Public anxiety about allowing offshore drilling has been around for a long time, rising to panic levels during accidents and spills, and for good reason. The continuing environmental disaster off the Gulf coast was the result of poor regulation and should prompt Canadians to question our own regulatory regime for offshore exploration. More specifically, we need to address our inability to manage risks that accompany technological advances and ensure that knowledge about our country’s resource potential is used in the public interest.

Offshore drilling started in the Gulf of Mexico over 60 years ago. In fact, the recent Louisiana spill is remarkably similar to the blowout at Mexico’s offshore IXTOC 1 well in 1979. That accident was caused by failures aboard a Canadian-built oil rig, which, like the recent BP accident, also burned and sank, releasing half a billion litres of oil into the ocean—10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

A decade before, that same rig had been used to drill the last hole in Shell Canada’s program off the coast of British Columbia. At that time, the infamous Santa Barbara, California, spill was alerting Canadians to the hazards of offshore drilling, but it hardly mattered, because Shell ended its program as planned, in August 1969.

Oil engineers have had 40 years to learn about preventing offshore blowouts. Rather than question their expertise, a better response would be to ask why government monitors seem unable to anticipate and prevent such events. Disasters caused by new technology occur when a small number of engineers monopolize technical knowledge and fail to protect the public. A prescient 1976 study by the British Council for Science and Society entitled “Superstar Technologies” analyzed this problem.

Frailties of intellect may lead engineers to believe their skills are sufficient for the job; or to work within isolated silos of expertise, ignorant of the skills of others. Frailties of conscience may make them yield to boredom, neglect routine safety measures, or let them be bullied out of more cautious or dissenting opinions. The higher the risk, the greater the need for monitoring, but explicit federal policy cripples its capacity to apply the critical scrutiny necessary to protect our environment.

With the notable exception of Health Canada, federal departments do not recognize provincial licensing for professionals. Self-regulation is the public’s first line of defence. Federal engineers and geoscientists are accountable only to their minister, and not to their peers. Secondly, federal regulators must be attentive to political direction filtering down to their level. If a regulator wanted redundancy in an aspect of blowout prevention and the company engineer replied, “We can’t afford that,” the regulator would be risking his or her chances for promotion by withholding approval. Corporations complain to the political level if their desires are thwarted, and the embattled public servant always hears about it, inevitably acquiescing.

Current drilling of Chevron’s deep well Lona 0-55, off Canada’s East Coast, has made everyone very nervous. The regulators said they balanced this project’s higher risk with more operational requirements and monitoring, but we can’t assess the truth of this statement. Long-standing rules for petroleum rights allow companies to withhold release of their offshore seismic and drilling results for five to 10 years. Arguably, the unexplored Orphan basin off our East Coast needed drilling to define its geology, but Chevron gains the knowledge, not the public. That’s still a problem on our West Coast.

Canada first issued offshore permits for the West Coast in 1961. Shell was the sole bidder, and two years later, the company started a six-year exploration program. After the 1968 discovery of oil on Alaska’s North Slope, everyone saw tankers carrying Alaskan oil to the Lower 48 as a pollution threat. The federal Liberal cabinet then attempted to ban tanker traffic to help its advocacy of a new pipeline for Alaska oil across the continent. By then, the government knew Shell had not found oil.

Preventing oil spills was the government’s rationale when it started the “moratorium” on offshore exploration in 1971. This action exempted Shell from obligations like annual permit fees or releasing geological information. Promises to cancel the permits were not kept, so even today the company pays nothing for its rights, which remain preserved like fossils in bureaucratic amber.

It’s unlikely there is oil off Canada’s West Coast. The moratorium lets Shell sit on what it knows, but it published some hints in 1971. Most of Canada’s oil originated in shallow seas of the Cretaceous era, but rocks of that origin are notably absent on the western continental shelf. Overlying, younger rocks were found to be “tight,” meaning they have poor ability to store any oil or gas squeezed up from older rocks. More ominously, Shell reported drilling into “hard geopressures,” where the rock has higher fluid pressures than the weight of overlying rock would predict. Such conditions make blowouts even more likely.

One might wonder what additional requirements regulators assigned to Chevron’s Lona 0-55, to be equipped to handle “hard geopressures.” If the public has only limited and long-delayed access to facts like these, to understand the geological realities, it cannot properly assess the diligence of the monitors.

Technology seems always one step ahead of our evolving capacity to protect the environment. We should insist that the regulation of offshore development include true independence of the monitoring agency, critical scrutiny by licensed professionals, and complete disclosure, to ensure that the interface between rocks and dollars is managed in the public interest.

Shell Canada’s operations in Alberta’s oil sands are clean and green, and simply the victim of nasty rumours spread by environmentalists trying to tar the company’s reputation. That is, if you believe the “six-week Canwest special information feature on climate change, in partnership with Shell Canada.”

