The development of unconventional hydrocarbon resources in Western Canada, primarily the bituminous oil deposits of northern Alberta (hereafter bitumen sands), has become one of the most contentious issues incontemporary Canadian politics. Particularly important in recent years have been the politics of expanding pipelines and related infrastructure to transport bitumen from Alberta to refineries and global consumers. Strongly supported by Conservative governments in Ottawa and Edmonton, the fossil fuel industry, and industry-funded advocacy groups, proposed pipeline projects have experienced unexpected, and unexpectedly vigorous, opposition from environmental activists, Indigenous groups, municipal governments, the province of British Columbia, and the Barack Obama administration. As a result, these projects' futures are uncertain, and both sides of the debate continue their efforts to sway public and official opinion to oppose or support expansion of major hydrocarbon infrastructure in Western Canada.

To date, academic discussion of the bitumen sands and pipelines has primarily focussed on the costs and benefits to local communities and the broader provincial, regional, and national economies. Little attention has been given to the framing of the bitumen sands within two distinct discourses of security: energy security to advocates, and environmental security to critics. Drawing from security studies, critical political economy, Green political thought, and the social theory of Paul Virilio, this essay examines the discourses around bitumen extraction and transportation using the tools of securitization analysis. It asks two basic yet often-overlooked questions: For whom does a given discourse suggest security is required? From what is protection needed? Given the incompatible claims made by the energy and environmental security discourses, I suggest that Virilio's theorization of technological progress provides a useful intervention into the internal formulations of securitization theory. Securitization emphasizes the social construction of in/security, but offers little guidance on how to evaluate divergent conceptualizations of in/security and their policy implications.1 Virilio's concept of the "integral accident" (2007, 11) provides one means of evaluating these discourses by examining each set of security claims on the basis of the expected material outcomes.

This essay first outlines securitization theory, emphasizing the theoretical challenge of adjudicating multiple, divergent, and often-contradictory securitizations when security is socially constructed. It then outlines the importance of technological innovation for modern conceptions of progress and neo-liberal economic growth, before introducing Virilio's critique of modern progress and his theory of technological accidents. Next, it surveys bitumendevelopment and pipeline expansion in Western Canada, examining the competing energy and environmental security discourses that frame its in/security implications. Finally, it engages Virilio's theory to evaluate the differing security claims made concerning the bitumen sands. I conclude that energy security discourse that supports unconventional hydrocarbon expansion cannot result in meaningful conditions of security at the local, national, or global levels. Rather, the bitumen sands illustrate the integral accident, whereby the faulty conception of technological progress on which energy security is premised results in the certainty of technological accidentsthat undermine the promised provision of security. In the context of anthropogenic climate change, any security discourse premised upon the continued or expanded consumption of hydrocarbon energy proves lacking when its construction of "security" is evaluated against its material implications.

Constructing In/Security

Security has long been recognized as a contested concept that has no inherent or natural meaning, but is socially constructed through the intersubjective agreement of particular social actors (Smith 2005; Wolfers 1952). A "radically constructivist" understanding of in/security initially developed by the Copenhagen School (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 35), securitization theory offers a compelling account of how, rather than providing objective analyses of in/security within a given context, security discourses transform political issues into security issues through the (re)production of specific phenomena as security threats. Considered in the context of the linguistic theory of John Austin, securitization is the mechanism by which something-theoretically anything-is produced as a threat through a three-stage process: a social actor must make a securitizing move, usually a spoken or performative act, which identifies a referent object as experiencing a threat to its survival or wellbeing; that move must then be accepted by an authoritative audience with the power to invoke measures in response beyond the bounds of normal politics; and action must then be taken in response to the specified and acknowledged threat (Balzacq 2011; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998; Floyd 2010). Securitizing moves that employ the language or grammar of security thus seek to elevate the specified threat-referent relationship to superordinate status within the relevant policy field. In this way, security is "a self-referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security issue-not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is presented as such a threat" (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 24). The logic of averting a perceived threat to a specific referent object underpins invocations of security, but neither the threat nor the referent is given or immutable: socially constructed, in/security is what social actors make of it.

Since in/security is socially constructed, the aim of securitization theory is not to identify "real" threats, but to uncover the discursive and performative processes by which "[a] speech act ha[s] the effect of raising a specific challenge to a principled level, thereby implying that all necessary means would be used to block that challenge" (Wæver 1998, 7). The core task of securitization analysis is thus deconstructing security claims: the analyst examines the discourse and practices that depict a referent object as experiencing a specific threat, and interrogates the source of the proposed threat, how official actors propose to respond, and the likely impacts of that response for the referent in question or other affected objects. Contradictory representations of in/security in the same context or for the same referent object demonstrate contestation over how an issue should be understood, and are evidence of competition over how and for whom security should be pursued by authoritative actors. Through its capacity to examine divergent or contradictory securitizing moves, securitization theory provides a framework for understanding how security is always susceptible to contestation.

