Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the first part of this essay, I consider why the discussion over the likelihood of imminent “peak oil” has faded from public view in the last few years. I suggest that, due to the decline in demand (due to the recession) and the development of “unconventional” natural gas and oil sources, the “cost” of fuels has passed from the obvious rise in price to that of another dimension: the rise of hidden, “external” costs—a recession triggered by too-high prices, pollution, climate change, and so on. I argue, moreover, that this externalized cost forever defies precise measurement. This is clear, for example, in the case of the “unconventional” production of gas in the “tar sands” region of Alberta. How can one measure the cost of drifting underground plumes of arsenic that may not show up for hundreds of years? All of this makes a precise calculation of “sustainability” just about impossible, while at the same time not absolving us—all of those living in the current fossil-fuel civilization—from attempting to calculate it. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that our subjectivity—as consumers, as free agents—is itself an after-effect of the agency of oil: we as subjects are interpellated by oil. Thus one response to the unknowability of externalities—tied to the impossibility of the “closed economy” of sustainability calculation—may be a different model of agency, in which calculation is replaced, or supplemented, by the act of gift-giving. Most important, perhaps, would be the giving of the gift of oil “addiction” not to any recipient (or agent), but to a necessarily repeated forgetting.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".