Nature's Past Episode 050: Canadian Energy History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to a study by Richard Unger and John Thistle, Canadians consumed 430 petajoules of energy in 1867. Combining energy from animal labour, food, firewood, wind, water, coal, crude oil, natural gas and electricity, by 2004 Canadians reached a historic peak of energy consumption at 11,526 petajoules. For reference, a petajoule is a unit of energy measurement roughly equivalent to 31.6 million cubic metres of natural gas or 277.78 million kilowatt hours of electricity. \n \nSince Confederation, Canadians have been high per capita energy consumers and our appetites for energy have grown substantially over the past 148 years. The way we consume energy has changed quite a bit over that time period too. In 1867, Canadians drew energy primarily from organic sources: animal labour, wood, and agricultural produce. Since the mid-twentieth century, we have drawn increasingly from mineral sources of energy: coal, crude oil, and natural gas. \n \nThis shift in energy consumption since Confederation has arguably been one of the most consequential changes in Canadian history. It changed our relationships with one another as much as it changed our relationships with nature. The energy history of Canada is as much a concern for environmental history as it is for social history, political history, and cultural history. \n \nEnergy history is an emerging field in Canada, but one with long historiographical roots. To learn more about Canadian energy history and the development of this new approach to thinking about environment, history, and society, this episode features a round-table discussion with three Canadian historians each of whom were part of an energy history working group at the University of Toronto in 2014-15.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".