Canadian - Journalist | -
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.
Andrew Nikiforuk
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The tar sands has changed Canada in the same way the fur trade has changed Canada.
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Oil has allowed us to think about economics as though energy doesn't matter.
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Slavery, first and foremost, was an energy institution. Shackling human muscle was about getting work done.
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What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.
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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.
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Sour gas is one of the most dangerous, toxic substances known to man.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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