Students in the SFU Dialogue and Public Issues class hosted a discussion on the “oil crisis” (their term) yesterday, called “Beyond the TurmOIL”, involving students, activists, members of the general public, and 4 speakers. It was an interesting and fast-paced session anchored by Sara Robinson, futurist and blogger for Blog For our Future and other sites; Sara provided both hard facts and her personal story about the impacts of oil on her life.

Other speakers included Shannon Daub, who gave some results of her interviews with Canadian energy workers (including many in the tar sands) who support the switch to alternative energy, and Jennifer Fisher-Bradley, who’s working with her partner Stephen to make Port Alberni into Canada’s first Transition Town.

The fourth speaker was Ray Lord, PR man for Chevron. Lord too told his personally story, becoming choked up at a couple of points about how personally he takes his job (and the attacks that are sometimes aimed at his employer), then went on to talk about how Chevron is “positioning” itself to be helpful to Premier Campbell in successfully executing his climate change plan for the province.

Whether or not Ray, as the only person in the room who was paid to be there — and thus the only person with a sales agenda aimed at increasing profits — was appropriate as a speaker is open to debate; it’s certainly true that as a person he had a right to stand and tell his own story.

What was not appropriate, in my opinion, was the 2 minute Chevron commercial that the SFU students dutifully showed at Lord’s behest. The commercial, part of a series of commercials (conveniently available on youtube) under the general rubric “Human Energy”, is a montage of lovely images under carefully calibrated piano music intended to sell the idea that the folks at Chevron (actually ChevronTexacoUnocal since the mergers) are just moms and dads and football coaches like you and me, looking for ever-cleaner ways to power our world. An animation at the end emphasizes that they’re not just an oil company anymore, giving equal weight to their comparatively miniscule investments in clean energies.

When PR is introduced into any public forum, I think it’s the responsibility of whoever is facilitating the dialogue to make sure that PR is balanced by someone who can deconstruct the PR and fill in the missing facts. In this case, some relevant facts are:

Chevron was originally Standard Oil of California, a descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil of Ohio. Standard Oil was one of the most rapacious corporations in the history of corporations, using cutthroat monopolistic business practices to destroy competitors until it was broken up by the Surpreme Court in 1911 under the terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Chevron was a founding member of the Global Climate Coalition, which defeated ratification of the Kyoto treaty in the US.

Chevron is one of the US companies that has finally gotten back into Iraq with a no-bid contract, 36 years after Saddam Hussein nationalized the Iraqi oil industry, thanks to the US war that re-opened Iraq’s fields to foreign investment.

The Chevron corporation is not just another citizen of BC like you and me. We don’t have equal say in influencing policy or decisions in Gordon Campbell’s office. We have much to do to get the Lower Mainland ready for the imminent impacts of peak oil - changing our pattern of community, rearranging the Gateway project and stopping the expansion of YVR so we can spend those billions on mass transit, changing our zoning and habits to promote urban agriculture - and the extent to which the ruling Liberal Party is indebted to resource extraction companies is not going to make our job easier.

So let’s have dialogue, but dialogue free of PR. To clear the air on climate change, visit BC’s own DeSmogBlog; to clear the air on advertising, try BC’s AdBusters, and to get a humorous opposing viewpoint on how benign corporate influence has been in the province, check out How to Boil a Frog’s mini-documentary on the proposed coal mine in the pristine Flathead Valley.

The more we stick to the facts, the less TurmOIL we’ll have to go through.