It’s hard to say if it was the worst week of his life, but last week will probably go down as Ed Stelmach’s worst one so far as premier of Alberta. And for that, three cheers!

The week had barely begun when the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution that would curtail the use of dirty fuel in their municipalities’ vehicles and specifically singled out the black gold produced in Northern Alberta’s oilsands.

Of course, their insistence that only the least destructive greenhouse gas and other pollutant-producing gasoline available be used in their cities is a little rich coming from the mayors of the most oil-addicted nation on the planet. It’s also a completely symbolic gesture. There is no way today to track the ingredients of any particular tank of gas.

Still, it’s the thought that counts and it appears more and more people are coming around to the one that tells us we’ve only got one planet on which to live, so we’d better stop screwing with it.

Others, like Greenpeace, reached that conclusion some time ago and they’re sick and tired of those who are determined to extract their short-term profits at any cost—those willing to disregard, downplay, or flat-out lie about the large-scale environmental catastrophe we’re racing towards, pedal to the metal, no touching the brakes.

Check out the website Greenpeace put up last week, www.travellingalberta.com. It’s set up to look like a travel brochure, promising wake-up calls from the propane cannons that keep the birds out of the toxic lakes and showing kids playing on a pollutant-smeared beach while Mom gets a tar facial and Dad reels in something covered in black goo. “Disgusting” was how the distraught premier described the “misinformation” the group put forward. Of course, one person’s misinformation is another’s painfully obvious truth.

In another bit of bad news for Stelmach, in anticipation of the meeting of the Western Governors’ Association this week in Wyoming, a coalition of Canadian and American environmental groups pooled their money and plunked it down on a full-page ad in Wyoming’s biggest newspaper, the Casper Star-Tribune, dubbing the sands “the most environmentally destructive project on Earth.”

That’s a tough one to argue against. You’d have to name a project that will scrape up and discarde a spread of boreal forest (read: carbon sink) bigger than Florida, devours natural resources such as water and natural gas like I eat potato chips, then spits them out again in the form of toxic sludge that, if it doesn’t kill the wildlife outright, disrupts every other aspect of their lives quite thoroughly.

See what poor Ed is up against?

As part of the plan to counter such claims and set the record straight, so to speak, Alberta has undertaken a $25-million “greenwash” campaign for the oilsands shithole, which took Stelmach, Ted Morton (his “right-hand man” of sorts) and Saskatchewan’s new premier Brad Wall down to Wyoming to meet with the WGA. Of course, those guys are a pretty easily convinced lot, especially when the shithole is somebody else’s environmental catastrophe. If anything, they want the oilsands developed faster!

Not everyone is likely to be quite so easy to convince, however, which is where the $25 million comes in.

Now, if you think that’s a lot of money... well, it’s a bargain compared to how much it’ll cost to clean that mess up, so by way of gaining a little perspective: who remembers the Sydney Tar Ponds?

The ponds formed on an industrial site near Cape Breton, Nova Scotia that manufactured steel and burned coal in giant coke ovens for a century. It underwrote the local economy, so the pollution was tolerated. None of the stakeholders, as we would call them if they were around today, did much to upgrade the technologies at the plant. As far as sticking around to help with the clean-up after the money was made and the plant decommissioned, they didn’t do that either.

And so, when orange goo began seeping into people’s basements and residents began complaining of headaches, nausea and respiratory problems, government was once again saddled with the health care burden, not to mention the logistical nightmares and outrageous cost of cleaning the site up.

After an excruciatingly long period of inaction, $400 million was budgeted for the clean-up. That’s for a site that covers roughly 31 hectares. For comparison’s sake, the tailings ponds in Northern Alberta cover about 4,856 hectares. They’re still growing. Do the math, then go and do something that’ll make this week an even crappier one for the premier.