The “Public Interest” in Section 3 of Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Act: Where Do We Stand and Where Do We Go From Here?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Section 3 of the Energy Resources Conservation Act (ERCA) requires the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) to consider whether a proposed energy resource project is “in the public interest” having regard to three factors, the social and economic effects of the project and its impact on the environment. Although the concept is fundamental to the discharge of the Board’s mandate, the phrase “in the public interest” is not defined in the ERCA. Since little has been written about section 3 of the ERCA and since Alberta Energy propose to change to how the public interest is engaged in the course of regulation of the upstream oil and gas industry, this paper sets out to assess the current state of the interpretation and application of that provision by the ERCB against the background of relevant social science literature on the topic of the public interest and applicable court decisions. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations for the way forward. Section 3 of the Energy Resources Conservation Act (ERCA) requires the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) to consider whether a proposed energy resource project is “in the public interest” having regard to three factors, the social and economic effects of the project and its impact on the environment. Although the concept is fundamental to the discharge of the Board’s mandate, the phrase “in the public interest” is not defined in the ERCA. Since little has been written about section 3 of the ERCA and since Alberta Energy propose to change to how the public interest is engaged in the course of regulation of the upstream oil and gas industry, this paper sets out to assess the current state of the interpretation and application of that provision by the ERCB against the background of relevant social science literature on the topic of the public interest and applicable court decisions. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations for the way forward.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".