Lithium’s Northern Buzz: Extractivism, Energy Transitions, and Resource Frontiers in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the “buzz” before extraction begins in earnest, landscapes, financial interests, and communities are reshaped in anticipation of economic windfalls—even if a project never materializes. The buzz around critical minerals necessary for decarbonization technologies adds the existential threat of the climate crisis to the financial, social, and political pressures that normally drive resource extraction. As this article illustrates in its study of the emerging lithium frontier in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Québec, these processes are always overdetermined, blurring simple causal explanations—particularly in the early and sustaining “buzz” of extraction. Drawing from interviews with frontline communities and decision makers, I aim here to assess the relationship between extraction and energy transitions at emerging energy frontiers of the Global North. Path dependency, geopolitics, and local dynamics all inform the (re)formation of resource frontiers and, in the process, offer new ways to consider the politics of extraction and energy transitions in the context of intensifying climate crises.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".