The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

CALGARY — The kid with the YouTube rant is young and approachable. He’s an actor sporting a black leather jacket, strolling through a West Coast forest and talking about pipelines.

“The environment. The economy,” he intones. “People think you have to have one or the other. But do you? So many things to think about.”

And then, he tells us how we might want to think about those things. How we don’t have to worry about pipeline spills, since pipelines are monitored 24/7 “by trained experts.” Tankers, too, shouldn’t cause sleepless nights, since they’re equipped with “state of the art navigation systems,” steered by “well-trained local pilots” and escorted by tugs.

“As a British Columbian, we want to make sure that we’re protecting our beautiful environment. But here’s the thing. Canadian pipelines have a 99.9-per-cent safety record.”

The YouTube video has all the hallmarks of a campaign orchestrated by big-money oil companies, with slick graphics and accompanying social media accounts and slick websites translated into Punjabi, Mandarin and Cantonese.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

EDMONTON — Tom Steyer is a man at odds with himself. He made his fortune by founding a hedge fund with a keen interest in the energy sector, including leading oil, pipeline and mining companies. The firm also gobbled up stock in BP a year after its Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. All this should hardly make him a darling of environmentalists.

Yet there’s a green streak to Mr. Steyer – one that led last year to something of an existential crisis: Climate change, the American billionaire decided, was the “defining issue of our generation.” And so he left the firm he had spent a quarter-century building, Farallon Capital Management, because it valued a company’s bottom line, not its carbon footprint.

“I have a passion to push for what I believe is the right thing,” Mr. Steyer, 55, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail this week. “And I couldn’t do it in good conscience and hold down a job – and get paid very well for doing a job – where I wasn’t directly doing the right thing.” The Harper government and Canada’s oil patch might have wished he had stayed at Farallon.

Mr. Steyer has since set his sights on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. He has waded into the Democratic primary in Massachusetts by lampooning a pro-Keystone Democrat, Stephen Lynch, for being in the pocket of “big oil.” Mr. Steyer also accused him – in the form of a cheeky banner, pulled by a plane through Boston’s skies – of a loyalty akin to treason: being a Montreal Canadiens fan.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

At 83, Clement Bowman hasn’t lost any of his vision. We’re not talking about his eyesight, but rather his dogged determination to see potential where others only see pitfalls. It’s not hard to see why Peter Lougheed tapped Mr. Bowman as the first head of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority in 1975.

The late Alberta premier, who also came by the vision thing naturally, had founded AOSTRA a year earlier with what seemed like an impossible mission. All but a small proportion of oil sands bitumen was buried too deep to extract using existing strip-mining techniques. The big oil companies, clueless about how to get at the resource, were turning their backs on their leases.

True visionaries such as Mr. Bowman never let the negative groupthink get them down. With an initial $100-million from the Alberta Heritage Fund, AOSTRA took the lead in developing the now-universal steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) technology that unlocked the oil sands’ potential and brought Big Oil rushing back. Mr. Bowman got the Order of Canada, Alberta got filthy rich and the world took notice.

Fast-forward to the present and the two biggest challenges threatening the resource. Unless Canada can dramatically reduce carbon emissions from the oil sands and squeeze more value from raw bitumen, we risk environmental blacklisting and technological underdevelopment.

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