The award-winning Calgary-based author, journalist, and The Tyee contributor has written on energy and the environment for more than two decades.
In 2002, he was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction for Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, and in 2009, he was awarded the Rachel Carson award for The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.
In The Energy of Slavery, Mr. Nikiforuk picks up where he left off in The Tar Sands, examining the influence of oil on consumer behaviour and democracy. Not only has our reliance on fossil fuels indebted and enslaved us, he contends, but it has also disenfranchised us by giving rise to governments who use oil revenues to consolidate power and silence dissent.
Mr. Nikiforuk recently stopped by The Hill Times to discuss energy, faith, policy, and the Prime Minister.
In The Energy of Slavery you liken our current fossil fuel-based economy to past economies that relied on human slavery. Humans used to rely on slave labour, but now humans are slaves to fossil fuels. How are the two comparable?
“We’re not just slaves to fossil fuels, but also slaves to the machines that fossil fuels power. People forget that slavery was an energy institution. It was about shackling human muscle to get work done. It was about rich people living off poor people. This institution really conditioned a lot of thinking about energy and how energy should be used or abused, and we took a lot of those attitudes and basically heaped them right on top of a hydrocarbon economy, just as hydrocarbons were being used to feed steam engines and other machines.
“We’re now in an oil-fuelled civilization that employs billions of energy slaves, and the average individual is much wealthier than a Roman slaveholder in terms of the power they have at their command, made possible by cheap hydrocarbons and the machines they power. The difficulty we are now encountering is that we live in high-energy civilization, but the cost of maintaining our slaves has got us all in debt, and the fuel that powers them is becoming ever more extreme and expensive.
“We sit around, scratching our heads, wondering why the global economy seems to be slowing down, why Europe is such a mess, why U.S. oil consumption is actually declining, and why Japan has entered a period of rapid stagnation. A lot has to do with decreasing flows of energy due to the increasing cost of energy.”
By ‘energy slaves’ you mean simply appliances and vehicles?
“That’s exactly what they are—they are appliances, they are trains, planes and automobiles, forklifts, and all sorts of stuff. The guy that coined the term ‘energy slaves’ was Buckminster Fuller. He used the expression in an article in Fortune Magazine in 1940. One of the reasons the United States became the empire and economic dynamo it did for the last 30 or 40 years, was that it had more energy slaves than any other country on the planet.
“It’s a powerful metaphor. Fuller realized that something really dramatic had happened. In 1810, there were a million families in the United States and on average they had one slave. By 1940, the average American had access to 30 energy slaves. He based those numbers on data compiled by the British and U.S. military. He thought that was a stunning figure that had dramatic implications for how we lived as well as for politics and our culture in general.”
Carbon pricing has become a leading issue in the political debate in Ottawa. What do you think of the current debate as it’s framed—a choice between economic growth and making the polluter pay? Is this debate actually useful for the public?
“Probably not. When we talk about a tax on carbon, we’re saying that we’re going to tax our energy slaves. Any taxation on energy slavery is going to tax the rich most dramatically, because they employ the most slaves. The have the largest home, they travel abroad the most, they have the largest vehicles, so taxing energy slaves is not something that they’re terribly anxious to see happen.
“I’m a firm supporter of a carbon tax. I think it’s the fairest way to address the social, political, and economic consequences of really abusive oil consumption, particularly in regards to pollution of the atmosphere. That too is an energy story. By overheating the atmosphere, we’ve changed energy patterns in the atmosphere, so we’re actually changing the energy composition of the whole planet. We need to address that issue.
“There is no major oil-exporting country, other than Norway, that considers climate change an issue. The reason is simple. If you consider climate change an issue, then that is going to cut into your revenue. The Canadian government has basically gone on record saying that, ‘Revenue from oil and gas comes first, climate change comes second.’ ”
What policies does Norway owe its success to?
“It actually owes its different perspective to an accident of immigration. An Iraqi geologist [Farouk Al-Kasim] immigrated to Norway at the same time that the Norwegians discovered oil off the North Sea. The Norwegians realized that they were ignorant about its social, political, and economic consequences. They knew it was the world’s most lucrative commodity, and it immediately sparks a gold rush wherever it’s discovered.
“Al-Kasim was hired by the Norwegian government, and he basically gave them two principles to work on: go slow, save the money. Then the Norwegians actually had a public conversation about how to develop this resource. Canada has not had a public conversation. We haven’t talked about the money, we haven’t talked about the influence of oil revenue on government behaviour and political parties. We haven’t talked about the carbon liabilities in any responsible way. It’s just been this colossal free-market fuck up. We have no strategy, we have no plans. Our government does not even produce intelligent reports on the cumulative impacts of rapid bitumen development, what’s going to happen to the markets if the Chinese economy implodes, or there’s a sustained economic slowdown in the United States.”
You label Canada a petro-state. What are some of the other characteristics of petro-states?
“Oil money can resurrect extreme religious beliefs, and this has been a powerful theme in American politics for 100 years, where big oil has funded a variety of really extreme political movements. The Big Rich in Texas in the 1940s and 50s bankrolled all sorts of libertarian and fundamentalist radio talk shows, even helped begin the funding of the National Review.
“Big oil actually began a political conversation about very right-wing ideals and beliefs that hadn’t really previously been in the United States. We see it continued right up to today with the Koch Brothers—two billionaires who made their money in oil and gas funding the Tea Party movement. Oil is all about power, it’s all about money. A lot of that power and money can quite often be invested in extreme causes and beliefs.
“The characteristics of petro-states are quite unique. Oil has all kinds of impacts on consumer culture. The big issue that oil producing states face is that you have this gush of revenue that comes in. Sitting on top of the world’s most lucrative commodity does not make you smart. Unless you have good public policy, intelligent leadership, and honest institutions, this money just blows everything apart and creates incredible levels of dysfunction in these petro-states.”
