Review: The Tar Sands Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

Abstract

THE TAR SANDS Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent Andrew Nikiforuk Vancouver: Grey stone and the David Suzuki Foundation, 2008. 214pp, $20 paper ISBN 978-1-55362-407-0When it was published in 2008, Andrew Nikiforuk's latest book, The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, co-published by Greystone and the David Suzuki Foundation, caused a sensation. Hailed in some quarters as a wakeup call to Canadians and the world about the social, economic, and political perils of oil sands development, Nikiforuk's book lambasted federal and provincial politicians and institutions alike for their perceived laxity and complicity in creating an environmental, social, economic, and political disaster. Nikiforuk's harsher critics, on the other hand, derided The Tar Sands as little more than environmental agitprop whose preconceived political and social agenda distorted facts and produced, at best, a misleading and incomplete picture of the industry.To be sure, The Tar Sands is not an academic piece, nor does it aspire to be one. Nikiforuk is animated by the same impulses that drove Ida Tarbell, the infamous muckracker for McClure's Magazine, to tackle John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike Rockefeller's creation, which effectively dominated the world's petroleum industry at the beginning ofthe 20th century, however, Alberta's modern oil sands industry operates on the margins of an international petroleum order as a capital-intensive player dependent on economies of scale for profitability. While daily production reached 1.3 million barrels per day in 2008, this represents approximately 1.5 percent ofthe world's daily demand of 85 million barrels per day. Nevertheless, oil sands projects and investments have grown dramatically since 2005 and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers estimates that total investment will reach $10 billion in 2009 - one quarter of the total investment in the province of Alberta.Despite claims by the provincial government that it is effectively managing development, Nikiforuk asserts that Alberta's unconventional oil deposits are being recklessly developed by an uncaring oil industry while government agencies and officials at both the federal and provincial levels turn a blind eye to what is taking place in northern Alberta. In places, the analysis is sharp and penetrating and the issues he raises deserve careful consideration. In a province where tar sands-derived royalties and revenues top billions of dollars, deficiencies in funding for social services, health care, and education raise troubling questions about provincial management. So too does the moribund status of vital infrastructure projects, such as the twinning of provincial highway 63 from Edmonton to Fort McMurray, a topic Nikiforuk tackles in a chapter that metaphorically and literally suggests tar sands development is like travelling down a highway to hell. The Tar Sands is intended to provoke a visceral reaction to tar sands development: Nikiforuk is mad as hell and wants everyone to know it.But this passion, which is so clearly evident on every page ofthe book, occasionally leads him astray. He presents energy politics as a zero-sum game in which development proceeds at the expense of every other social, political, economic, and environmental goal. Without a trace of irony, Nikiforuk concludes that Canada's natural resource wealth has imperilled freedom of speech and democratic institutions, and leads him to draw a lazy - and highly suspect - analogy between Canadian public policies and those of other petro-dictatorships, including Vladimir Putin's Russia, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. …