Do Oil and Democracy Only Clash in the Global South?: Petro Politics in Alberta, Canada

Shrivastava, Meenal; Stefanick, Lorna

doi:10.1515/1940-0004.1147

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Considering 207 counties in the Western region of the U.S., Haggerty et al [26] find that economic specialization in oil and gas development was associated with anemic economic development and social problems like crime. Natural resource curse dynamics have also been observed in mining regions of Australia [53,54], and Canada [55]. Presumably, problems of natural resource dependence might exist in some regions of nation that are not writ large subject to the natural resource curse, while the natural resource curse can be observed cross-sectionally between nations.…”

Section: Natural Resource Dependencementioning

confidence: 99%

Fossil fuel dependence and energy insecurity

Mayer

2022

Energ Sustain Soc

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Background Access to reliable energy services is increasingly seen as a prerequisite for well-being and human development. Copious research documents the negative consequences that occur when nations specialize in natural resource production, creating a “natural resource curse” or “paradox of plenty”. In this analysis, we evaluate how natural resource dependence, measured as oil and gas production, impacts energy security. Results Using entropy-balanced fixed effects models, we find that oil and coal production is not associated with shorter times to establish a connection to the electricity grid, fewer outages, or improve electricity access among the population. Conclusions Nations that produce oil and coal do not seem to have better energy insecurity as a result, representing a distributional inequality. Fossil fuel-producing nations should consider implementing policies that would allow them to retain more wealth from fossil fuel production.

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Section: Natural Resource Dependencementioning

confidence: 99%

Fossil fuel dependence and energy insecurity

Mayer

2022

Energ Sustain Soc

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“…The ABMI's metaphor of intactness dematerializes actual ecology by shifting attention to the fantasy of an immaterial thing: the idea of an intact ecological space that promises future health and wealth for its inhabitants. This promise does not necessarily need to be uttered aloud: it is implied through the longstanding Albertan paradigm associating continued extraction with societal collective good and prosperity (Adkin 2016;Shrivastava and Stefanick 2012;Takach 2017). How does the profusion of images of environmental health and economic wealth that is enabled by the metaphor of intactness prevent residents of a settler colonial state from seeing and confronting the multifarious forms of harm perpetrated by colonialism?…”

Section: The Metaphor Of "Intactness"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, “Intactness,” and Extractive Industry in Canada

Blacker

2022

Catalyst

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Debates over the environmental costs of industrial resource extraction in Alberta, Canada—home to a petrochemical industry that plays an outsize economic and political role—are reaching a fever pitch in response to government regulations on industry, data on climate change threats, and social movements pushing for environmental protection. Away from the news headlines, scientists are developing new metrics and models to calculate biodiversity loss and other outcomes of industrial environmental contamination. But these data are not only used to provide evidence of environmental harm. Practitioners of settler science like the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute employ such data in combination with the metaphor of environmental “intactness,” generating colonial mythologies of terra nullius anew, and enabling industrial extraction to continue. This paper theorizes a technology of settler colonial concealment. It shows how settler technologies of quiescence operate through the strategic use of scientific metrics, thereby concealing evidence of colonial harm and promoting a fiction of environmental “intactness” in a province that is home to one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world.

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“…3 Environmental opposition to the industry seems to hold little sway in a province that several scholars have characterized as a petro-state. The Alberta energy industry has a long reach into politico-economic sectors (Adkin, 2016;Shrivastava and Stefanick, 2012;Takach, 2017), and pro-oil PR is pervasive. Oil companies, advocacy groups posing as grassroots, citizen-led initiatives, 4 Alberta's provincial government and the Canadian federal government have all launched PR campaigns to improve the industry's image (Canadian Press, 2019;Simpson, 2017;Wereley, 2016).…”

Section: Naturelynxmentioning

confidence: 99%

When citizen science is public relations

2021

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Amid rising interest in participatory research, some industries have recently begun to practice public relations citizen science (PRCS). Unlike citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that generate raw materials for product development, PRCS benefits capitalist firms primarily by improving their public image and deflecting accusations of causing harm. Three cases illustrate how PRCS works: (1) a growing assortment of citizen science projects associated with Antarctic tourism, (2) an initiative to document biodiversity, linked to Canada’s oil and gas industry, and (3) a study sponsored by Biology Fortified, a nonprofit organization that works to communicate positive information about agricultural biotechnology. Scientists and research organizations may have legitimate reasons for entering into these partnerships, but PRCS can benefit industries in problematic ways. First, by supporting environmental science, PRCS can attach a ‘sustainable’ image to a polluting industry, without changing its core practices. Second, PRCS can accumulate data and steer volunteers’ observations in ways that undermine claims about the harms caused by the industry’s practices or products. Finally, in some cases, PRCS organizers hope to induce people to view an industry more ‘rationally’ than those who make ‘emotional’ or ‘ideological’ claims about its harms.

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Do Oil and Democracy Only Clash in the Global South?: Petro Politics in Alberta, Canada

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Fossil fuel dependence and energy insecurity

Fossil fuel dependence and energy insecurity

Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, “Intactness,” and Extractive Industry in Canada

When citizen science is public relations

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