A Province Powered by Coal: The Renaissance of Coal Mining in Late Twentieth-Century Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the political economy of coal in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the resurgence of coal production beginning in the 1960s after a decline in the immediate post-war period. After 1962, the coal industry in Alberta was transformed compared to its early twentieth-century counterpart as it shifted from producing a transport fuel to producing a fuel for electric power generation and came to occupy a different place in Alberta's and Canada's energy networks. The shift to strip-mining in the post-war period, which was part of a global transition, enabled intensified exploitation of the resource at greatly reduced costs. A new coal industry in Alberta was born after 1962 that depended less on the labour of skilled coal miners than on the transferable skills of heavy equipment operators. A shift in markets for coal produced in Alberta fundamentally changed the place of coal in the provincial political economy. This article also contributes to the national and international energy literatures by presenting a case study of the mid-century energy transition in Alberta, complicating our understanding of which energy sources prevailed in this transition and why. While Alberta exported oil and gas, coal provided for the intensifying energy demands within the province itself. Coal was thus wholly integrated into the fossil fuel economy of the late twentieth century.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".