@book {53843,
	title = {Tar sands: Dirty oil and the future of a continent},
	year = {2010},
	month = {03/2010},
	pages = {272 pages },
	publisher = {Greystone},
	organization = {Greystone},
	address = {Vancouver, BC},
	abstract = {For the  better part of their history, the Alberta tar sands have been out of sight and out of mind for most Canadians. A thinly populated wilderness and (in the words of one early bitumen booster) a {\textquotedblleft}relatively undesirable environment,{\textquotedblright} it is a place few people visit. Ninety-eight per cent of the current population of Fort McMurray plan on eventually retiring somewhere else. Government operates as an absentee landlord.

Such blindness and indifference spring from broad-spectrum denial of the unpleasant consequences of our addiction to oil. Calgary-based journalist and Governor General{\textquoteright}s Award-winning author Andrew Nikiforuk covers the resultant fallout in detail, from the massive and irreparable destruction of the natural environment {\textendash} turning a good chunk of northern Alberta, including the world{\textquoteright}s third-largest watershed, into a toxic moonscape {\textendash} to the political transformation of Canada into a modern petrostate. What he exposes most of all, however, is the mind-boggling short-sightedness and stupidity of the entire enterprise.

Nikiforuk does overdo the figurative comparisons a bit. While volume may be handily imagined in units of Olympic-size swimming pools, it{\textquoteright}s less helpful to know that the area covered by open-pit mining could end up being three times larger than the ancient city of Angkor Wat. But this is a minor point. Overall, Tar Sands provides an excellent guide to all of the environmental repercussions of our oil dependency.

The political analysis is also good, sounding a warning about our dangerous energy {\textquotedblleft}interdependence{\textquotedblright} with the declining American empire and using Thomas Friedman{\textquoteright}s first law of petropolitics {\textendash} that the price of oil and the quality of freedom invariably travel in opposite directions {\textendash} to make the case for tar{\textquoteright}s corrosive effect on democracy.

Nikiforuk concludes with {\textquotedblleft}Twelve Steps to Energy Sanity,{\textquotedblright} an oil-addiction recovery program. And surprisingly, many of his recommendations seem doable. We can{\textquoteright}t avert a disaster that is already under way, but we might be able to prevent things from getting horribly worse.},
	keywords = {overview},
	author = {Nikiforuk, Andrew}
}
