Download or read book Tar Sands written by Andrew Nikiforuk and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tar Sands critically examines the frenzied development in the Canadian tar sands and the far-reaching implications for all of North America. Bitumen, the sticky stuff that ancients used to glue the Tower of Babel together, is the world’s most expensive hydrocarbon. This difficult-to-find resource has made Canada the number-one supplier of oil to the United States, and every major oil company now owns a lease in the Alberta tar sands. The region has become a global Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine dealers, Muslim extremists, and a huge population of homeless individuals. In this award-winning book, a Canadian bestseller, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands, arguing forcefully for change. This updated edition includes new chapters on the most energy-inefficient tar sands projects (the steam plants), as well as new material on the controversial carbon cemeteries and nuclear proposals to accelerate bitumen production.
Download or read book Developing Alberta s Oil Sands written by Paul Anthony Chastko and published by University of Calgary Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alberta's oil sands represent a vast and untapped oil reserve that could reasonably supply all of Canada's energy needs for the next 475 years. With an estimated 300 billion barrels of recoverable oil at stake, the quest to develop this natural resource has been undertaken by many powerful actors, both nationally and internationally. Using research that integrates the economic, political, scientific, and business factors that have been influential in discovering and developing the sands, this book provides a comprehensive history of the oil sands project and a window on the nature of the complex relationships between industry, government, and transnational players. This book is the first comprehensive volume that examines the origins and development of the oil sands industry over the last century.
Download or read book Ethical Oil written by Ezra Levant and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canada's "no. 1 defender of freedom of speech" and the bestselling author of Shakedown makes the timely and provocative case that when it comes to oil, ethics matter just as much as the economy and the environment. In 2009, Ezra Levant's bestselling book Shakedown revealed the corruption of Canada's human rights commissions and was declared the "most important public affairs book of the year." In Ethical Oil, Levant turns his attention to another hot-button topic: the ethical cost of our addiction to oil. While many North Americans may be aware of the financial and environmental price we pay for a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil, Levant argues that it is time we consider ethical factors as well. With his trademark candor, Levant asks hard-hitting questions: With the oil sands at our disposal, is it ethically responsible to import our oil from the Sudan, Russia, and Mexico? How should we weigh carbon emissions with human rights violations in Saudi Arabia? And assuming that we can't live without oil, can the development of energy be made more environmentally sustainable? In Ethical Oil, Levant exposes the hypocrisy of the West's dealings with the reprehensible regimes from which we purchase the oil that sustains our lifestyles, and offers solutions to this dilemma. Readers at all points on the political spectrum will want to read this timely and provocative new book, which is sure to spark debate.
Download or read book Tar Sands written by Andrew Nikiforuk and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-published by the David Suzuki Foundation.
Download or read book The Future of the Canadian Oil Sands written by J. Peter Findlay and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Extracting Home in the Oil Sands written by Clinton N. Westman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, Indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multispecies relations within a critical political ecology framework and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.
Download or read book Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm written by James Heydon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this in-depth analysis of First Nations opposition to the oil sands industry, James Heydon offers detailed empirical insight into Canadian oil sands regulation. The environmental consequences of the oil sands industry have been thoroughly explored by scholars from a variety of disciplines. However, less well understood is how and why the provincial energy regulator has repeatedly sanctioned such a harmful pattern of production for almost two decades. This research monograph addresses that shortcoming. Drawing from interviews with government, industry, and First Nation personnel, along with an analysis of almost 20 years of policy, strategy, and regulatory approval documents, Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm offers detailed empirical insight into Canadian oil sands regulation. Providing a thorough account of the ways in which the regulatory process has prioritised economic interests over the land-based cultural interests of First Nations, it addresses a gap in the literature by explaining how environmental harm has been systematically produced over time by a regulatory process tasked with the pursuit of ‘sustainable development’. With an approach emphasizing the importance of understanding how and why the regulatory process has been able to circumvent various protections for the entire duration in which the contemporary oil sands industry has existed, this work complements existing literature and provides a platform from which future investigations into environmental harm may be conducted. It is essential reading for those with an interest in green criminology, environmental harm, indigenous rights, and regulatory controls relating to fossil fuel production.
Download or read book North American Oil Sands written by Marc Humphries and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to future reliable oil supplies, Canada¿s oil sands will likely account for a greater share of U.S. oil imports. In 2008 oil sands accounted for 46% of Canada¿s total oil production and oil sands production is increasing as conventional oil production declines. Since 2004, when a substantial portion of Canada¿s oil sands were deemed economic, Canada has ranked second behind Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. As oil sands production in Canada is predicted to increase to 2.8 million barrels per day by 2015, environ. issues are a cause for concern. Contents of this report: (1) Intro.; (2) World Oil Sands Reserves and Resources: What Are Oil Sands?; U.S. and Canada Oil Sand Resources; (3) History of Development. Charts and tables.
Download or read book The Canadian Oil Sands written by Michael A. Levi and published by Council on Foreign Relations. This book was released on 2009 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report explores both the energy security and climate change implications of expanded oil sands production. It assesses current and future trends in the oil sands, including in the scale and cost of production and in the oil sands' impact on world oil markets, and evaluates the potential impacts of a range of policy options. The report concludes that the oil sands are neither critical to U.S. energy security nor catastrophic for climate change.
