Risking Rupture: Integral Accidents and In/Security in Canada's Bitumen Sands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expansion of unconventional hydrocarbon development in Western Canada is one of the most contentious issues in contemporary Canadian politics. Although widely studied, little attention has been paid to the framing of Alberta's bitumen sands within distinct and incompatible discourses of and environmental security. This essay examines these discourses using the tools of securitization analysis, asking the basic questions of what each presents as needing to be secured, from what, and by what means. Presented with two sets of socially constructed in/security claims related to the bitumen sands and proposed pipeline expansion, the author suggests the social theory of Paul Virilio provides a useful intervention into securitization analysis that allows the material implications of these discourses to be clarified and assessed. Drawing upon Virilio's critical account of technological progress and his theory of accidents, this essay proposes that conventional accounts of energy in the bitumen sands cannot result in meaningful conditions of security because they remain premised upon continued and expanded hydrocarbon consumption in an era of anthropogenic climate change.L'expansion du secteur des hydrocarbures non conventionnels dans l'ouest du Canada est une des questions les plus controversees dans l'arene politique canadienne contemporaine. Bien qu'il y ait eu beaucoup d'etudes a ce sujet, peu d'attention a ete accordee a la definition des sables bitumeux de l'Alberta dans des discours distincts et incompatibles sur la securite energetique et environnementale. Le present article examine ces discours en se servant des outils de l'analyse de la securisation pour poser des questions fondamentales sur ce que chacun affirme quant a ce qui doit etre protege, contre quoi, et par quels moyens. L'auteur se sert de deux ensembles de revendications construites par la societe/axees sur la securite concernant les sables bitumeux et l'expansion proposee de pipelines. L'auteur suggere que la theorie sociale de Paul Virilio fournit une intervention utile dans le cadre de l'analyse de la securisation qui permet aux repercussions importantes de ces discours d'etre eclaircies et evaluees. En se servant du bilan critique des progres technologiques et de la theorie des accidents de M. Virilio, l'article avance que les rapports conventionnels sur la « securite energetique » dans les sables bitumeux ne peuvent pas entrainer des conditions valables de securite parce qu'ils se fondent sur la consommation continue et accrue des hydrocarbures dans une ere de changement climatique anthropique.Copyright © Journal of Canadian Studies. All rights reserved.Copyright © Revue d'etudes canadiennes. Tous droits reserves.The development of unconventional hydrocarbon resources in Western Canada, primarily the bituminous oil deposits of northern Alberta (hereafter bitumen sands), has become one of the most contentious issues in contemporary Canadian politics. Particularly important in recent years have been the politics of expanding pipelines and related infrastructure to transport bitumen from Alberta to refineries and global consumers. Strongly supported by Conservative governments in Ottawa and Edmonton, the fossil fuel industry, and industry-funded advocacy groups, proposed pipeline projects have experienced unexpected, and unexpectedly vigorous, opposition from environmental activists, Indigenous groups, municipal governments, the province of British Columbia, and the Barack Obama administration. As a result, these projects' futures are uncertain, and both sides of the debate continue their efforts to sway public and official opinion to oppose or support expansion of major hydrocarbon infrastructure in Western Canada.To date, academic discussion of the bitumen sands and pipelines has primarily focussed on the costs and benefits to local communities and the broader provincial, regional, and national economies. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".