When Alberta’s Environment Minister, Diana McQueen, dropped by the State House this week to promote tar sands oil, she brought along a 30-page, full-color brochure touting the myriad benefits of her province’s most lucrative — and notorious — export.

It’s a slick document. Problem is, it’s chock full of little white lies, deceptive statements, and deliberately misleading visuals. But there’s one Big Lie, repeated frequently, that deserves special attention: that Alberta is a pioneer in the fight against global warming — in spite of its carbon-heavy oil industry — through its development of “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) — in which CO2 is captured from industrial operations, converted to a liquid, and pumped deep underground, filling spaces in the porous rock that were vacated by fossil fuel extraction.  

It’s a technological miracle, see? We can keep on burning fossil fuel to our heart’s content, and just dispose of the carbon deep in the earth. No fuss, no muss.

Except…

Alberta’s own experiments with CCS have been going seriously awry. The province has canceled two major projects in the past year, one of them just this week. Let’s turn to a February 27 piece by Graham Thompson, political columnist for the Edmonton Journal:

Officially, the government remains committed to the carbon capture and storage experiments as a way to reduce Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions. But unofficially, Premier Alison Redford has displayed no great confidence in the experiments’ ability to deliver as promised.

Her skepticism is understandable. Carbon capture and storage is a troubled, and unproven, experiment…

… Redford let it slip to Alberta journalists in 2011 that she’d prefer to see “better initiatives and opportunities” than CCS to reduce CO2 emissions, although she still hasn’t said what those “better initiatives” would be.

At the same time, Thompson reports, Redford has no problem with touting CCS “as a way to convince American politicians that her government takes climate change seriously.”

She talked about CCS again this past weekend while in Washington, D.C. However, in a move that was positively Orwellian, at the same time she was touting Alberta’s carbon capture and storage experiments, her government was putting the final touches on a news release announcing the death of one of those experiments.

That experiment, Swan Hills Synfuels, was killed on Monday. It’s proudly promoted in the brochure that Diana McQueen was handing around Montpelier on Tuesday. Oopsie.

The entire brochure is worthy of closer examination, but I thought the CCS Lie deserved its own diary. Expect another Alberta post in the near future.