Canada’s largest media company teamed up with the oil giant to produce a series of features that showcase how Shell is tackling energy challenges and environmental responsibility. The full-page, feel-good features ran in six Canwest dailies—the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Vancouver Sun—six Saturdays in a row in January and February 2010. The six-part series also appeared in the Toronto Star as a pullout section.

The series profiles friendly Shell employees who share what motivates them to work in Alberta’s oil sands—Canwest style is to avoid the use of “tar sands”—otherwise known as one of the world’s largest and most destructive industrial projects. There’s the climate change expert (a goateed grandpa clutching walking sticks), the chemist (a longhaired family man who dabbles in acting) and the environmental management systems coordinator (a young woman in a Cowichan sweater who spent countless hours as a child flipping through National Geographic). The features include “myth busters” to clear up so-called misconceptions like the idea that Shell’s oil sands production is too energy-intensive, pollutes the Athabasca River and results in “dirty oil,” among other allegedly tarnishing falsehoods. The only myth, however, is that these features are editorial content. The fact is, they’re paid advertisements for Shell.

While advertorials designed to look like newspaper stories are common, they are usually clearly identified as advertisements as urged by regulatory groups like Advertising Standards Canada. This is essential so readers don’t think the material is subject to the same standards and ethics of journalistic stories: accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and accountability.

Nowhere did the word “advertorial” or “advertising” appear on the Shell ads. Rather, “Canwest special information feature on climate change, in partnership with Shell Canada” was inked across the top of the page, suggesting an editorial partnership between Canwest and Shell, a major newsmaker. Seasoned journalist and outgoing chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism Paul Knox says the wording is euphemistic. “You’re either trying to disguise the advertorials as editorial content or you’re not,” says Knox. “And if you’re not trying to disguise them, what’s to be lost by being reasonably explicit about the terms?”

When asked this question, Canwest director of communications Phyllise Gelfand said: “We feel very strongly that the language was clear enough and that readers will appreciate it.” However, when asked to elaborate on what the language means, she said: “I’m not going to go into semantics with you.”

Gelfand pointed out the information features were presented in a different font, layout and style than the papers’ editorial content. However, the ads ran during the lead-up to the Olympics and during the Games, when many papers were using different layouts. Lifestyle spreads (fashion and homes, for example) also often take more colourful and creative layouts, not unlike the Shell ads. (In the Star, the pullout section was printed on a differently coloured paper.)

Advertorials are often distinguished from editorial copy by not placing a byline on the piece. But in this case, Alberta-based freelancers and Canwest contributors Brian Burton and Shannon Sutherland were credited. Both Burton and Sutherland have covered Shell and the oil industry for Canwest. Burton has 20 years of experience in corporate communications for leading energy corporations, according to his LinkedIn profile, which also states his goal: “to advocate successfully for my clients in the court of public opinion.” For Sutherland’s part, her bio on one magazine site says when she’s not “interrogating industrialists” she’s hanging out with her kids.

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The advertorials also appeared on Canwest papers’ websites—on homepages as top stories and in the news section, with URLs that looked like those of any other news story. Just like regular news, readers could comment on the “stories.” Canwest refused to respond to allegations the campaign included seeded comments, meaning a slew of positive comments about Shell were posted and negative ones deleted in an effort to further sway public opinion. “I am not aware of this,” said Shell spokesperson Ed Greenberg. “I know you appreciate that anyone, whether or not they work for Shell, is entitled to read any newspaper or magazine they want and form their own opinions from what they read.”

When Sierra Club Executive Director John Bennett spotted the features in the Ottawa Citizen, the former newspaper reporter and ad sales rep was shocked by the one-sided nature of the information. “I could not tell they were ads,” Bennett says. “They looked and read like editorial content.” He only learned the features were ads when he contacted the publisher of the Citizen to complain about the unbalanced coverage. The nonprofit environmental advocacy organization promptly filed a complaint with Advertising Standards Canada. However, because Sierra Club went public by issuing a news release, ASC did not accept the complaint: it’s against the rules for special interest groups to generate publicity for their cause through the complaint process. Sierra Club also filed a complaint with the Ontario Press Council, which has not yet adjudicated the matter. The council’s advertising policy states ads that look like ordinary news stories should be clearly labelled as advertising.

Despite dismissing the complaint, ASC Vice-President of Standards Janet Feasby says advertising designed to look like news stories is of growing concern and ASC will be publishing an advisory on the subject to bring the issue to the attention of advertisers, media, and the public. Feasby points to a recent precedent decision, in which the ASC found a “special information supplement” in a newspaper that extolled the virtues of Neuragen, a homeopathic product, was presented in a manner that concealed the advertiser’s commercial intent. “It was clear to council that it was advertising, not information.” Like the Shell features, an ad for the company was included at the bottom of the page.

