âA robustly researched and smoothly written overview of the many challenges confronting our devotion to fossil fuelsâ from the author of Tar Sands (Quill & Quire).
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Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the worldâs most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slaveryâs ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion.
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In this provocative book, Andrew Nikiforuk, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, argues that what we need is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and truly human scale.
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Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute
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âIn his cautionary tale about the evils of oil . . . Nikiforuk makes his case for impending doom if we donât mend our energy-spending ways.â âThe Star
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âIn this cogently argued book, Andrew Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor. Oil dependency, he writes, is a modern form of slaveryâand itâs time for a global abolition movement.â âTaras Grescoe, author of Shanghai Grand
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âA startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty.â âRonald Wright, author of On Fiji Islands