Abstract
The notion of security is being increasingly employed in debates regarding energy consumption, economies, and human relationships to the environment, not least the issue of climate change. This chapter looks at the tensions present across many arctic communities and states reliant upon or impacted by natural resource development, where environmental concerns collide with economic and energy vulnerabilities. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate different understandings of security in relation to the extraction and consumption of non-renewable energy resources, and what is valued or prioritized within these different conceptions. The chapter then moves briefly to the “ethical oil” debate that focused on the Alberta oil sands in 2010, and the ways in which Norwegian oil and gas politics are also making ethical claims about continued extraction.
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Notes
- 1.
The labeling of this non-conventional energy source sets up the ethical battleground: proponents refer to the source as the oil sands whereas challengers refer to it as the tar sands. The latter has a negative connotation. For consistency I have referred to them as “oil sands” but not to reflect of my view on their ethical role in energy development.
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Gjørv, G.H. (2017). Tensions Between Environmental, Economic and Energy Security in the Arctic. In: Fondahl, G., Wilson, G. (eds) Northern Sustainabilities: Understanding and Addressing Change in the Circumpolar World. Springer Polar Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46150-2_4
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