Andrew Nikiforuk
Andrew Nikiforuk has been writing about the oil and gas industry for nearly 20 years and cares deeply about accuracy, government accountability, and cumulative impacts. He has won seven National Magazine Awards for his journalism since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists.
Andrew has also published several books. The dramatic, Alberta-based Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. Pandemonium, which examines the impact of global trade on disease exchanges, received widespread national acclaim. The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the world’s largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. Andrew's latest book, Empire of the Beetle, a startling look at pine beetles and the world’s most powerful landscape changer, was nominated for the Governor General’s award for Non-Fiction in 2011.
Solar Dreams, Spanish Realities
Facing limits to sun-powered renewable energy. Latest in a series.Perils and Promise of Turning Plants into Gasoline
In 1917 Alexander Graham Bell, Canada's premier inventor, had a bold ethanol vision. He predicted, in the pages of the National Geographic no less, that alcohol-based fuels would power the future when petroleum ran out. Corn alcohol "makes a beautiful, clean and efficient fuel," declared Bell. "We need never fear the exhaustion of our present fuel supplies so long as we can …'The Shale Gale Is a Retirement Party'
So concludes an expert analyst of the natural gas boom. Brace for bust. From the series: The Big Shift-Surviving the Great Energy Transition.Why Energy Experts Get Things Wrong So Often
After the unpredicted fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s due primarily to an oil price shock, Philip Tetlock, a U.S. psychologist, started to question the wisdom of experts. It seemed rather incredible to Tetlock that political commentators, including Soviet scholars, had uniformly failed to forecast the dissolution of the world's second mightiest empire. Tetlock wondered why and how …What Really Killed Soviet Union? Oil Shock?
Larry Hagman, the late U.S. actor that played the bombastic oilman JR Ewing, often quipped that the TV soap opera Dallas brought down the mighty Soviet Union. "The opulence, the consumerism, the food, the cars -- these things made them want more than their governments provided them," claimed Hagman.The Big Shift Last Time: From Horse Dung to Car Smog
Before city dwellers complained about cars, smog, congestion and the loss of public space, they railed against stinking, fly-ridden horse crap. In fact, the rise and fall of the horse makes very clear the difficult and troubling character of energy transitions.Bitumen's Extraordinary and Popular Delusions
Behold the latest mystical and ecstatic pronouncements of Keystone XL acolytes.Fracked Gas Won't Solve Energy Crunch: Report
Governments and financial analysts who think unconventional fossil fuels such as bitumen, shale gas and shale oil can usher in an era of prosperity and energy plenty are dangerously deluded, concludes a groundbreaking report by one of Canada's top energy analysts.Can we live again in 1964's energy world?
We must engineer a return to that era's lower usage, says expert Vaclav Smil. For nearly 40 years now, Smil, a Czech émigré and polymath, has studied the world's energy systems. He grew up in the political darkness of the Soviet Empire and has matured in the moral emptiness of its American counterpart. Although heralded around the world for his insights, he remains largely …The Making of a Natural Gas Glut
A former investment banker says the explosion in shale gas development, such as frenzied activity in northern B.C., was a financial mania largely driven by Wall Street bankers intent on capitalizing upon a record $46-billion worth of mergers and acquisitions that shook up the troubled industry in 2011.
