Canada's reckless carbon habit

Here’s the situation, and it’s a dangerous one. In the past 150 years, the human tribe willingly became eager slaves to oil and got teenage-drunk on the fumes. But carbon is now the insidious master of our house and garden. Man-made volcanoes of CO{-2} have wrecked the climate thermostat, dried up water supplies, killed forests, shrunk glaciers and made farmers as insecure as artists. And that’s just the beginning of the oil hangover. Can Canada remain strong and free without ice, journalist Ed Struzik asks in his mind-boggling expos

And now Canada has become the No. 1 oil dealer for the United States. (Our U.S. consulates pimp for the oil sands like 19th-century Saudi slavers.) For once, we no longer sit on the proverbial fence. As earnest bitumen salesmen, we brazenly pollute the atmosphere with no real plan or strategy. In short, Canada, a bona fide carbon hedonist, has become a dysfunctional and paralyzed geography. I don’t think the world really needs more of us any more.

And that’s why the brief collection of essays in Carbon Shift really matters. Edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon, an intellectual straight shooter, the book offers six distinct point of views about Canada’s troublesome twins: climate change and peak oil and their central role in Canada’s discordant future.

Homer-Dixon clearly sets the scene. He correctly argues that cheap oil has undermined our economic models, and business as usual is no longer an option: “The greatest threat to our future may be not that our fossil fuel economy will disappear – but that it will endure.”

Globe and Mail