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
barrels extend midwest million running sands
Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?
running light oil
Probably no single event highlights the strength of Campbell's argument (on peak oil) better than the rapid development of the Alberta tar sands. Bitumen, the world's ugliest and most expensive hydrocarbon, can never be a reasonable substitute for light oil due to its extreme capital, energy, and carbon intensity. Bitumen looks, smells, and behaves like asphalt; running an economy on it is akin to digging up our existing road infrastructure, melting it down, and enriching the goop with hydrogen until it becomes a sulfur-rich but marketable oil.
jobs school ideas
Schools have never been about getting access to information. That's the job of libraries. Schools and universities have nobler missions as gentle gatekeepers. Their role is to control ideas on the loose and to present the best and noblest ideas to the young.
bit tend
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.
dollars instead link revenue
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.
companies drain next regard resource
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.
assume business capture carbon meltdown oil peak problem programs storage usual work
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.
canadians compromise future next sands tolerant
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 controls country excesses kinds needed protect themselves
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.
champion character created destiny export favours foreign global lax national policy rapid redefining sands standards states united
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.
canada changed fur sands trade
The tar sands has changed Canada in the same way the fur trade has changed Canada.
capital largest sands
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.
known substances toxic
Sour gas is one of the most dangerous, toxic substances known to man.
energy human muscle work
Slavery, first and foremost, was an energy institution. Shackling human muscle was about getting work done.