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Tar Sands: Dirty Oil And The Future Of A Continent
 
 
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Tar Sands: Dirty Oil And The Future Of A Continent (Paperback)

by Andrew Nikiforuk (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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Product Description

Quill & Quire

For the  better part of their history, the Alberta tar sands have been out of sight and out of mind for most Canadians. A thinly populated wilderness and (in the words of one early bitumen booster) a “relatively undesirable environment,” it is a place few people visit. Ninety-eight per cent of the current population of Fort McMurray plan on eventually retiring somewhere else. Government operates as an absentee landlord. Such blindness and indifference spring from broad-spectrum denial of the unpleasant consequences of our addiction to oil. Calgary-based journalist and Governor General’s Award-winning author Andrew Nikiforuk covers the resultant fallout in detail, from the massive and irreparable destruction of the natural environment – turning a good chunk of northern Alberta, including the world’s third-largest watershed, into a toxic moonscape – to the political transformation of Canada into a modern petrostate. What he exposes most of all, however, is the mind-boggling short-sightedness and stupidity of the entire enterprise. Nikiforuk does overdo the figurative comparisons a bit. While volume may be handily imagined in units of Olympic-size swimming pools, it’s less helpful to know that the area covered by open-pit mining could end up being three times larger than the ancient city of Angkor Wat. But this is a minor point. Overall, Tar Sands provides an excellent guide to all of the environmental repercussions of our oil dependency. The political analysis is also good, sounding a warning about our dangerous energy “interdependence” with the declining American empire and using Thomas Friedman’s first law of petropolitics – that the price of oil and the quality of freedom invariably travel in opposite directions – to make the case for tar’s corrosive effect on democracy. Nikiforuk concludes with “Twelve Steps to Energy Sanity,” an oil-addiction recovery program. And surprisingly, many of his recommendations seem doable. We can’t avert a disaster that is already under way, but we might be able to prevent things from getting horribly worse.


Review

"Andrew Nikiforuk reveals the true costs of America's oil addiction. Tar Sands tells an important story with passion and wit." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

"Andrew Nikiforuk reveals the true costs of America's oil addiction. Tar Sands tells an important story with passion and wit." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Blistering Attack on Alberta's Tarsands, Jul 10 2009
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Smithers, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
It is not long into the book before the reader realizes that the Canadian environmentalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, has more than a few bones to pick with the Canadian petroleum industry over the future expansion of the Tar Sands. In this short study on the state of this megaproject as it unfolds in the boreal forests of northern Alberta, Nikiforuk believes that the technology used to extract and convert bitumen from deep in the ground is extremely hazardous to the environment and expensive to Canadian taxpayers. As mentioned in the book, there are friendlier, albeit more expensive, energy alternatives that big government and big oil need to pursue in order to save the environment and the future of the country. For Nikiforuk, a notable left-wing political activist, the real beneficiaries of this huge government investment in the Tar Sands are the right-wing neocons who are profiting from major kickbacks from the likes of Suncor in the rush to expand the production of dirty oil. He includes chapters in the book that deal specifically with how Ottawa and Edmonton have teamed up to make Canada a leading exporter of underpriced oil to the US at the expense of damaging the wildlife and waterways of the indigenous people of northern Alberta. Furthermore, Alberta charges Suncor and its affiliates some of the lowest oil royalties in the country while paying out its own pockets hundreds of millions of public money for building critical public infrastructure for processing centers like Ft.McMurray. As a result of the big spending, anti-environment policies of the successive governments of Ralph Klein and Ed Stelmach, Alberta is in the process of squandering its future as one of the wealthier provinces in Confederation. Nikiforuk maintains that it is time for the federal government to start shifting its energy priorities away from harmful and wasteful oil production to greener alternatives. To this end, a national carbon tax, fewer agriculture subsidies, higher royalties and a national heritage fund similar to Norway's could pave the way to a more sustainable economy that is not dependent on fossil fuels as its one key energy source. While I sympathize to a degree with Nikiforuk's message on the need to step back from developing the Tar Sands, I don't think it will happen the way Nikiforuk imagines it will. There are powerful economic forces at work here that have the attention of government and are prepared to do anything possible to see the Tar Sands expand over the next decade, even it uses up over 70% of the province's water and pollutes most of its northern waterways for generations to come. Well-written and worth the read just to learn how fragile this region is in terms of heavy industrial development.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Debunkers have their heads buried in the (tar) sand, Mar 20 2009
This is a must-read for anyone interested in the planet's future. Some facts and figures may be suspect, but the overall report is accurate, similar to what the courts said about Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." Environmental "Deniers" never seem to try to disprove an idea, but nitpick on isolated items as if that will make the whole thing crumble, just as they have done with the climate change facts over the years. Read the book, and do your own validation. You'll find this book is accurate overall.

