‘An edifice of lies’: How climate denial and religion kickstarted Alberta’s oilsands | National Catholic Reporter

Source: ‘An edifice of lies’: How climate denial and religion kickstarted Alberta’s oilsands | National Catholic Reporter

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The religious connection that greased the oilsands wheels

Dembicki outlines in his book how the wheels for Sun Oil’s oilsands megaproject were greased by the religious worldviews of Dunlop’s predecessor, former Sun Oil president J. Howard Pew, as well as then-Alberta premier Ernest Manning. Both men felt that North American oil needed to be urgently exploited.

The Pew name is associated these days with the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Pew Research Center it established, but in the early 1960s, Pew, a Christian libertarian, was able to get Manning’s approval to get an oilsands operation started in Alberta, after the two exchanged letters riddled with Biblical references.

Dembicki’s book quotes extensive research done by Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame, who has studied the links between religion and petroleum in the United States, including in his own book, “Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.”

Through archival documents, Dochuk has shown how Pew became bent on using the oil in northern Alberta to loosen North America’s dependence on overseas oil. Pew enthusiastically showed off a file marked “Athabasca Tar Sands” in his Philadelphia office, Dochuk wrote, to anyone who would indulge him.