Andrew Nikiforuk > Quotes

“Probably no single event highlights the strength of Campbell’s argument (on peak oil) better than the rapid development of the Alberta tar sands. Bitumen, the world’s ugliest and most expensive hydrocarbon, can never be a reasonable substitute for light oil due to its extreme capital, energy, and carbon intensity. Bitumen looks, smells, and behaves like asphalt; running an economy on it is akin to digging up our existing road infrastructure, melting it down, and enriching the goop with hydrogen until it becomes a sulfur-rich but marketable oil.”
― Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

“Ellul”
― Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude

“the beautifully logical condition of the national Theory of Economy in this matter being that, if you are a shoemaker, it is a law of Heaven that you must sell your goods under their price, in order to destroy the trade of other shoemakers; but if you are not a shoemaker, and are going shoeless and lame, it is a law of Heaven that you must not cut yourself a bit of cowhide, to put between your foot and the stones, because that would interfere with the total trade of shoemaking.”
― Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude

“asdfgh”
― andrew nikiforuk, The Fourth Horseman

“Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen”
― Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude

“You have a population all of whom are in debt, and who are essentially renting themselves to employers to do jobs that they almost certainly wouldn’t want to do otherwise, to be able to pay those debts. If Aristotle were magically transported to the U.S. he would conclude that most of the American population is enslaved, because for him the distinction between selling yourself and renting yourself is at best a legalism... We’ve managed to take a situation which most people in the ancient world would have recognized as a form of slavery and turned it into the definition of freedom.”
― Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude