Can a just transition achieve decarbonization? Explaining fossil fuel community opposition in the Canadian Oil Sands
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Just transition policies are widely viewed as one of the most effective mechanisms for compensating and building support for decarbonization in fossil fuel communities. However, early empirical work suggests that many coal-producing regions remain opposed to decarbonization even when just transition policies are proposed or implemented. In this study, I add to and nuance existing accounts by analyzing data from 18 interviews with oil and gas workers and community members in the Canadian Oil Sands, the world’s third-largest fossil fuel reserve. I show how those living and working in the Oil Sands remain skeptical of renewable energy, optimistic about the long-term viability of fossil fuels, and strongly oppose the proposal for a just transition. These responses are patterned by feelings of fear, exclusion, and resentment towards the motives and actors driving decarbonization, which I argue demonstrates a threatened sense of ontological security. Reframing decarbonization and just transition policies as an issue of ontological security encourages scholars and policy makers to prioritize the social and emotional impacts of decarbonization and reconsider the conditions necessary for a just transition.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it