Download or read book American Empire and the Canadian Oil Sands written by George A. Gonzalez and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Throughout the US, oil and gas shale are being "hydrofracked" to produce petroleum and natural gas. Oil (or tar) sand from Canada is being "processed" - thereby generating large amounts of crude oil. This book places the unconventional fossil fuels revolution that is taking place in North America within the context of great power politics"
Download or read book The Patch written by Chris Turner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In its heyday, the oil sands represented an industrial triumph and the culmination of a century of innovation, experiment, engineering, policy, and finance. Fort McMurray was a boomtown, the centre of a new gold rush, and the oil sands were reshaping the global energy, political, and financial landscapes. The future seemed limitless for the city and those who drew their wealth from the bitumen-rich wilderness. But in 2008, a new narrative for the oil sands emerged. As financial markets collapsed and the scientific reality of the Patch's effect on the environment became clear, the region turned into a boogeyman and a lightning rod for the global movement combatting climate change. Suddenly, the streets of Fort McMurray were the front line of a high-stakes collision between two conflicting worldviews--one of industrial triumph and another of environmental stewardship--each backed by major players on the world stage. The Patch is the seminal account of this ongoing conflict, showing just how far the oil sands reaches into all of our lives. From Fort Mac to the Bakken shale country of North Dakota, from Houston to London, from Saudi Arabia to the shores of Brazil, the whole world is connected in this enterprise. And it requires us to ask the question: In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?"--
Download or read book Black Bonanza written by Alastair Sweeny and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-05-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if Canada 's so-called environmental nightmare was really an engineering triumph and the key to a stable and sustainable future? For years, Canadians have been hearing nothing but bad news out of the Athabasca Oil Sands. From 20th Century economists decrying it as a perpetual money-loser in the face of more easily-extracted foreign oil to green groups around the world declaring it the world's worst industrial enterprise, sometimes it seems as though no good could ever come from this so-called dirty resource. But what if developing Canada's Oil Sands was the key to bridging the gap between current petroleum-based economies and the alternative energies that aren't ready for market yet? What if it meant eliminating the threat of Peak Oil and providing economic stability not just for Canada and the rest of North America, but for the world? And what if the environmental costs of the resource were both not nearly as dire as some would have you believe, but currently better than many other options with the industry already making huge advances in sustainability, energy use and water reclamation? That's exactly the case that Alastair Sweeny, author of BlackBerry Planet, argues is at the core of the Athabasca Sands: a bright future. By digging into the past, present and future of oil sands technology, Sweeny cuts through the hype and hysteria and makes a solid and engaging case that the Sands aren't the environmental boogeyman set to destroy humanity, but rather our best hope for a truly stable and sustainable future.
Download or read book The Big Space Shuttle written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beautiful Destruction written by and published by Rocky Mountain Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Alberta oil/tar sands are a place of superlatives, of awesome beauty and equally awesome destruction. They are a kaleidoscope of contrasts, colours and patterns keeping time with the seemingly unstoppable movement of machinery, smoke and effluent set in an immense boreal landscape with its own immutable patterns, cadence and cycles. Beautiful Destruction is a large-format, high-quality photography book that uses over 100 stunning, full-colour aerial photographs to transcend the polarities that dominate public discourse of the largest industrial project in North America: the Alberta oil/tar sands. With short essays by renowned personalities Bill McKibben, Charles Wilkinson, Duff Connacher, Elizabeth May, Eric Reguly, Ezra Levant, Jennifer Grant, Rick George, Gil McGowan, Allan Adam, Megan Leslie and Francis Scarpaleggia from both sides of the oil/tar sands debate discussing the artistic, industrial and environmental perceptions of northern Alberta's petroleum-based mega-project, Beautiful Destruction is one of the most ambitious, provocative and unique photography projects to be published in years.
Download or read book Oil s Deep State written by Kevin Taft and published by James Lorimer & Company. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have democratic governments failed to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions despite dire warnings and compelling evidence of the profound and growing threat posed by global warming? Most of the writing on global warming is by scientists, academics, environmentalists, and journalists. Kevin Taft, a former leader of the opposition in Alberta, brings a fresh perspective through the insight he gained as an elected politician who had an insider's eyewitness view of the role of the oil industry. His answer, in brief: The oil industry has captured key democratic institutions in both Alberta and Ottawa. Taft begins his book with a perceptive observer's account of a recent court casein Ottawa which laid bare the tactics and techniques of the industry, its insiders and lobbyists. He casts dramatic new light on exactly how corporate lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, universities, and other organizations are working together to pursue the oil industry's agenda. He offers a brisk tour of the recent work of scholars who have developed the concepts of the deep state and institutional capture to understand how one rich industry can override the public interest. Taft views global warming and weakened democracy as two symptoms of the same problem — the loss of democratic institutions to corporate influence and control. He sees citizen engagement and direct action by the public as the only response that can unravel big oil's deep state.
Download or read book World Energy Outlook 2008 written by International Energy Agency and published by International Energy Agency. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "World Energy Outlook 2008 draws on the experience of another turbulent year in energy markets to provide new energy projections to 2030, region by region and fuel by fuel, incorporating the latest data and policies. "
Download or read book First World Petro Politics written by Laurie Adkin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First World Petro-Politics examines the vital yet understudied case of a first world petro-state facing related social, ecological, and economic crises in the context of recent critical work on fossil capitalism. A wide-ranging and richly documented study of Alberta’s political ecology – the relationship between the province’s political and economic institutions and its natural environment – the volume tackles questions about the nature of the political regime, how it has governed, and where its primary fractures have emerged. Its authors examine Alberta’s neo-liberal environmental regulation, institutional adaptation to petro-state imperatives, social movement organizing, Indigenous responses to extractive development, media framing of issues, and corporate strategies to secure social license to operate. Importantly, they also discuss policy alternatives for political democratization and for a transition to a low-carbon economy. The volume’s conclusions offer a critical examination of petro-state theory, arguing for a comparative and contextual approach to understanding the relationships between dependence on carbon extraction and the nature of political regimes.
