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
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?
Sour gas is one of the most dangerous, toxic substances known to man.
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.
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.
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.
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.