In the book you draw on Christian thinkers like G.K. Chesterton, John Ruskin, and Alasdair MacIntyre. In a recent piece for The Tyee you described yourself as Christian and socially conservative. How does faith inform your work?
“It informs my work on so many different levels, but fundamentally it always comes back to writing about things that you hope will make some small difference for ordinary people, and draw attention to things that you believe are important and worthwhile.
“I have been very much influenced by the thinking of people like Ivan Illich, who I think really has written some of the most powerful and important works on energy. Even a controversial Catholic like Chesterton, who was really wrestling with the growing urgency of high energy living and its impact on ordinary people in England. He could see this massive growth in cities and this massive mechanization and standardization of everyday life, and much like Gandhi or Leo Tolstoy, he was saying that this may not be the right road for us. That kind of radical Christian thinking has always influenced me.”
In that same Tyee column, you suggest that our Prime Minister is a climate change skeptic informed by “right-wing scholars, economists and evangelicals.” If the Prime Minister actually based his policy decisions on that, how do you explain the position he took in the recent abortion debate?
“Stephen Harper is a very clever strategist. Members of his church aren’t even quite sure what he believes and doesn’t believe, but his position on a number of energy issues, and climate change, his policies on environmental issues, his attitude towards science, clearly indicates that he has some rather extreme beliefs in that region. I think what we saw with the abortion debate, was a strategist who is clever enough to recognize that this would really declare some of his more extreme leanings and as a strategist he decided he didn’t want to go there.”
Policy-makers like Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney have characterized Canada’s resources, particularly the oil sands, as a blessing in tough economic times. These sectors have kept Canadians working. Is that not important? Where’s the downside in that?
“I would say that’s an ignorant statement from the Bank of Canada. The oil and gas industry is a capital-intensive industry. It is not a labour intensive industry, and if it is the tar sands will go down in history as the most expensive job creation project on the planet. They spend $200-billion and basically only employ a 100,000 people in Fort McMurray, that’s not much of a job creation program. You pay them grossly inflated salaries for digging holes in the ground — that also doesn’t seem to be a very sound program of economic development.
“We are trying to attribute properties to a lucrative, highly-valuable resource, that are purely the function of market economics. I think it would be fair to say that yes, bitumen is a strategic resource; yes, it is important to the Canadian economy, but we’re blowing it. We’ve developed this resource far too quickly. We haven’t asked ourselves what is going to happen if the Chinese economy implodes, or what is going to happen if this economic stagnation that we’re seeing around the world is really long-term, sustained and a product of higher prices.
“What I see in Ottawa is a lack of strategic thinking. I see a lot of desperate thinking, where the government is keen to use money from this very lucrative resource to fund their own political agenda, but they’re not very keen to examine in an honest way what the liabilities of exploiting this resource are. Whether it’s the Dutch Disease, an appreciating currency, growing carbon liabilities, an over-reliance on one staple for the Canadian economy, or the growing influence of the state of China on our own affairs.
“To me, those are all critically important issues, not to mention the money. What the hell are we doing with the money? We’re employing a couple of guys up there from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick— that’s wonderful, but what are we doing for future generations? What do we actually hope to achieve as a nation by exploiting this resource, other than becoming a global embarrassment in the sense that we’re no longer a moral leader on anything? We behave and talk like another petro-state. Everything is about oil or the export of oil, and anyone who questions that is a radical.”
What does a future where people are emancipated from energy slavery look like? Is it necessarily rural and agrarian?
“Energy transitions are uncertain and unpredictable. They can also be conflict ridden. Nobody has ever gone this far up on the energy ladder and I think history shows that coming down the energy ladder is always a very difficult and problematic exercise. We’ve used this remarkable flow of energy that we’ve seen and received over the last 100 years to grow big things and to concentrate power. It makes sense to me that when that energy flow contracts, we’re going to see a contraction of government and corporations as well. We’re going to see contraction in big cities.
“We’re going to have to go back to smaller enterprises and to using more human muscle and ingenuity to get things done. There’ll be a lot of good things from that. We may restore a lot of human vitality and happiness.”
Does policy have a place in achieving that freedom, or are societies adjusting in response to price signals from the market on the energy they consume, and an awareness of climate change?
“We obviously need good policy, but I don’t see good policy anywhere. We can’t even have a conversation about a carbon tax, for heaven’s sake. What I see is a system that is locked into high energy consumption, and that is not going to address these issues until there’s a crisis. Until the price of oil absolutely collapses, or until this economic stagnation keeps on rolling and becomes a really profound depression, then I don’t think we’re going to address any of these issues. The powers that be are also doing their damnedest to make sure that we don’t address them.
“Ordinary people are beginning to recognize that this complex, high-energy civilization we’ve developed is not performing. You have people who are downsizing their lives, people planting their own gardens, people getting rid of their cars, people who are consciously eliminating energy slaves from their life. The energy transition that we are experiencing first is not one that we anticipated when we thought it would be all windmills, solar panels, and electric cars. The transition in this case is economic stagnation. We can no longer afford the high price of the extreme hydro-carbons that we’re using.
“Government, industry, and corporations will be the last to get it.”
Do you think your book can actually inform public policy? Can policy-makers use the ideas presented in your book?
“Yes, they could. You wonder how many of them are still literate. One of the reasons that I wrote The Tar Sands a couple of years ago was to hopefully introduce some policy discussions about the pace and scale of that project, and to introduce some of Lougheed’s basic principles about approaching this. He said that we should behave like owners, collect our fair share, save for a rainy day, one project at a time, and add value to the resource. That was a conservative program but also I think a progressive program to govern how we went about exploiting the tar sands.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: CHRIS PLECASH
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