“… fossil fuels replenished slavery’s 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.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk. The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Greystone Books, 2012), book synopsis.
“The evolution of fracking technology would not have surprised Jacques Ellul. In his final book on the subject, The Technological Bluff, the Christian philosopher argued that the rapid adoption of techniques from computers to genetic engineering generates totalitarian discourses.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk. Slick Water: Fracking (Greystone Books, 2015), p. 309.
Here at MasterResource, opposing views are considered thoroughly. We welcome debate, unlike the other side which claims ‘consensus’ for their views so that they can get on with their agenda (energy statism in place of freedom).
But surely the burden of proof should reside on those who advocate using government power and favoritism in place of voluntary, free-market relations.
In the study of opposing views, some writers espouse peculiar views that are at war with human flourishing (the term Alex Epstein emphasizes as the gold standard for energy and climate policies). And here, some levity is justified to go along with the unmasking of anti-humanistic diatribe.
Nikiforuk I
Last year, I profiled the peculiar views of Andrew Nikiforuk, author of The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2012). The Canadian journalist is a critic of free-market, consumer-driven, taxpayer-neutral, good-living energy. He does not like mineral energies, the enabler of modern life. He seems to despair at a world filled with more, longer-living folks who are busy, productive, and energetic.
The thesis of Mr. Nikiforuk’s book is that we are hydrocarbon slaves for choosing the cheapest and most reliable energies to make our lives more productive and easier. As the book synopsis explained:
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 world’s most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery’s 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.
Strange stuff…. I emailed Mr. Nikiforuk to try to get him to update his views now that a new hydrocarbon era is upon us with the fracking oil and gas revolution. I have not heard back. I do not think he wants to debate…. just to keep believing since he has so much emotionally invested and gets confirmation from colleagues that somehow hydrocarbon energy is very bad.
Nikiforuk II
Wondering what Nikiforuk’s latest book would say about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), I read Slick Water: Fracking (Greystone Books: 2015). And I found this near the end (p. 309):
The evolution of fracking technology would not have surprised Jacques Ellul. In his final book on the subject, The Technological Bluff, the Christian philosopher argued that the rapid adoption of techniques, from computers to genetic engineering, generates totalitarian discourses:
The more indispensable [these techniques] become, the more power they have, the more important they are, the more money they make, the more difficult they are to uproot. Their propagation becomes … an expression of both their self-interest and the strengthening of their situation. They cannot act in any other way. They are forced to reject increasingly what remains of democracy.
The constant proliferation of techniques, argued Ellul, makes a society more complex, more wasteful, and more disorderly. For Ellul, only two forms of resistance mattered: “We must be prepared to reveal the fracture lines and to discover that everything depends on the qualities of individuals.”
Conclusion
Huh?
This seems to be post-modernistic free thought emanating from the premise that humankind is a cancer on the earth.
One wishes that Andrew Nikiforuk would explain more clearly what is meant and what is desired in the real world in regard to the commonly held standard of human flourishing. I shall email him (again) with a link to this post for comment.
The ball is bouncing in his (deep ecology) court.