Oil Opposition: Creating Friction in Energy Politics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Energy Research & Social Science, 2020
Canadian politics is alive with references to what oil means to the country and its residents. However, the existing research only intermittently and often superficially discusses how Canada recognizes itself as a petrostate and negotiates its identities in relation to oil. Seeking to fill the gap, this paper offers a nuanced, dynamic, and comprehensive picture of Canadian discursive politics of oil on provincial, federal, and international levels. A systematic intertextual discourse analysis of this heterogeneous collection of texts allows us to achieve two major analytical goals: to reveal the discourses about energy resources that dominate in Canadian politics on federal and provincial levels and to differentiate them from the discourses that are marginalized or even suppressed.
Pipeline Politics: Capitalism, Extractivism, and Resistance in Canada
Economic and political pressures to extract Canada’s oil sands—among the most carbon-intensive and polluting fossil fuels on the planet—have increased manifold, while heightened risks of toxic spills, climate change, and environmental degradation from fossil fuel use and production have solicited intense public concern. Yet, influenced by neoliberalism, political solutions to climate and environmental crises are often swept aside in favor of market-based approaches to economic and social organization. In the face of such depoliticizing trends, and an economic model that makes life on Earth increasingly precarious, a loose network of environmental organizations and citizens took social and political action against oil pipelines in response to the “failure of institutional representation” (Dufour et al., 2015: 127). This movement—dubbed the anti-fossil fuel or anti-pipeline movement (Klein, 2014)—sought to challenge the dominant cultures and politics of fossil-fueled capitalism to initiate a public conversation about building and governing differently in a socio-ecologically precarious world. For that reason, social resistance to a specific oil infrastructure project, the Energy East pipeline in Canada, presents an opportunity to unpack how political claims for a post-carbon society are enacted and formulated. Drawing primarily on reviews of the social science literature on risk, capitalism, and environmental politics, as well as discourse analysis and in-depth interviews with key anti-fossil fuel movement actors, the thesis aims to explore how anti-pipeline claims problematize capitalist solutions to contemporary environmental problems. It argues that social resistance to pipelines carves out a space in the public imaginary for a future beyond petroleum—and perhaps even modern capitalism itself.
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2018
Background This article examines a week-long road blockade that took place in northern Alberta in January, 1983, organized by members of the Fort McKay First Nation and the Fort McKay Métis Community. The communities leveraged their blockade against a logging company, expanding the conversation to demand compensation, tougher oil sands pollution management, and better healthcare access. Analysis A critical discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of the blockade in the local Fort McMurray Today and the provincial Edmonton Journal shows how links between the blockade and broader oil sands politics were minimized. Conclusions and implications The article closes with considerations for contemporary journalistic practices of covering oil development, energy politics, and Indigenous resistance.Contexte Cet article examine le blocus d’une semaine organisé par la Première Nation de Fort McKay et la Communauté Métis de Fort McKay au nord de l’Alberta en janvier 1983. Ces communautés ont...
Journal of Political Ecology, 2021
The northwest region of British Columbia, Canada has been at the center of multiple fossil fuel projects over the past decade as corporations have sought access to the coastline in order to export their products. Analyzing the dynamics of how and why groups and communities responded to two specific fossil fuel projects, we address the question: why did the "unlikely alliance" formed at the local level in northwest B.C. to resist the Enbridge oil pipeline project fracture just a few years later in the case of the LNG Canada/Coastal GasLink Liquefied Natural Gas project and pipeline project? We argue that the fracturing arose in part because of historic vulnerabilities of the resource periphery, and the legacy of settler colonial governance but also because state and corporate actors used their powers to increase the financial incentives for communities to support LNG projects, to change the discourse on fossil fuels by promoting the concept of LNG as "clean"energy...
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.
Protest and Politics: The Promise of Social Movement Societies, 2015
An analysis of the social movement opposition (environmental, indigenous, labour, religious) to oilsands development in Alberta. I place it in the context of a "cultural politics" of the province. For instance, advertising campaigns and government efforts construct "Homo alberticus" as "Homo energeticus", that is "energy is what makes us Albertan. This chapter was up to date to about 2014. Haluza-DeLay, Randolph. (2015). Alberta Internalizing Oilsands Opposition: A Test of the Social Movement Society Thesis. In, Howard Ramos and Kathleen Rogers (Eds.) Protest and Politics: The Promise of Social Movement Societies, pp. 274-296. Vancouver: The University of British Columbia Press.
The Rhetoric of oil in Canadian News: Framed for Indigenous Care
This article critically examines news representation of oil and indigenous "voice" as a tactic of consensual politics. It suggests that by leveraging the politics of recognition to frame the "oil pipeline debates" as an issue fit primarily for indigenous care, news media position Aboriginality as the primary rhetoric of sustainability. Leveraging Nancy Fraser's concept of scales of justice and Jacques Rancière's intellectual emancipation, the article suggests that the politics of recognition can result in branding issue owners, creating lines of divisibility between political and apolitical subjects. The author contextualizes the topic of news representation of oil and indigenous "voice" within the sphere of political pedagogy and social change communication.
Sociological Inquiry, 2018
Offshore oil development and nature‐based tourism offer alternative ways of living with and making use of coastal environments. We analyze a recent controversy over offshore oil extraction in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in eastern Canada, and identify key points of alignment between environmentalism and the tourism industry that structure resistance to oil development. Our results are based on interviews with tourism operators, government, environmental groups, and recreational organizations, as well as an analysis of key Web sites and Web 2.0 content. Four discourses are used to challenge the normal separation of offshore oil and tourism development in Atlantic Canada: wilderness and wildlife; ecological risks of oil disaster; protecting existing social–ecological networks; and contesting political jurisdiction. Our findings show that the ecological and social value of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is used to justify opposition to oil development in the region. However, the project‐specific nature of this opposition neglects larger questions of social–environmental sustainability in an oil‐dependent political ecology.
Avoiding the Resource Curse: Indigenous Communities and Canada's Oil Sands
— Concerns about a resource curse in Canada have been raised in response to rapid growth in the petroleum sector in northern Alberta. In previous research, there has been little consideration of how symptoms of the resource curse are experienced and managed at a regional scale and by Indigenous communities. An analysis of effects and responses is offered using a natural, financial, human and social capitals framework. Without consideration of how to manage the symptoms of the resource curse, oil and gas activity is likely to further disadvantage Indigenous populations already living on the margins of Canadian society.