Financing energy futures: the contested assetization of pipelines in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pipelines are technological and political undertakings, but also financial feats. When pipelines are in protracted states of uncertainty—not yet built, but not yet canceled—the outcomes seem not to benefit anyone: proponents face cost overruns and regulatory battles, while potentially affected communities remain under threat of disruption and dispossession. In light of these negative outcomes, why do such projects remain in liminal states for so long? To answer this question, we interrogate two contested oil pipeline proposals in Canada, the Northern Gateway Pipelines and the Trans Mountain Expansion projects. In both cases, we find that the complex and shifting financial arrangements for these pipelines produced what we call ‘contested assetization.’ This process operates through three intertwined dynamics: temporality (collapsing and expanding time), market valuation (specific forms of knowledge and professional practices), and financial tools (contractual, equity, and other financial arrangements). Proponents create complex, layered future-oriented investable assets, mediating corporate risk; at the same time, opponents target multiple regulatory venues, challenge valuation systems, and highlight future social and ecological costs. We find that although the strategic use of these dynamics has contradictory consequences, overall, these financial processes reinforce corporate power, prolonging fossil fuel-based energy futures.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".