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A Pattern When Exploiting Valuable but Dangerous Resources

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The Fossil-Fuelled Climate Crisis

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Abstract

Societies basing their economies on the extraction of fossil fuels are most resistant to changing their fossil-fuelled practices. This chapter investigated one state—Canada—and one type of oil—bitumen—deposited in oil (tar) sands that contain the world’s third largest oil reserves. Bitumen results in a high emissions, high-cost type of oil, a type becoming increasingly prevalent as wells are depleted. As evidence mounts of fossil fuels causing long-term global harm, a pattern of attachment to near-term benefits and to an oil identity consisting of phases or steps was detected. Another valuable but dangerous resource, namely asbestos, in the same country was investigated, and a similar pattern was found of attachment to the resource and to an asbestos identity. Thus a hypothesis was proposed that the pattern is common to the exploitation of all fossil fuels and indeed most valuable but dangerous resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Raymond Murphy

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  1. Raymond Murphy
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Correspondence to Raymond Murphy .

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Murphy, R. (2021). A Pattern When Exploiting Valuable but Dangerous Resources. In: The Fossil-Fuelled Climate Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53325-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53325-0_6

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-53324-3

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