Securitization's analytical strength in identifying concurrent or contradictory security discourses risks normative weakness, however, since if nothing is inherently a security issue then one securitization is as valid as any other, and in/security is reduced to the intersubjective success of discrete securitizing moves. Since the essence of a threat was thought to lie in its discursive construction, the Copenhagen School's initial theory claimed no ability to evaluate among competing securitizations. Securitization analysis might map in/security, but it provided no guidance on which direction to go. As Thierry Balzacq notes,

[For the Copenhagen School], there is no security problem except through the language game. Therefore, how problems are "out there" is exclusively contingent upon how we linguistically depict them. This is not always true. For one, language does not construct reality; at best, it shapes our perception of it. Moreover, it is not theoretically useful nor is it empirically credible to hold that what we say about a problem would determine its essence.... Some security problems are the attribute of the development itself. (2005, 181; emphases in original)

In this respect, a wholly discursive view of in/security overlooks the physical world and material objects, including people, in which and upon which security logic operates. It limits securitization theory's analytic utility because it provides no tools to evaluate a given security claim's internal coherence, normative implications, or correspondence to material reality.

Borrowing from Alexander Wendt's defence of "rump materialism" in constructivist international relations theory (1999, 109-13), I argue that while in/security is socially constructed, specific security claims can be assessed on their reflection of, and implications for, the material factors and human agents that constitute the social world. Just because threats are co-constituted by actors and audiences does not mean they cannot be assessed against relatively objective phenomena. This might resemble subjecting security claims to a loose "correspondence test of truth"; such a test asks us "to rely on publicly available, albeit always theory-laden, evidence from the world, which critics of our theoretical claims can assess for relevance, accuracy, and so on" (Wendt 1998, 106). Of course, what evidence is used to evaluate a given claim will depend upon the analyst and the context; the audience will ultimately determine the appropriateness of the theoretical and methodological tools employed for a given analysis.

In the remainder of this essay, Paul Virilio's theory of accidents is used to evaluate two contradictory security discourses surrounding the bitumen sands in Western Canada. While the foregoing discussion allows the possibility of assessing the empirical validity of security claims, this essay's ambition is more modest. The goal is not to claim that a particular securitization is right or wrong per se, but to assess whether the public policy implications of energy and environmental security claims are likely to deliver conditions of security for their specified referent objects.

Progress, Technology, and Paul Virilio

Global political and economic order is rooted in a conception of neo-liberal economics in which private sector economic growth has become the very definition of modern "progress" (Gill 1995; Harvey 2005; McBride 2005). Crucially, the mechanism for such growth is technological progress, whereby scientific innovation generates efficiency gains and profitable solutions to the problems, real or perceived, of human life. Such innovation ideally takes the form of a technological fix, a discrete solution that remedies a problem without requiring substantial change to the underlying technology, system, or behaviour that initially led to it (Lovins 1976). Since technological fixes do not challenge the gestes repétés of modern life (Saurin 2001), they are preferred to solutions that would disrupt the normal modes of behaviour that arise from consumptive capitalism and underpin most current environmental problems (Wapner 2010).

Belief in the transformative certainty of technological progress has become a hallmark of contemporary economic policy and the "new" environmental politics. Proponents of this view have been given various labels that emphasize their shared view that humanity will generate solutions to its social, economic, and environmental problems faster than those problems will endanger the goals of human prosperity and security. Analysts who assert the planet's limitless abundance have been described as "cornucopian" (Murphy 2006, 184) and "Promethean" in homage to the Greek myth of humanity's ingenious potential (Wapner 2010, 37). Ronald Manzer's description of contemporary society based on "technological liberalism" (1994, 267) foreshadows Thomas Homer-Dixon's (2000, 29) description of "economic optimists" who place faith in the problem-solving power of "free markets, science, and liberal democracy." This ontology asserts an indefinite human capacity for ingenuity while downplaying or dismissing cognitive, material, or ecological limits to economic growth or humanity's innovative potential. It is hopeful, yet deeply uncritical of the factors driving global environmental problems.

