburban Marblehead on the Atlantic coast, celebrity financier Peter Lynch saluted the union of his daughter Elizabeth and French Count Gonzaque Mariede Montrichard by hiring a harbor barge to fire off a colossal private fireworks barrage that rivaled Alberta’s biggest public summer sky spectacles, Canada Day in Edmonton and the Calgary Stampede.

From an obscure start as a tiny non-profit society, CERES grew into a widely imitated evangelical mission for a business reform creed that is becoming popular across the United States, especially in the wake of the 2008 economic slump blamed on dog-eat-dog greed. The nub of the doctrine is expressed by placards that a Citizens Bank advertising campaign, aimed at striking a chord on mass markets for financial services, pastes on Boston bus-stop shelters: “The first principle of good banking is to have principles.” Translating the poster into the message that the ethical investment house is sending to oil sands developers and Alberta only requires changing one word. Instead of banking, say energy.

“Every industry has issues. Nobody has clean hands – be it sweatshops in China or oil sands tailings ponds. Every industry has its challenges.”
– Carol Lee Rawn, Transportation Programs Manager, CERES

At CERES headquarters in Boston, transportation programs manager Carol Lee Rawn explains, “The idea is that a strong economy and sustainability are not opposed but dependent on each other.” Oil production is never pretty and the ethical investment network does not stamp seals of approval on corporate members, she says. CERES maintains that all business sectors can polish up their reputations by openly disclosing their environmental risks, taking corrective actions and candidly reporting the results. “Every industry has issues. Nobody has clean hands – be it sweatshops in China or oil sands tailings ponds. Every industry has its challenges,” Rawn says.

Apart from the most avid industry fans, she doubts that anyone buys the beggar-thy-neighbor theory spread by some Calgary business commentators that BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has made bitumen projects look environmentally safe and less in need of scrutiny. “I’ve seen Canadian government officials making the same suggestion. But it should be a wake-up call. It made people pay attention to the risks associated with the oil sands. BP is a case of a company ignoring risks of poor environmental management with devastating consequences,” Rawn says. “There is concern about using higher-carbon fuels in general,” she adds. “There’s a growing recognition that we’re all in the same boat. The BP oil spill added fuel to the flames.”

She highlights an aspect of the investor and consumer side of energy markets outside Alberta that inspires reality checks like the warning that Gires gives Calgary as a Total veteran of the global oil and gas scene. Scrutiny of industry conduct has spread far beyond clutches of youthful green exhibitionists out to mock the economic and political establishment with publicity stunts.

Rawn is no amateur. A lawyer, she has served as a prosecutor for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. She recites a 1990s case of making a lead smelter pay a fine and clean up hazardous waste. A criminal assault charge was laid against the plant. The prosecution beat hard obstacles such as refusals of the smelter’s workers to help expose its pollution secrets because many were illegal immigrants who feared that they would be deported if they talked.

No such fight is wanted by Alberta’s pioneer bitumen miner. Suncor aims to make improvements and ensure they are understood well before conflicts blow up. Lambert describes CERES as a potent tool for developing widely acceptable standards of corporate responsibility. “The power they have comes from the diversity of perspectives they bring together,” Lambert says. As part of the Boston-based network, “We learn about questions we need to answer. We listen to stakeholder voices. It’s a bit of a compass for us. It’s a guide to issues, and how to take them on.”

CERES at times circulates one-sided reports by green organizations that Alberta leaders regard as at best loosely based on industry and government realities. But Lambert says the ethical investment house operates in an independent and objective way when it comes to providing its own services, such as convening advisory groups on corporate sustainability reporting. “They help us calibrate whether we’re telling our story.” Rather than rely on fashion arenas such as digital social media, “We put a high emphasis on the personal touch, like face-to-face dialogue, tours and education. We take it right out to the plant.”

“Investors are looking for a clean energy environment.”
– Rob Renner, Alberta Environment Minister

The first oil sands developer’s evolution bred an advantage over some rivals at coping with the modern green era. The firm’s current corporate incarnation is less than half the age of its 43-year-old Fort McMurray bitumen mega-mine. By the time Suncor’s president, Rick George, led its conversion from a private to a public company with a 1992 share sale, growing interest in environmental performance was clearly at hand. A formal mission statement adopted at the time identified becoming “a sustainable energy company” as a “core purpose.”

As an often-repeated pledge to stockholders and pitch to prospective investors, a high-minded mandate can have practical effects. “It compels you to try to understand expectations,” Lambert says. “It puts you in an operating mode of listen-and-respond, as opposed to declare-and-defend.” Joining CERES was one result. Another was seeing that mine tailings ponds were emerging as an issue and going to work on cleanups well ahead of the oil sands pack about seven years ago, he recalls.

In Boston, CERES is not one-dimensional. The ethical investment house recognizes that the current environmental focus on the supply side of energy markets only tackles part of a culture of fossil fuel-guzzling that spawns heated production development and mass carbon emissions. The sustainable business agenda includes engaging manufacturers, marketers, urban planners and the public in product, service and lifestyle changes.

“American cities were built as transportation shifted off railways and over to roads and cars. Everyone moved out to the suburbs to get a taste of the country. Now they’re sitting in traffic for two hours a day,” says Rawn, a convert to bicycle commuting. “People would like to get out of their cars.”

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