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15 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dick Cheney comes to Canada, December 29, 2008
Andrew Nikiforuk has done us all a great favour in writing this impassioned book about the Alberta Tar Sands and the social, environmental and political devestation they are causing. Mr. Stephen Harper has revealed himself as the Dick Cheney of Canada, a scheming figure, intellectually in debt to the carbon fuels industry, with great personal integrity and a passionate contempt for democracy, especially parlimentry democracy.
Mr. Nikiforuk begins his book with XXII propositions (I will not repeat them all here) which are a strong call to action for anyone concerned with the environment, Canadian society and politics and the people of the Athabasca. He follows this with a detailed history of the tar sands development and its impacts. Bitumen is a very dirty and inefficent fuel and that we are turning to it as an alternative shows how far we have gone down the road of carbon degredation. Nikiforuk points out that integrating the North American energy market around fossil fuels will effectively remove what ever political independence Canada has (a long time goal of the Harper Conservatives) and will reconstitute Canada as a client energy slave of the US. It will make it impossible for Canada to meet any international agreements on carbon reduction (another goal of the Harper Conservatives) and lock Canada into a path of declining international relevance as the world moves into a post-carbon economy and a devestated landscape.
After reading this book I went over to Google Maps and cruised around the Fort McMurray and the enviromental disaster in the making is already clearly visible.
This book reinforces how important it is to stop Harper and his carbon fueled political machine. At the very least, the tar sands projects should be forced to carry the full cost of all of their externalities - carbon footprint, land restoration, impact on wildlife, social impact ... If these costs were fully factored in it is doubtful that there would be much development in the tar sands. Instead, the federal and Alberta governments are selling out the Canadian tax payer for short term gain, though most of the gain will go to a very few Canadians and Americans. The rest of the world will suffer from carbon emmissions and the loss of a wonderful river and wilderness.
I suspect that our grand children will ask us in horror and disbelief why we thought that burning complex and beautiful hydrocarbons was a good way to create energy when we had so many other options available.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
thorough analysis of a social and environmental disaster, October 30, 2011
A thorough examination of the consequences of the tar sands project in Alberta. The author looks at this situation from a number of angles, including the project's water and methane usage, the wasting of the Athabascan watershed and millions of acres of boreal forest, the ruinous air quality in the area where the bitumen is refined, the devastation of community and economy in the area surrounding Fort McMurray, the contribution dirty oil makes to climate change, the possibility of nuclear reactors being used simply to help power the project, the failure of the project to benefit the citizens of Alberta, the redirection of the oil itself to the United States, and the growing "Saudi Arabization" of Canada and particularly of Alberta. My biggest complaint with the book is that the author all but ignored making any consideration for the Dene people, whose ancestral land is being turned into a moonscape in the name of "energy security". I also disliked the author's nonsensical belief that driving less is an effective means of helping to halt the tar sands project. As a non-driver, I do not believe this. I can understand a corporation using the "It's up to individual consumers to change things" remedy to social and environmental ills, but it's depressing to hear it come from the social and environmental activists themselves.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A non-romanticized review of oil addiction and ecological holocaust, May 23, 2011
This review is from: Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (Paperback)
I am drawn to write a review of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent after reading the negative reviews of Nikiforuk's book. He does like to paint a vivid picture, and sometimes lapses into hyperbole, but the wealth of information in here is comprehensive and well-sourced in an extensive bibliography. This book covers the history, culture, production, corruption, social impacts, and ecological devastations of the Tar Sands oil extraction in Alberta, Canada. The author also provides his own predictions (as terrible as that may seem), and offers a set of common sense solutions. The corruption of local and national political forces by big oil conglomerates, however, makes any of the solutions presented difficult to imagine really occurring.
This book gives necessary background on an important and colossal, yet somewhat hidden from Americans, ecological rape happening to the North American continent. My only criticism is that I wish he had included more perspectives from First Nation people such as the Athabascan nation. This is a book to read, and then get angry over, and then move to become active in promoting environmental justice and sanity over the extreme greed of the oil industries.
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