Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon To Canada (And Doesn’t Seem To Care) is written by bestselling investigative journalist who takes a tour of the Alberta oil and gas industry, revealing how Canada’s richest province is squandering our chance for a sustainable future.
Richard Helm of the Edmonton Journal writes, “In his examination of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, author William Marsden puts a fascinating focus on Fort McMurray and the oilsands and the runaway development there, and I have to say it’s a fairly dispiriting, entirely convincing report.”
Marsden and his book are also mentioned in a Maclean’s article (Oct. 8th, 2007 issue) – DOOMSDAY:Alberta Stands Accused (p.20) – watch for it on newsstands.
About this Book – from RandomHouse.ca
A bestselling investigative journalist takes a tour of the Alberta oil and gas industry, revealing how Canada’s richest province is squandering our chance for a sustainable future.
In its desperate search for oil and gas riches, Alberta is destroying itself. As the world teeters on the edge of catastrophic climate change, Alberta plunges ahead with uncontrolled development of its fossil fuels, levelling its northern Boreal forest to get at the oil sands, and carpet-bombing its southern half with tens of thousands of gas wells. In so doing, it is running out of water, destroying its range land, wiping out its forests and wildlife and spewing huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding to global warming at a rate that is unrivalled in Canada or almost anywhere else in the world. It’s digging, drilling and blasting its way to oblivion, becoming the ultimate symbol of Canada’s-and the world’s-pathological will to self-destruct.
Nowhere has the world seen such colossal environmental destruction as is being wreaked on Alberta. At one point the province even went so far as to consider a scientist’s idea of nuking its underbelly to get at the tar sands. Albertans Are Stupid looks at the increasingly violent geopolitical forces that are gathering as the world’s gas and oil dwindle and the Age of Oil begins its inevitable slide towards oblivion. As Canadians deplete their energy reserves, selling them off to Americans at bargain-basement prices, no thought is given to conservation or the long-term needs of the nation.
In this powerful polemic, William Marsden journeys across the heart of a province seized by the destructive forces of greed, power and the energy business, and envisions a very bleak future.