"Carbon capture" raised by another reviewer (who writes as if he is a shill for Big Oil) is viable only in a few geographic areas in the world and North America, such as the US western states, and possibly the Appalachians. In the reasonably flat US Southeast, one of the biggest emitters of CO2 from burning coal, there is no way of doing this on the required large scale due to the region's geology. Carbon capture is happening in only one small test which is, frankly, not doing much to curb total emissions. There is Zero carbon capture occurring in the oil sands projects.

It is well-known in scientific circles, and widely reported in mainstream magazines and via television programs on the US Discovery Channel, PBS and elsewhere, that the tar sands are a huge emitter of greenhouse gases, both in the production, and with its final product. As a former Albertan, I understand the economic reasons for the government pursuing this path, but that doesn't mean I agree with it.
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19 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars overblown, inaccurate, and disappointing., Nov 25 2008
By David Lewis (Crescent Valley, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
The tar sands is an important topic. But this book isn't the place to learn about it. You'd have to double check everything so you might as well go other sources and ignore this.

I study climate change and wanted to know more about the tar sands as it is a significant deposit of fossil fuel. But in one section of this book Nikiforuk writes on carbon capture, a topic I know something about. I realized how poorly researched this entire book might well be.

Nikiforuk, on carbon dioxide: "many tar sand projects puff out nearly a million tons of carbon dioxide a year.... ... a million tons - a megaton - is enough lethal carbon dioxide to fill one million two-storey, three-bedroom homes and suffocate every occupant".

If this type of overblowing is your cup of tea you'll love this book. If someone stacked up a megaton's worth of copies of Nikiforuk's book and toppled them on a three-bedroom home, no doubt these lethal books would suffocate or at least crush everyone inside as well.

When it comes to inaccuracy, he comes up with wild figures and contradicts himself on CO2 within a few paragraphs. He states, citing no source: "no infrastructure currently exists to bury carbon. To inject twenty megatons... will cost anywhere from $10 billion to $16 billion". This works out to $500 - $800 a ton. Then he points to a supposed source, as if to confirm this ballpark figure: "the Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage... requested $2 billion in public funds to explore how to effectively bury just five megatons" which works out to $400 a ton.

No one else in the world is publishing figures like this.

Then, a few paragraphs later, Nikiforuk brings up an authority, the I.P.C.C. and states they say capturing "just one ton of carbon ranges anywhere from $25(U.S.) to $115(U.S.). So, within a few paragraphs, Nikiforuk goes from $500, to $800, then to $25 - $115 for either "injecting" a ton, or "capturing" a ton of CO2. Nikiforuk is just throwing numbers around, and using language loosely enough its hard to decypher exactly what he is claiming. Carbon capture "defies economics" he writes, even as his writing defies understanding.

He ignores that the I.P.C.C. states carbon capture will be an important part of future carbon dioxide emitting power sources for civilization even as he claims to be familiar with their work.

Near the end of this topic, he blithely pronounces the entire concept of carbon capture to be "morally bankrupt".

I don't find it that useful to be told that a technology that removes a pollutant is somehow "morally bankrupt". As far as his pronouncement that carbon capture "defies economics" it would be far more useful to publish a meaningful figure. What would cost to remove the CO2 from the emissions of the energy source used to process a barrel of oil from tar sand? If he just stated a range of estimates for this, then anyone could understand what it might cost to put tar sand oil on a more level playing field with conventional oil. It is the carbon emissions from the processing fuel that has analysts saying that tar sand oil results in more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. Nikiforuk carefully avoids stating any figures in this most meaningful form.

I've seen a study stating less than $10 a barrel, i.e. the Rand study. But Nikiforuk has an axe to grind, this is the "dirtiest" possible oil, and he isn't interested in providing any figures anyone can use to see the issue in any way other than what he says the issue is.

An on and on.
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 		 Most recent customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Superficial, Misleading, and Politically Slanted
You wouldn't want to read this book if you wanted other than a superficial picture of the oil sands. Read more
Published 3 months ago by David Moe

5.0 out of 5 stars The stupidity of man kind.
I am now in my winter years and a keen observer of the world around me and how humankind has destroyed so much of our planet. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Johnny Boy

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read!
Enlightening, well researched and written. This has been very helpful for me in understanding tar sands development.
Published 9 months ago by PBA

4.0 out of 5 stars A Sweeping Expose of an Environmental Disaster in the Making
Nikiforuk, most famous for his book on Wiebo Ludwig, "Saboteurs", now returns with a book that looks at the massive oil sands development in Northern Alberta and shows how the... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Gordon Neufeld

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