Andrew Nikiforuk
Andrew Nikiforuk
Andrew Nikiforuk is a Canadian journalist who has won multiple National Magazine Awards. His work has appeared in Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Report on Business, Chatelaine, Alberta Views, Equinox, Alternatives Journal and Canadian Family, and in both national newspapers. In 1990 the Toronto Star newspaper awarded him an Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy to study AIDS and the failure of public health policy. His books include Pandemonium; Fourth Horseman; Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Oil, which won the Governor...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionJournalist
CountryCanada
When you've got a lot of slaves at your command, you tend to get a little bit fat. You tend to get a little bit lazy. You tend to get a little incompetent because there's not much that you do for yourself anymore.
When governments run on petro dollars or petro revenue instead of taxes, then they kind of sever the link between taxation and representation, and if you're not being taxed, then you're not being represented.
There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources.
The problem with cap-and-trade and programs such as carbon capture and storage is that they all assume that business as usual can continue. The financial meltdown and peak oil has pretty much demonstrated that business as usual's not going to work.
The destructiveness of the tar sands is not inevitable. But Canadians and Albertans have become too tolerant of the politicians who compromise the nation's energy security as well as the next generation's future.
Canadians need to start thinking of themselves as a petrostate, and they need to start thinking of the kinds of controls needed to protect the country from the excesses of oil.
Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers.
The tar sands has changed Canada in the same way the fur trade has changed Canada.
The tar sands boom has become the world's largest energy project, the world's largest construction project, and the world's largest capital project.
Sour gas is one of the most dangerous, toxic substances known to man.
Slavery, first and foremost, was an energy institution. Shackling human muscle was about getting work done.
Oil has allowed us to think about economics as though energy doesn't matter.