ASC can force advertisers and publications to remove ads, but often it’s too late: the ads have already run and the damage has been done. The only loser is the reader, who may have read and wrongly interpreted the ad as a news story. Papers that blur the line between advertorial and news content risk their credibility and their relationship with their audience. “The problem with these advertorial exercises is they muddy the waters and you’re placing obstacles in the way of a reader who’s trying to figure out, ‘What is my interest here, and what’s behind what I’m being told?’” says Knox, who teaches media ethics at Ryerson. “It has the potential to undermine the trust that your audience has in you and that’s fatal.”

The seriousness of this matter is magnified when the subject of the advertorial is a controversial one, such as climate change. “[These ads] play on public complacency, they play on the public’s hopes that the environment is being protected,” explained the Sierra Club’s Bennett. “One of the reasons we have so much difficulty advancing the environmental agenda in the face of overwhelming public support is because people can’t imagine there are governments or companies not trying to do the best they can. When you get misleading advertising like this, you play to that inborn need for people to believe that things are being looked after.” You also play into the inborn need people have to trust the media to provide them with honest coverage.

While Shell insists it produced the features to clear up “misconceptions” about climate change and its environmental commitment, the company has a track record for producing misleading, greenwashed advertising. In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. denounced a Shell newspaper ad that described tar sands projects as sustainable, saying it breached rules on substantiation, truthfulness, and environmental claims. A year earlier, the ASA found another Shell ad guilty of greenwashing—this one featuring refinery chimneys emitting flowers. Still, Shell defends its ads.

“We were getting feedback from Canadians that all they were seeing and hearing was one-sided information [about climate change], so [the feature campaign] was done to try to balance the discussion,” said Greenberg. “Don’t you think that’s fair?” Readers?

98% of so-called "green" products really aren't. Creative Commons photo by fotdmike.

It seems like everything has “gone green” these days. From retailers to celebrities, airlines to hotels, banks to even runway fashion, the environment is sexy in the marketplace for the first time. But is all the publicity really helping Mother Nature? When consumers are being “greeenwashed” in their attempt to fit into a petite size footprint, there is a serious problem-the status quo.

Greenwashing, like whitewashing, is masks inconvenient truths about the sustainability of products and services. By appearing to be environmentally sensitive, companies are earning billions in “green” revenue. Meanwhile, consumers are misled in their attempts to live green, unknowingly contributing further to planetary destruction.

“It’s greenwashing when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be ‘green,’ through advertising and marketing, than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact,” says the Greenwashing Index, a web site that rates the authenticity of companies’ and products’ eco-friendliness.

And the sad reality is most green products out there are bogus. Exactly 98% of products that claim green labels in the market place are greenwashed, says a report by the TerraChoice Environmental Marketing in April. The company says there are seven eco-sins that companies commit, including: misleading consumers about the environmental benefits of a product or the practices of a company; hidden trade offs, for example, energy efficiency versus the production of hazardous chemicals; and vagueness, such as using terms like “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “natural.” Does a naturally-occurring substance like formaldehyde conjure up ideas of eco-consciousness for you?

One example of a greenwashing company is Shell. Shell Canada is currently providing grant money for up to $100,000 towards four major initiatives that improve and preserve the Canadian environment, and $10,000 grants to grassroots, action-oriented projects. And in its ad campaigns, Shell promotes itself as sustainable and eco-friendly. Is this true? Is Shell becoming a business leader in our ecologically pivotal time?

I think not. Shell is spending billions to be the lead company in the business of dirty and unconventional oil with the Alberta Tar Sands. That helps to extend our dependency on fossil fuels and contributes to the most destructive and greenhouse gas-intensive method of oil extraction on earth. The Tar Sands produces 40 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually for Canada through this project. Such projects make it impossible for us to meet any significant global climate agreement, like Kyoto, and probably Copenhagen.

However, there is an immune response to all this consumer corruption. Today, there are a number of groups that work as third parties in environmental labelling, such as EcoLogo, Energy Star or Green Seal. There are science-based marketing firms that assist in transforming companies to the ‘green path,’ like TerraChoice. And there are numerous references and indexes for the every-day consumer in verifying the genuine nature of a product, like Greenpeace’s Electronics Report and GreenwashingIndex.com.

But with this surge of green-labelling – including some companies that mimic third-party environmental certifications, such as HP’s Eco Highlights products – it’s no wonder why so many of us are still in the dark about greenwashing. Perhaps, as Treehugger.com argues, we need a universal eco-labelling system to make it easier for consumers to really go green.

Or perhaps we need to get our heads out of our greenwashing asses. Making change involves getting smarter. We cannot keep expecting someone else to do it for us. Being informed as a consumer and human being in our choices is our responsibility. Relying on the other guys is what got us into the mess we are in. Like brainwashing, let’s take back our brains back – and leave the washing for cleaning our hybrid cars with biodegradable products.

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Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.