CEI Launches the ReThink Alberta Campaign to stop the Tar Sands

For Immediate Release

July 14, 2010, Calgary, Alberta - With the Calgary Stampede underway, billboards asking Americans to rethink their travel plans to Alberta rolled out across four major US cities today (cities that bring the most US tourists annually to Alberta) marking the first wave of a multi-year ad campaign aimed at revealing Alberta to be one of the world’s dirtiest destinations.

The billboards by San Francisco-based Corporate Ethics International (the same group behind the Ava-Tar-Sands ad endorsing an Oscar for James Cameron) and which works with multiple environmental groups across the US, Europe and Canada, including Friends of the Earth, Earthworks, Rainforest Action Network and ForestEthics, compare Alberta’s Tar Sands with the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

“Alberta can't destroy an area the size of England by producing the world's most polluting oil and still be known for Banff," said Dr. Michael Marx, executive director of Corporate Ethics.  “There is another oil disaster going on in Alberta every day and as more Americans become aware of it we believe they’ll be less willing to support the province with their tourist dollars.”

The first phase of the campaign consists of large [street-level] billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis, Google ads paired with key Alberta names and places like Banff, flash banner ads on high traffic tourism sites like Priceline.com and Discovery.com, a web site – rethinkalberta.com - and mail-outs to US tourism operators that specialize in Alberta tourism and professional associations that hold annual conferences in Alberta.

With Americans acutely aware of the environmental and economic disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil blowout, the message is that Alberta is home to the world’s other oil disaster, the Tar Sands, a place where:

Tar sands mines continue to create 130 square kilometers of tailings ponds that store toxic waste and leak 11 million litres of toxic water every day into groundwater and the Athabasca River;

The cumulative impact to boreal songbird populations from tar sands development could be as high as 166 million migratory birds dead over the next 30 to 50 years;

Air pollution due to Tar Sands development consistently exceeds government emission standards and is impacting air quality and causing acid rain in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan; and,

The Alberta and Canadian governments, like the US government in the Gulf, are rubber-stamping new projects without proper environmental review, safety and emergency plans.

Tar Sands development is the fastest growing source of global warming pollution in Canada, and is the major barrier to the Canadian government taking action on climate change. Meanwhile, Alberta has paid lobbyists in Washington trying to prevent the passage of US laws aimed at low carbon fuel standards.

The next wave of the ad campaign will be launched in two weeks across the UK.

For more information, please contact:
Michael Marx, executive director Corporate Ethics International
(415) 659 0531
(415) 238 9977 (cell)