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and we've really built this huge way

of life based on cheap oil, essentially.

- The world as we know it, which

relies entirely on oil to function,

is nearing its end.

- We are headed for the crash.

That oil is not going to come again.

Fort McMurray

Alberta, Canada

- The tar sands are probably one

of the biggest industrial

projects in the history of mankind.

- The tar sands are the largest,

most destructive environmental

project on the planet right now.

- It's oil extraction,

it's some of the dirtiest oil on the planet,

which means that it takes

the most energy to extract,

and the reason that we're extracting this

this particular brand of dirty, dirty, oil

is because there's no other oil left to extract.

- Tar sands really aren't oil.

Effectively, the process by which you

mine and refine tar sands

is adding about a hundred

million years of development

through a synthetic process.

The tar sands deposit

is an area that covers

the size of the state of

New York, or larger than England

is already considered the largest industrial project

in human history, and it's barely begun.

- They extract it from the sand by

steaming and heating water,

basically boiling it...

...so the oil sits on top of the water like a froth,

then they scrape it off, and that's the bitumen.

- There's mining processes

and in situ processes,

and both of them are pretty

much trying to extract

bitumen out of the sand.

- To produce one barrel of oil

you have to first, after

you've cleared off the ground

and broken all the trees down

and so forth, then dig a pit,

which can be up to two hundred feet deep.

For each barrel of oil, there's

four barrels of water used,

in a process called a slurry

where you spin it at a high speed,

high velocity, with high

temperatures of water,

to separate the bitumen,

which is the pre-synthetic oil,

from the sands itself,

and all the clays and silts.

But that's after you've already

dug out what has to be

hundreds of tons of Earth.

- The energy that's required to

actually do that is approximately,

people say for almost every barrel of oil you need

about a half a barrel of energy just

to produce this,

so for every barrel of energy input,

two barrels of oil are produced,

whereas with conventional

crude it was very,

very minor in terms of the energy

that's inputted to actually

get the crude oil out.

So the ratio that's most important to

talk about is a ratio you could use

in a country like Iraq, where for

each barrel of oil you use to try to

get more oil you'll get about

a hundred barrels back.

Fort Chipewyan

Alberta, Canada

- The Athabasca River, which runs

through northern Alberta,

where you have many different native

communities living along the river,

is being sucked of its water to

fuel the tar sands operations.

- Because of the contamination of the river

from oil sands discharges

of things like oil and grease and

untreated sewage into the Athabasca River,

and sometimes there's accidents,

spills of these toxic chemicals

directly into the Athabasca Rivers.

- The community of Fort Chipewyan,

both the Mikisew Cree

and the Dene Chipewyan First Nation,

who have been fighting

and really at the front

of raising the alarm about what's happening,

and their community has been seeing all of this

rise in rare cancers, autoimmune diseases,

arsenic in the land,

the moose meat, the fish

are at high levels of

heavy metals, mercuries,

basically the whole environment

up there is contaminated.

- How this is effecting my community is that

it's killing off the people of Fort Chipewyan.

It's what I've called before

"a slow, industrial genocide."

I buried my auntie,

I buried my uncle, I got

an auntie living with it.

And this is a war for our lives,

because the government is allowing

the people of Fort Chip to die.

- The tar sands are not only fueling

the destruction of the

second fastest rate of deforestation

in the world outside of

the Amazon River basin,

they're already the second fastest

contributor to climate

change in North America.

And with the goals of production that

they're talking about, the CO2 emissions

will make it so the only way

you could outstrip a

climate change contributor

for North America would

be to combine all

the coal-fired power plants from

Alberta to Arizona and in between,

across all of North America.

- I think that the tar

sands is the absurdity

of still desiring oil

when we know so well

that, for example, fresh water is just

an elemental part of human existence

and they're running full force towards

extracting these last little bits of oil

to sustain this plastic culture,

this plastic civilization,

to the destruction of the environment

in which we can live.

- People say it's like the

world's addicted to crack,

and this is like the dirtiest

and most disgusting form of crack

that'll keep it addicted

for a lot longer, right.

This is actually what it is.

It is the most insane

thing that people are doing.

- We probably agree that civilization's

going to crash, whether or

not we help bring this about.

If you don't agree with this, we probably

have nothing to say to each other.

We probably also agree that

this crash will be messy.

We agree further that since industrial

civilization is systematically dismantling

the ecological infrastructure of the planet...

...the sooner civilization comes down,

whether or not we help it crash,

the more life will remain afterwards

to support both humans and nonhumans.

Figure IV

- The genesis of Endgame, the book,

was really because I did some talks

around the possibility of fighting back.

And the response by the

audience was really predictable.

If it was an audience made up of

sort of mainstream environmentalists

and peace and social justice activists,

often, they would put up what

I've taken to calling a "Gandhi shield".

Which is, they would

say the names "Martin Luther King",

"Dalai Lama", and "Gandhi"

again and again, as fast as they can,

to keep all evil thoughts at bay.

And if it was grassroots environmentalists,

they would do the same thing

but then they would come

up to me afterwards and they would say,

"Thank you so much

for bringing this up."

Pacifying Resistance

- Especially in North America,

the pacifists and non-violent

advocates have had a very defining role,

and even a censoring role, in determining

what other people's participation can be

in a whole range of social struggles, and

that the way that they've

affected social struggles

has made it very much easier for the state

to control those social struggles,

that non-violence plays a function

of recuperating social struggles,

of taking out their teeth

and making them harmless,

so that they can just exist in

this cesspool of democratic plurality.

- I wonder, what happens to

that kind of energy or

idealism or faith that something

is about to change

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