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Bill Freudenburg’s concept of recreancy is used as a frame for explaining processes that perpetuate questionable regimes of emergency response planning. The specific instance of tar sands upgrading in Alberta, Canada, is used as a case in point. When recreancy is institutionalized so that the results correlate across permitted hazardous facilities, it must be concluded that recreancy is less of a situational response than a normative dynamic.

This paper aims to track the development of climate policy in the province of Alberta, Canada, particularly the province’s unique greenhouse gas emission offset mechanism. The analysis shows how the policy has influenced, and been influenced by, policy processes at the national and international levels.

The paper begins with an analytical framework that recognizes different types of influence between international, national and provincial climate policy processes. That framework is used to structure a review of four historical periods of climate policy change: prior to 1992, 1992 to 2002, 2002 to 2012 and between 2012 and mid-2015.

The analysis illustrates the interplay between the Alberta approach to climate policy and the international and national policy contexts. A period of intense policy conflict between Canada’s federal and provincial governments led to a situation in which the Alberta Government sought to lead rather than follow national policy. Subsequent periods have seen the Canadian national government oscillate between following the lead of Alberta or the USA.

Rather than national and international policies simply setting the context for Alberta’s policy, the paper identifies multiple flows of influence between the three levels of governance. The results illustrate the need to consider forward and backward flows of influence between the different levels of government that set climate change policies. Elements of several models of policy change are supported.

The Alberta climate mitigation policy has many elements that can be effective in reducing carbon emissions in a way that is both flexible and predictable. These elements are of interest to other jurisdictions. Other elements of the current policy, however, limit its effectiveness in reducing emissions. More concerted policy action is needed to mitigate carbon emissions in Alberta for Canada to meet its agreed targets.

No other paper has tracked the historical evolution of climate policy at the provincial/state level in a way that clarifies the forward and backward linkages with national and international policy.

Despite research on legitimacy, fairness, and justice, there is a paucity of knowledge of how moral legitimacy becomes institutionally constructed in relation to and between stakeholders – both evaluators and those evaluated, human or non-human, in time and space. To understand the microfoundations of these processes, the authors examine transcripts from Alberta oil sands regulatory review hearings and associated media coverage from the 1960s to present day. The authors find six framings of fairness that respond to broader challenges to the moral legitimacy of this industry, while also dynamically evolving its regulatory framework.

This chapter examines similarities in government policies that have accelerated and privatized the extraction of offshore oil, coal, and oil sands on public lands in the United States and Canada, as well as the arguments used to justify those policies. Sociologist William Freudenburg argued that the diversion of public resources into private hands was made possible by a second diversion, the diversion of attention. Freudenburg, with Gramling, later applied this concept to U.S. offshore oil leases, noting that when it came to offshore oil, the myth of “energy independence” was often used to justify policies that were actually antithetical to the concept, promoting further dependence on fossil fuels. We extend the double diversion concept from offshore oil to U.S. coal and Alberta oil sands, noting the similarities in both the policy changes and the diversionary frameworks. The frameworks also divert attention from the increasing risks associated with energy extraction.