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, Newfoundland, and Labrador offered extensive support for oil development and downplayed its environmental effects. At the height of the boom, these oil-dependent provinces undermined their own environmental policies in order to boost production. Angela Carter investigates overarching institutional trends that prioritized resource extraction over environmental protection and identifies regulatory inadequacies related to environmental assessment, land-use planning, and emissions controls. Her detailed analysis situates these policy dynamics squarely within the historical and global context of late-stage petro-capitalism and the growing neo-liberalization of environmental policy.

Fossilized reveals 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.