The Networked Infrastructure of Fossil Capitalism: Implications of the New Pipeline Debates for Environmental Justice in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A read of the critical geography literature on the concept of “networked infrastructures” generates two arguments in relation to the environmental justice implications of the new pipeline debates. First, the proposed coast-to-coast pipeline is likely to exacerbate existing environmental inequities in Canada. Conceiving of the crude oil in a pipeline as a material flow of commodified nature demonstrates that, at the end of the pipe, inputs of labour, technology and capital are required to convert the crude into useable forms of energy. This leads to a serious engagement with the communities at the ends of the proposed pipes. Here, I illustrate the type of analysis that is required with a preliminary examination of the expected environmental health impacts from increased refinery emissions in Sarnia, Montréal and Saint John. Second, the notion that pipelines, despite their vital effects, are fixed and durable installations of built infrastructure—lending a marked inertia to the routes they cement—produces intergenerational equity concerns in relation to fossil capitalism. These concerns are brought powerfully to the fore by activists under the banner of Idle No More. In fact, it is this growing indigenous resistance movement centered on lands and resources that best illustrates the obvious contradiction: the permanence of the pipelines on the landscape, once built, underscores the gravity of the choices we are weighing, just as the active resistance of indigenous people across the county reveals the inherent instability of the networked infrastructure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".