Petroleum Development Moratoria on Georges Bank: Environmental Decision Making Where Values Predominate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The U.S. and Canada have each recently extended moratoria on petroleum activities on Georges Bank, an offshore area between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia which is ecologically rich and, historically, has supported valuable fisheries. In both the U.S. and Canada the question of moratorium extension has been viewed in isolation with little reference to the larger goal of optimum overall management of Georges Bank. The U.S. moratorium was extended by executive order without any formal process of public comment or scientific review. In Canada a Georges Bank Review Panel was established by statute to conduct a public review of environmental and socio-economic impacts of petroleum exploration on the bank. The panel examined technical information concerning Georges Bank and offshore petroleum operations and gathered public comments concerning extension of the moratorium. This paper examines the work of the review panel and concludes that (1) the Canadian decision-making process for the question of moratorium extension was much more open than the U.S. process; (2) the Canadian approach to moratorium extension as a yes-or-no question tended to increase the importance of socio-economic and cultural values and preferences and to decrease the importance of detailed and quantitative analysis of technical issues; (3) the alternative approach of determining whether conditions exist under which petroleum development on Georges Bank would be acceptable would have tended to encourage more detailed exploration of technical issues; and (4) the failure to set the question of moratorium extension in the broader context of optimum environmental management of Georges Bank is a serious shortcoming of both U.S. and Canadian policy.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".