Talking Tar Sands with Andrew Nikiforuk

• Artist: boilingfrog.ca [2]
• Title: Talking Tar Sands with Andrew Nikiforuk [3]
• Album: Green Town Times [4]
• Genre: environment [5]
• Year: 2009 [6]
• Length: 22:26 minutes (30.82 MB)
• Format: Stereo 44kHz 192Kbps (CBR)

Andrew Nikiforuk [7], journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent [8] and , and former Saskatchewan Green Party [9] Leader, Sandra Finley [10], visit Craik [11], SK.

Andrew shares his knowledge about the environmental and economic effects of tar sands production in western Canada with a group of local citizens who came out to meet him over coffee.

Andrew and Sandra were between stops on the Great Tar Sands Debate Tour [12] of 2009. After the shocking bad news, Andrew shares some of the easily implemented solutions, some of which are already being used with great success. 

0:00 - 0:53 Intro with Bridget Haworth [13]

0:54 - 3:19 "... most of the bitumen is going to ... Barak Obama country... that's where all the money is being made."

3:20 - 5:18 "... We were even at the point of setting off a nuclear bomb in Fort McMurray [14] to melt the bitumen in the nineteen sixties, and the Americans were going to provide the bomb." ... 'When you gotta schlep two tons of sand to create one barrel of oil you know you're in the bottom of the ninth inning.'"

5:19 - 9:08 "We've moved enough dirt up there to build seven Panama Canal [15]s since the nineteen sixties. ... Here's the Mackenzie River Basin [16]... a sixth of Canada's fresh water is all in this basin and here we have the world’s largest energy project right in there."

9:09 - 11:48 “... to replace that kind of natural gas (used for tar sands production) would require twenty nuclear reactors, hence the nuclear debate.... We're producing more greenhouse gases in the tar sands than the entire country of New Zealand..."

11:49 - 13:48 "Germany... came up with a program, one hundred thousand homes [17] would be converted to solar power [18] within the space of a year... they did it! They started a solar panel industry that employs forty thousand people; it's the fastest growing economic sector in Germany today."

13:49 - 16:03 "We spent two hundred billion now on the tar sands. Imagine if we took twenty or thirty (billion) of that and invested it in renewables."

16:04 - 17:54 "...re-localizing food production [19], that should be a part of your (our) strategy too.... We're making ourselves more and more vulnerable to potential economic collapse when you can't produce... your own food."

17:55 - 22:03 Q. "Are you hopeful?" A. "I am... whether we want change or not, it's coming.... We've got a short window of opportunity to create a national debate about the scale and pace of this project."

22:04 - 22:25 extro 

Talking Tar Sands with Andrew Nikiforuk was produced by Bridget Haworth and Kelly Reinhardt of boilingfrog.ca [20], March 2009 in Craik, SK.

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