To many optimists, the ability of as-yet-undeveloped technologies to deliver humanity from the worst of its problems vitiates the need to mitigate the causes of such problems in the first place (Lawson 2008; Lomborg 2007; Simon 1995). Eschewing material limitations upon the power of ideas, some maintain that in "every sense except the one that is most literal and least important, the planet's resource base is growing larger, not smaller. Every day the planet becomes less an object and more an idea" (Rauch 2001, 49). Such a view suggests a belief that "the dominant postulates concerning the relationship between humans and their natural environment are that nature is plastic and can be mastered by human reason" (Murphy 2006, 181). Paul Krugman (2010) and Joseph Stiglitz (2010) refer to a related strain of optimism in neoliberal markets as belief in "the confidence fairy," and Maarten Hajer has described "ecological modernisation," a common environmental variant of such thinking, as "basically a modernist and technocratic approach to the environment that suggests that there is a techno-institutional fix for the present problems" (1997, 32). As the scale of global environmental problems has grown, and the limitations of contemporary political and economic systems in effectively addressing them have been repeatedly demonstrated, emphasis on technological solutions has only increased:

Different only by degrees ... scores of [authors] promote an environmentalism that is compatible with contemporary economic and political practices, premised on the notion that we need not alter our lives dramatically to address environmental challenges. To them, the route to environmental well-being is not through denying ourselves certain goods or familiar practices, but rather, through designing and investing in smarter ways of provisioning ourselves. (Wapner 2010, 39)

Given the theoretical reliance of neo-liberalism and new environmentalism upon the limitless potential of technological progress, "economic optimists are not keen to acknowledge that technology solves some problems faster than others" (Homer-Dixon 2000, 251), or that there may be problems it cannot solve at all.

The central problem with techno-optimism when applied to "the neoliberal theory of technological change ... [is that] it becomes so deeply embedded in entrepreneurial common sense ... that it becomes a fetish belief: that there is a technological fix for each and every problem" (Harvey 2005, 68). Technological fixes, however, have often been false promises deployed to perpetuate status quo practices. The view that innovation will indefinitely solve human problems requires overgeneralizing the nature of humanity's past technological achievements and excessive optimism about our capacity to find solutions to global challenges orders of magnitude graver and more complex than those we have previously confronted (Homer-Dixon 2000, 2006). The scepticism of "environmental realism" (Murphy 2006) towards technological fixes to global ecological challenges is undermined, however, by the prevalence of such solutions to the inconveniences of daily life, particularly in the Global North; such technological fixes "give humans the illusion of dominating the world through high technologies more than at any time in history" (Conley 1997, 31). Homer-Dixon describes this as "techno-hubris," understood as the view that market-driven technological innovation will indefinitely satisfy human problem-solving needs, diminishing the need for significant or sustained changes to human behaviour (2000, 247). Since "one of the characteristic features of the [neo-liberal] growth ethic is a generally misguided faith in the magic of the 'technological fix'" (Rubinoff 1997, 133), reliance upon indefinite and exponential technological innovation is necessary to sustain belief in the viability and desirability of our current global form of neo-liberal capitalist development.

While a significant literature rebuts the view that humanity under neo-liberal capitalism can and will innovate out of current and future crises, a deeper critique of our reliance upon technological innovation is found in the work of French social theorist Paul Virilio. An architect, professor, author, and critic, his contributions to the fields of architecture, art, media studies, social criticism, conflict studies, and postmodern theory have fostered a lively field of Virilio studies (Armitage 2011b; James 2007; Redhead 2004). Virilio is acknowledged for recognizing early the salience of speed to the practice of culture, politics, and war in the late twentieth century, and his dromological theories of the science of speed in contemporary social life have informed analysis of hypermodern conflict, defined as the near simultaneity of violence and its visual dissemination and the increasing virtualization of war (Der Derian 2001). Emphasizing the centrality of perception, and concerned over the implications of our increasingly technical and virtual methods of perceiving the social world, "Virilio's cultural theory is at all times a kind of art, concerned of late with the destructive nature of technology, and the connection between perception, artists, and their material ... contemporary art and perception are presently undergoing a transition that will only intensify our already considerable territorial insecurities" (Armitage 2011a, 20). Without directly speaking the language of security studies, Virilio none the less addresses the core concerns of securitization analysis. His work underscores the emergence of security issues beyond the traditional boundaries of the concept; traces links between those issues, technology, conflict, and daily life; and suggests the centrality of how these issues are perceived for their resolution.

