Clearing the Air? Information Disclosure, Systems of Power, and the National Pollution Release Inventory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The establishment of the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) in 1992 marked the emergence of a new approach to the regulation of industrial pollution in Canada. In contradistinction to the traditional permit-based model of regulation, the NPRI sets no mandatory discharge limits, instead requiring facilities to track their releases of pollutants and report them to a publically-accessible national database. Through its grounding of regulation in the interplay of social actors interacting across the public/private divide, the NPRI exemplifies a new governance technique of environmental regulation, a characterization I examine through a series of analytical lenses. The mining industry offers an informative narrative, and I contend that the relationship between mining activity and the NPRI illustrates well the risks of failing to attend to the extant distribution of power within the social dynamic that informational regulatory mechanisms seek to harness. I end by offering some recommendations for how the NPRI might be improved in light of these considerations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it