Developing Alberta’s Oil Sands: From Karl Clark to Kyoto & Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity (original) (raw)
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Energy Humanities and the Petroleumscape
Oil Spaces, 2021
Recent debates around fossil fuels in Canada have brought home the importance of energy resources to the life of the country. They have also shown the importance of space to disputes over how, why, and whether fossil fuels should be used. The contentious function of oil in linking space and governance has been made clear in the extended struggle over the construction of pipelines from northeastern Alberta (close to the extraction site of the Athabasca tar sands) to the coasts, especially to the West Coast. For the Alberta provincial government and the Canadian federal government, pipelines have the potential to expand markets for Canadian oil, most of which goes to the US 1 ; for the provincial government of British Columbia, through whose territory they must pass, and for many First Nations in the region, the structures pose more threat than opportunity. Some of the disputes over energy in Canada are based on environmental principles and the argument that oil must be left in the ground. In the case of the pipelines and in the case of recent challenges by conservative governments in Saskatchewan and Ontario to the federal carbon tax, the struggle is over politics rather than principles, and it often plays out in the construction and representation of space. Conservative governments want the business of fossil fuels to continue unabated, even as British Columbia's current left-of-center government seems intent on mitigating the outcomes of fossil fuel use, including the fires that have plagued its forests over the past several years. Despite the fact that Canada's history and the space of its political sovereignty have been shaped in relation to resource extraction, it is safe to say that such practices have only recently animated vigorous public debate about their short-and long-term viability as well as their environmental implications. Yet these debates have only scratched the surface of the social and cultural commitments Canadians have made to their resource culture. This isn't to say that there aren't politically committed environmentalists in Canada, such as author Naomi Klein, whose contributions include her involvement in the 2015 Leap Manifesto, a document that demands restructuring Canada's economy to end fossil fuel use. Instead, it is to say, even as environmentalists push Canada to change its sources of energy, there has been less of a demand for an accompanying social transition. All too often, ending the use of
From Narrative of Promise to Rhetoric of Sustainability: A Genealogy of Oil Sands
Environmental Communication-a Journal of Nature and Culture, 2016
Since its conception, "oil sands" has been the name of a pro-development narrative seeking to convince skeptics that bitumen saturating the sandstone of Alberta's Athabasca region ought to be extracted and chemically altered into Synthetic Crude Oil (SCO). Over the decades, the nature of skepticism has changed, and thus oil sands (along with its meanings and claims) has been continually reproduced so as to placate new criticisms. This paper offers a discursive genealogy of the oil sands narrative, demonstrating how it has been transformed from what was throughout the twentieth century a materially situated "narrative of promise" aiming to prove that SCO production was physically possible and that it could be commercially profitable, into what by 2015 was at its core a largely reactive "rhetoric of sustainability" aiming to convince a new class of critics that, contrary to their claims, SCO was in fact being produced in an environmentally responsible manner.
Transformism in Alberta : the environmental political economy of the bituminous sands
2018
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Crisis in the Tar Sands: Fossil Capitalism and the Future of the Alberta Hydrocarbon Economy
Historical Materialism
Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier's dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.
Review: Gordon, Jon. "Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions"
In the introduction to Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions, Jon Gordon offers a sub-heading that works as a fairly straightforward summation of the book's concerns: " Literature's Counterfactual Response to All the Factual Bullshit. " Gordon's analysis of the literary, economic and political representations of the Albertan bitumen extraction and refinement processes is grounded in discursive and rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical analysis allows Gordon, and by extension his readers, to get past the bullshit – not just in the sense of getting to the " real " facts that bullshit tends to obscure, but in the sense of moving towards ways of knowing that are, unlike bullshit, directly related to the matter and material at hand. Unsustainable Oil argues that literature provides opportunities for imagining the ethical, ecological and social unknowns that are routinely excised by dominant narratives that appeal to the familiar Western tradition of tying reason and rationality to authority and, ultimately, prosperity.