Informed by the central role of technology in the accelerating speed of the processes of life, Virilio theorizes the role of "accidents" as an inherent part of technological progress. Writing in the early nuclear age amid an emerging global awareness of compounding ecological disasters, he situates his theory within a critique of postEnlightenment thought that views technological progress as the inevitable and desirable trajectory for human development. In Virilio's account, each new innovation brings with it an accident inherent to that technology: "There is no technical invention without accidents. Each time a technology is invented, a technology of transport, a technology of transmission, or of information, a specific accident is born" (quoted in James 2007, 116). Specific accidents may be unintended with respect to the time and place of their occurrence, but they are predictable and avoidable in so far as they result from the adoption of one technology over another, or the incorporation of one practice or another into the habits of human life. To Virilio:

The accident is an unconscious oeuvre, an invention in the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen.... To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway. (2007, 9-10; emphases in original)

Seeing accidents as the hallmark of technological progress, Virilio recounts a genealogy of "original accidents" over the twentieth century, each signifying the invention of the failure of a new form of technological progress. He lists the sinking of the Titanic, destruction of the Hindenburg, meltdown at Chernobyl, and grounding of the Exxon Valdez, to which we might add the 2008 global financial crisis (Crosthwaite 2011), the 2010 BP-Transocean Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the 2011 Fukushima Daichii nuclear meltdown. By highlighting the unintended negativities of technological advancement, Virilio suggests the potential for "Progress" to lead humanity unconsciously towards destruction, ever-greater technological achievements temporarily disguising the growing scale and impact of technological accidents. He notes "it follows that fighting against the damage done by Progress above all means uncovering the hidden truth of our successes" and subjecting to critical analysis "the eschatological dimension of the calamities caused by the positivist ideology of Progress" (2007, 11). He goes on to observe that "nothing is ever gained without something being lost, and therefore, technical progress is only an agreed sacrifice" (93). Thus, Virilio does not seek to halt or reverse progress so much as to expose the consequences of technologies that have become ubiquitous in modern society. It is these costs of technological achievements that are lost within discourses that conflate progress with economic growth, obscuring conditions of possibility that may exist for fostering alternative ways of defining civilizational success.

While accidents are, by Virilio's definition, eternal, their catastrophic potential grows in tandem with the complexity of each new technology and the scale of its adoption, such that the contemporary dangers posed by technological accidents stem directly from the impressive scale of humanity's technical accomplishments. Whereas the physical effects of accidents were once confined to the vicinity of the accident site, and the human impact limited to those directly affected, the power of contemporary technology has ruptured this historical barrier to the damage that can be caused by technological failure:

Once upon a time the local accident was precisely situated.... But the global accident no longer is and its fallout now extends to whole continents, anticipating the integral accident that is in danger of becoming, tomorrow or the day after, our sole habitat, the havoc wreaked by Progress then extending not only to the whole of geophysical space, but especially to timespans of several centuries. (Virilio 2007, 11; emphasis in original)

The likelihood or impact of accidents can be partly managed through technology, but integral accidents cannot be avoided because they are inseparable from the operation of a given technology. Ships will sink, automobiles collide, and train cars derail: integral accidents may be mitigated by technological fixes but cannot be overcome within the continued operation, in its essential form, of that technology. In the sense Virilio deploys above, the integral accident is conceived as the global macro-accident emerging from the accumulation of the consequences of industrial technologies. It is the meta-accident of modern civilization, an amalgam of the political, economic, social, and ecological negativities caused by the confluence of technology and social life, and the extent to which they exceed humanity's technological capacity to resolve. For Virilio, "It is the Earth ... which is becoming an integral accident. At the level of the globalizing world, then, war is increasingly superseded by disaster, by ecological, economic and political collapse. Why? Because the Earth is too small ... for the conflicts that arise as a result of 'progress'" (2011, 36). At the level of both the specific technology and of a civilization built upon technologies, the integral accident is thus "the paradox of the failure of success, for it is the success of Progress that provokes disaster" (Virilio 2007, 95). Our global integral accident cannot be solved through technological fixes because it emerges from the integral accidents linked to contemporary human reliance upon complex and fallible forms of technology, which cannot be separated from the operation of those technologies.

