A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

F1 driver Sebastian Vettel -- Getty Images

"I think what happens in Alberta is a crime because you chop down a lot of trees and you basically destroy the place just to extract oil, and the manner of doing it with the tarsands, oilsands mining, is horrible for nature."

"There's so much science around the topic that fossil fuels are going to end, and living in a time that we do now, these things shouldn't be allowed anymore, and they shouldn't happen."

"It's just to think about future generations and the world we leave in their hands ... I think it's only fair to look after it and not destroy it."

Sebastian Vettel, German Formula One driver

 

"A race car driver sponsored by Aston Martin, with financing from Saudi Aramco, complaining about the oilsands."

"Rather than demonizing the oilsands, which is on a path to net-zero, people could look to lowering their own personal carbon footprint."

"Perhaps a pedal-car for Formula 1?"

Sonya Savage, Alberta energy minister

Germany's vital energy dependency on Russian oil and gas has vastly complicated its reaction and that of other Western European nations all hugely in debt to Moscow, paying the Kremlin the rubles for its natural resources that enable it to continue pounding Ukraine into the ground. While castigating Vladimir Putin for his 'special operation', with the Russian military tasked to bring Ukraine to its knees, destroying towns and villages, killing thousands of civilians, sustaining huge military personnel and munitions losses on both sides, a German national finds it prudent to criticize Canadian oil extraction in Alberta.

 

The Formula One driver is struggling with his environmental demons, looking for some entity to blame for his future environmental fears revolving around Climate Change. Like others before him he has found it useful not to question his own country's dependence on fossil fuels that creates an indebtedness of necessity between it and a country whose political-military ideology it abhors and focuses instead on natural resource extraction in a country whose leaders have strangled their own industry, even as that industry is itself committed to cleaner, less polluting extraction methods.

 

Sebastian Vettel's commitment was front row and central when he arrived, as a driver for Aston Martin, on a bicycle at the site of the Montreal Grand Prix with a T-shirt featuring an anti-oilsands slogan. With absurd optics, given that he did not bicycle to Canada from Germany, but picked up his bicycle after flying from Germany to Canada wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed "Stop mining Tar Sands", below which was a picture of a pipeline with the title "Canada's Climate Crime".

In a later interview the Formula One driver wore a green team T-shirt which across from the Aston Martin label on his chest bore the word Aramco, representing the state-owned oil giant owned by Saudi Arabia. Known as Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One Team, in February motorsport.com reported that Vettel's team had signed a deal with Aramco.

The team owner had explained that the sponsorship would "showcase the sustainability and performance of Aramco's products". The team, in other words, acts as a giant approving billboard featuring its sponsor, an oil producer that ships its product all over the world, including to Canada and the United States. Early in 2022 Sebastian Vettel mused during a BBC interview, Question Time, whether he should be travelling the world to race cars, in view of the global energy crisis prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"Every time I step in the car, I love it. When I get out of the car, of course I'm thinking as well: 'Is this something we should do, travel the world, wasting resources'?" Arriving at the Miami Grand Prix a week earlier, he wore a shirt that captioned: Miami 2050 - 1st Grand Prix Underwater -- Act Now or Swim Later. His is an ultimate level of hypocrisy; forgiving his own gas-guzzling choices to further his career, while attacking one source of energy supply, effectively approving another.

France's Sebastien Loeb, left, celebrates with Germany's Sebastian Vettel after winning the world final of The Race of Champions on ice, in Pite Havsbad, Sweden, Sunday, Feb. 6, 2022. (Par Backstroem/TT via AP)