In a surprising turn, Canada’s oil and gas industry has gone silent following the passage of Bill C-59 on June 20, 2024. This new legislation, amending the Competition Act to penalize misleading environmental claims, has prompted major industry players like the Pathways Alliance and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to curtail their online presence. For a decade, Jordan B. Kinder, a scholar in media studies and environmental humanities, has studied the cultural politics of energy, infrastructure, media, and environment, coining the term "petroturfing" to describe the oil industry's fake grassroots advocacy. In his commentary on the oil industry's response to the bill, Kinder notes the benefits of the bill but also warns against putting too much stock in discursive struggles over the oil sands when what is needed is more immediate action.
In this author's note, Sibo Chen introduces his new book, Energy Politics and Discourse in Canada, and its argument about the rise of "progressive extractivism" in Canada. By exploring the conflicting narratives that have shaped the politics of natural gas extraction in British Columbia, Chen shows how progressive rhetoric often masks resource extraction and underscores the multifaceted challenges inherent in balancing the economy, the environment, and Indigenous rights in a fraught energy landscape.
Carrie Karsgaard, Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Cape Breton University, discusses her recent book, Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The book uses digital methods to explore the educative potential and limits of social media in anti-pipeline activism.
Historian Daniel Macfarlane introduces his new book, Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations from McGill-Queen's University Press. The book shows that the Canada-U.S. energy/environmental relationship is historically the most consequential in the world, spawning important changes in international environmental law and transboundary governance, while also fostering the voracious consumption of resources and and large-scale ecosystem change. In addition to analyzing this history, Macfarlane offers the concept of "natural security" as a potential guide to international environmental agreements and pathways.
In the second of a two-part series on Racial Capital by emerging researchers, Shouhei Tanaka (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Southern California) explores how Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms (1995) fictionalizes the James Bay Cree hydroelectric conflict and places it in the longer histories of North American settler colonialism. For Tanaka, energy modernity is a history of empire and the future of energy must necessarily be a future of decolonization.
In A Social Ecology of Capital, the Canadian social theorist Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, Pineault highlights the deep contradictions that humanity now faces.
In this Author's Note, political scientist Sarah Marie Wiebe outlines the stories, concerns, and methods animating her new book, "Life Against States of Emergency: Revitalizing Treaty Relations from Attawapiskat."
Achieving net-zero is a complex process beset by many challenges. Writing about the Canadian context, Temitope Onifade, a legal scholar and instructor in climate law and policy at the University of British Columbia, explains the need to develop and apply a "low carbon justice" approach to the actions that Canada takes to reduce its carbon emissions. If it doesn't prioritize justice, Onifade argues, Canada will once again fail its most vulnerable populations.
In late January 2022, hundreds of big rigs bannered with Canadian flags rolled across the nation’s highways in “The Freedom Convoy,” a movement of purportedly ordinary truckers opposed to COVID-19 mandates. Throughout the whole ordeal, however, surprisingly little was said in the news media about the convoy’s energy politics. In this feature essay, Tanner Mirrlees, an Associate Professor in Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University, peels back the layers of energy politics at the heart of the convoy, revealing its alignment with carbon elites.
Adam Carlson teases out how the framing of resource development in Canada often supports authoritarian resource rhetoric and policies. The way we talk about "Canadian oil", it turns out, is deeply political and cannot be separated from ongoing histories of resource extraction and dispossession.
In their astonishing memoirs, published only weeks apart, Kazim Ali and Robert Boschman explore how their personal and family stories overlap with histories of violence, colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and energy development in Western Canada. In Fall 2021, Boschman and Ali sat down with Energy Humanities editors to discuss the resonances between their narratives and the themes that unite them. The conversation that followed was an intimate and affecting dialogue between two men wrestling with the past.
What does religion have to do with climate change? For writer and artist Darren Fleet, the wildfires raging across Western Canada evoke the shared vocabulary of religion and climate change politics, and the urgent need to think seriously about the 'spiritual work' of energy transition and energy justice.
Amid growing calls for a worldwide energy transition, Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker highlight the possibility of an unjust transition, particularly for workers. Their research on the struggle of oil refinery workers in Regina, Saskatchewan, demonstrates that a just transition will only happen if people fight for it.
There is a growing body of Canadian ecopoetry that takes as its subject the links between oil, land, and colonialism. Poetry scholar Max Karpinski has studied these poets and explains how one of them--Lesley Battler--subtly reuses the bland terminology of the petrochemical industry to create poetic insights into our fossil-fueled condition.
Researcher Sydney Hart explains his web-based project to scrutinize the flight networks that support the operations of some of the world's largest gold mining companies. Rather than "flight shaming" individuals, "Mining Maps" shines a light on corporate responsibility for climate change.
In 2008, Canadian artist Sandra Sawatzky set out to embroider the social history of oil. Nine years and 17, 000 hours of work later, she completed her epic Black Gold Tapestry, which visualizes our relationship to energy like never before.
In 2019, the Government of Alberta launched a Public Inquiry into "anti-Alberta energy campaigns that are supported by foreign organizations." Independent researcher László Németh warns that the inquiry's latest report is flirting with dangerous forms of populist rhetoric.
Political scientist Amy Janzwood argues that the Biden administration's attempts to curb U.S. demand for oil will likely accelerate the downfall of Alberta's oil sands. The Canadian oil industry faces a choice: either manage that decline or transform.
The Liberal government's recent Throne Speech made grand environmental policy pronouncements. Imre Szeman finds fault with the Liberal's haphazard approach and questions their continued commitment to resource extraction.
