{"id":2462,"date":"2014-12-04T20:12:23","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T01:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2462"},"modified":"2014-12-04T20:12:23","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T01:12:23","slug":"letter-from-a-petro-state-opendemocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2462","title":{"rendered":"Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opendemocracy.net\/samir-gandesha\/letter-from-petrostate\">Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 20px;\">Over a year ago, a colleague at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Homer-Dixon, penned a\u00a0<a style=\"color: #0061bf; text-decoration: none;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/04\/01\/opinion\/the-tar-sands-disaster.html\">compelling opinion piece<\/a>\u00a0for the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0in which he addressed, from a Canadian perspective, the debate surrounding the future of the planned Keystone XL Pipeline. If built, this pipeline would transport unprocessed, environmentally toxic Alberta tar sands bitumen to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, Illinois and Oklahoma. Given the fact that Keystone has recently just failed, again, to pass the House, it is worth returning to the question raised by Homer-Dixon: is Canada becoming a \u2018petro-state\u2019? For Homer-Dixon, a state could be defined as a petro-state if virtually all of its main features could be ever more narrowly geared to the development of this single sector: non-renewal energy.\u00a0\u00a0This narrowing has deleterious implications for innovation, economy and democracy. Let us address each of these in turn.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 20px;\">If we understand basic research in science to be directly related to innovation insofar as many forms of technology and their application stem not from research in applied science per se but from basic research, then in Canada we have seen specifically a drastic diminution in a\u00a0\u00a0substantive commitment to technical innovation. Two years ago, Stephen Harper\u2019s Conservative government announced that it would only fund science with determinant applicability, which is to say, those forms of sciences that could be directly marketable. Moreover, it has actively muzzled government scientists and librarians, severely limiting what they can and cannot say in public. For Karl Popper, the \u201copen society\u201d was a society in which there existed a robust culture of \u201cconjecture and refutation\u201d which constituted the very condition for the possibility of scientific innovation. That is, scientific\u00a0truth-claims are those claims that can stand the open test of evidence-based falsifiability\u00a0by other scientists and the public at large.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 20px;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy. Over a year ago, a colleague at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Homer-Dixon, penned a\u00a0compelling opinion piece\u00a0for the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0in which he addressed, from a Canadian perspective, the debate surrounding the future of the planned Keystone XL Pipeline. If built, this pipeline would transport unprocessed, environmentally toxic Alberta tar [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1642,103,1030,1641],"class_list":["post-2462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-bitumen","tag-canada","tag-keystone-xl-pipeline","tag-petro-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2463,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462\/revisions\/2463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}