Denial and Misinformation in Defense of the Tar Sands: The Case of a Canadian Think Tank
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Literatures within the sociology of science and environmental sociology often focus on climate change denial, misinformation, and the role of think tanks in fuelling public skepticism. This work draws our attention to the arguments these organizations make and how they communicate doubt to the public. Less often have they focused on the ways that particular, locally emplaced organizations defend the material interests of the fossil fuel industry. This paper draws upon existing literature to perform a discourse analysis of the public communication (newsletters, press releases, website, blog, YouTube videos, and social media posts) of a Canadian think tank called Friends of Science based in Calgary, Alberta—the economic hub of Canada's tar sands. Through the analysis, I show how this organization works to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, communicates this doubt to the public, and slips from communicating about scientific matters—their stated goal—into matters of social, economic, and political advocacy. I show how this is done instrumentally in ways that protect the economic and social interests of Alberta’s oil industry.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.108 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| 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".