Andrew Nikiforuk Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands is a critical exposé of the World's largest energy project - the Alberta oil sands - that has made Canada one of the worst environmental offenders on earth. In Tar Sands, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands and argues forcefully for change. Combining extensive scientific research and compelling writing, Nikiforuk takes the reader to Fort McMurray, home to some of the world’s largest open-pit mines, and explores this twenty-first-century pioneer town from the exorbitant cost of housing to its more serious social ills. He uncovers a global Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine dealers, aimless bush workers, American evangelicals, and the largest population of homeless people in northern Canada. He also explains that this micro-economy supplies gasoline for 50 percent of Canadian vehicles and 16 percent of U.S. demand. Readers will learn that oil sands: burn more carbon than conventional oil, destroy forests and displace woodland caribou, poison the water supply and communities downstream, drain the Athabasca, the river that feeds Canada’s largest watershed, and contribute to climate change. The book does provide hope, however, and ends with an exploration of possible solutions to the problem.Co-published with the David Suzuki Foundation

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