Villanova Environmental Law Journal, 2010
In 1956, a petroleum geologist named M. King Hubbert made a controversial prediction: U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. At the time, Hubbert's prediction was widely disputed; in 1970, however, the U.S. production of crude oil started to fall, proving that Hubbert was correct. 2 The concepts that underlie what has become known as "Hubbert's Peak" are relatively straightforward: (1) oil is a finite resource; (2) production starts at zero; (3) production rises to a peak that can never be surpassed; and (4) production declines until the resource is depleted. 3 Put more colorfully by Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, "[A]s every beer drinker knows, the glass that starts full ends empty." ' 4 To most credible observers, we now live in a peak oil world. 5 We are well on the way to depleting the world's oil reserves. 6 The glass is headed towards empty. Professor Hannah Wiseman of the University of Texas Law School notes that "[a] s conventional sources of oil and gas become less productive and energy prices rise, production companies are developing creative extractive methods to tap resources like oil shales and tar sands that were previously not worth drilling." '7 These new methods of energy production, like their predecessors, PAUL ROBERTS, THE END OF OIL: ON THE EDGE OF A PERILOUS NEW WORLD 44-65 (2005) (stating easy access to oil reserves has ended). 6. See Deffeyes, supra note 1, at 133-99. 7. See Hannah Wiseman, Untested Waters: The Rise of Hydraulic Fracturing in Oil and Gas Production and the Need to Revisit Regulation, 20 FoRDHAM ENVTL. L. REv. 115 (2009) (noting that most new extraction techniques are causing disputes as they are occurring close to human populations).
2010
In 1956, a petroleum geologist named M. King Hubbert made a controversial prediction: U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. At the time, Hubbert's prediction was widely disputed; in 1970, however, the U.S. production of crude oil started to fall, proving that Hubbert was correct. 2 The concepts that underlie what has become known as "Hubbert's Peak" are relatively straightforward: (1) oil is a finite resource; (2) production starts at zero; (3) production rises to a peak that can never be surpassed; and (4) production declines until the resource is depleted. 3 Put more colorfully by Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, "[A]s every beer drinker knows, the glass that starts full ends empty." ' 4 To most credible observers, we now live in a peak oil world. 5 We are well on the way to depleting the world's oil reserves. 6 The glass is headed towards empty. Professor Hannah Wiseman of the University of Texas Law School notes that "[a] s conventional sources of oil and gas become less productive and energy prices rise, production companies are developing creative extractive methods to tap resources like oil shales and tar sands that were previously not worth drilling." '7 These new methods of energy production, like their predecessors, PAUL ROBERTS, THE END OF OIL: ON THE EDGE OF A PERILOUS NEW WORLD 44-65 (2005) (stating easy access to oil reserves has ended). 6. See Deffeyes, supra note 1, at 133-99. 7. See Hannah Wiseman, Untested Waters: The Rise of Hydraulic Fracturing in Oil and Gas Production and the Need to Revisit Regulation, 20 FoRDHAM ENVTL. L. REv. 115 (2009) (noting that most new extraction techniques are causing disputes as they are occurring close to human populations).
“This is Oil Country”: The Alberta Tar Sands and Jacques Ellul’s Theory of Technology
2015
The Alberta tar sands, and the proposed pipelines which would carry their bitumen to international markets, comprise one of the most visible environmental controversies of the early twenty-first century. Jacques Ellul’s theory of technology presents ostensibly physical phenomena, such as the tar sands, as social phenomena wherein all values are subsumed under the efficient mastery of nature. The effect of technological rationality is totalizing because technical means establish themselves as the exclusive facts of the matter, which creates a socio-political environment wherein ethical engagement is precluded. Analyzing the tar sands controversy through Ellul’s hermeneutic challenges environmental ethics to a more radical stance than the continuation of the technological worldview, and thus offers meaningful and hopeful alternatives to the status quo.