A Dark Dystopia

As luck would have it, just as I finished reading Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, my copy of The New York Times arrived and, with it, salvation. There on the front page was an article explaining that in two states, it is legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of barbiturates for those wishing to commit suicide. Aha, I thought, a glimmer of hope.

All of which is to say that Nikiforuk’s latest book is a remorselessly tragic tale of our species’ stupidity, profligacy, ignorance and greed. Here, Nikiforuk asks a question he says few have bothered to ask since oil gushers began spewing forth their black gold: who is being served by all the wealth that oil has made?

His answer is sobering. He contends that modern humans have become slaves to oil, that our entire civilization now bends itself to serve oil rather than oil serving us. Every facet of life has been disfigured and pathologically...