Thanks to increasingly extreme forms of oil extraction, Canada’s largest oil-producing provinces underwent exceptional economic growth from 2005 to 2015. Yet oil’s economic miracle obscured its ecological costs. Fossilized traces this development trajectory, assessing how the governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador offered extensive support for oil development, and exploring the often-downplayed environmental effects of extraction.
At the height of the boom, these oil-dependent provinces undermined their environmental policies or let them decay to boost production. This book investigates overarching institutional trends, such as the restructuring of departments that prioritized extraction over environmental protection, and identifies regulatory inadequacies related to environmental assessment, land-use planning, and emissions controls. The detailed analysis situates these policy dynamics squarely within the historical and global context of late-stage petro-capitalism and growing neoliberalization of environmental policy.
In Fossilized, I reveal a country out of step with the transition unfolding in response to the climate crisis. As the global community moves toward deep decarbonization, Canada’s petro-provinces have intensified oil production, intertwining their fate ever more closely with fossil fuel extraction—at great ecological and economic risk.
Angela Carter is an IC3 member and an Associate Professor in the department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo.
Carter, A. Forthcoming 2020 (in-press). Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada’s Petro-Provinces. Vancouver: UBC Press.