Drawing The Line: An environmental history of the Westcoast Transmission natural gas pipeline, 1948-1982
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an environmental history of Westcoast Transmission Company Limited (Westcoast), which built Canada’s first big-inch natural gas pipeline and inaugurated large-scale natural gas usage in British Columbia. The study starts in the late 1940s, when the company was founded, and ends in 1982 when it effectively concluded its first encounter with substantial public resistance to its natural gas pipeline ventures. The dissertation asks to what extent Westcoast shaped human-nature relations and argues that Westcoast’s energy transition was about more than technological innovations and economic questions of supply and demand. Instead, natural gas usage and exploitation were intertwined with gender identity, community building, geopolitical questions, colonial ambition, and the definition of modernity. Relying primarily on three archival collections in two Canadian cities, parts of which are newly available to the public, this dissertation explains how Westcoast developed, operated, maintained, and expanded its complex energy system and sheds light on Canada’s relatively late transition to fossil fuels and the persistent nature of Canada’s fossil fuel reliance.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".