Oil vs. Tar: Framing Insecurities in/to/from Alberta's Bitumen Sands

Energy and Economic In/Security

Technology, accidents, and in/security coalesce in the case of the bitumen sands of northern Alberta. Concentrated in the Athabasca, Peace River, and Cold Lake regions, the bitumen sands-a viscous mixture of clay, sand, water, and carboniferous bitumen-were used by Aboriginal peoples prior to European contact, and first surveyed by federal agents in 1875. The first bitumen mine opened in 1967, but large-scale development remained uneconomical throughout the post-Second World War period due to the high costs of extraction, discovery of large conventional oil deposits in Alberta in the late 1940s, and limited infrastructure and other impediments to development in the north of the province. Various extraction schemes were put forth-including a proposed subterranean nuclear detonation to super-heat the bitumen and force it closer to the surface-but development remained modest until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when multiple factors converged to stimulate growth in the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels (Chastko 2004; Marsden 2007). The confluence of rising global oil prices; rapidly growing oil demand in emerging economies, particularly China; declining production of many conventional oil fields; and growing political confrontation with several key oil-producing states renewed interest among American policy-makers for a more reliable supplier to meet US energy demand (Humphries 2008; Levy 2009). These trends accelerated during the George W. Bush administration, with Vice-President Dick Cheney chairing a high-level panel whose 2001 report concluded that continued development of Alberta's bitumen sands "can be a pillar of sustained North American energy and economic security" (National Energy Policy Group 2001, 8-8). The US Energy Information Administration stimulated further interest in 2003, when it estimated that at least 175 billion barrels of Alberta's bituminous oil-11% of the estimated 1.7 trillion barrels located in situ-were "economically recoverable," giving Canada, by way of Alberta, the second largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia (Alberta 2012).

The bitumen sands have had a powerful impact on Canada's economy. The "bitumen boom" that followed the US Energy Information Administration's 2003 estimates generated more than $10 billion of capital investment by 2009, with $100 billion of investments estimated from 2006 to 2015 (Alberta 2012). Bitumen development has driven economic growth in Alberta, which in the mid-2000s underwent "the strongest period of economic growth ever recorded by any Canadian province" (Statistics Canada 2006). In the wake of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, Alberta's unconventional hydrocarbon sector is often described as an engine of the broader Canadian economy, and is a centrepiece of the Conservative federal government's vision of Canada as an emergent energy superpower. Between 1995 and 2004, bitumen production doubled to more than 1 million barrels of oil per day, and although the pace of growth slowed after the Great Recession amid slumping global oil prices, between 2010 and 2011 production of raw crude bitumen increased by 8%, to a total of 637 million barrels annually (1.7 million barrels per day). Given planned expansion of existing development and expected new projects coming online, Alberta bitumenproduction is expected to increase to 3.7 million barrels per day by 2021 (Energy Resources Conservation Board 2012). In 2010, the bitumen sands accounted for more than 70% of Albertan crude oil production and nearly 52% of total Canadian oil extraction (Holden and Rolfe 2012, 5). Overall, 99% of Canadian crude exports go to the United States, constituting roughly 12% of total American crude supplies (Humphries 2008). Although bitumenroyalties are undoubtedly significant-totalling $3.7 billion in 2010-11-critics note that "since 1986, the oil industry has reaped $260 billion in pre-tax profits from the tar sands while the public share has been less than $25 billion" (Campbell 2012). Indeed, critics characterize the Alberta royalty regime as one of "misplaced generosity" towards the fossil fuel industry, a system that sees government historically receiving less than 20% of revenue generated by the bitumen sands, and only 9% since 1997 (Campanella 2012, 9). This share of revenues reflects what a former Alberta energy minister described as a "give-it-away" formula wherein investment in the oil patch was stimulated with a royalty regime that transferred the bulk of Alberta's oil wealth to corporate stakeholders located outside the province (Nikiforuk 2010, 159).

Debates around the bitumen sands indicate that they have become situated within two discourses of security, each having a different relation to and reliance upon technology. The discourses of energy and environmental security, respectively, posit radically different implications of bitumen development for referent objects at the local, national, continental, and global levels of analysis. The first situates continued bitumen development in terms of energy security, a widely contested term. Benjamin Sovacool (2011, 3-11) identifies it as having 45 differing and contradictory uses encompassing three theoretical perspectives and up to seven constitutive factors, although inpractice energy security is often left undefined (Ciûta 2010). Analysts have noted the variety of meanings of energy security specifically associated with the bitumen sands, and at least two embrace them all as supporting the case for bitumen development (Green and Eule 2013). There is no official definition of energy security in Canada, but in the context of the bitumen sands three referent objects can be identified within the energy security discourse: the maintenance of a stable Canadian and/or North American supply of oil and natural gas, acceptable energy costs for consumers, and continued contributions by the energy sector to Canadian economic growth. The energy security discourse thus depicts scarcity or disruption of fossil fuel supplies and higher energy costs as the threats to be protected against, with negative impacts to the Canadian national economy also widely implied as being defended against through promotion and expansion of the resource as oil sands (rather than tar sands).

The link between the bitumen sands and energy security has recently extended to debates over the merits of expanding pipeline infrastructure necessary to transport bitumen to global markets. Multiple proposals-including TransCanada's Keystone XL and Energy East pipelines, Enbridge's Northern Gateway, and Kinder-Morgan's Transmountain doubling project-have attracted public and political attention, coming to act as proxies for the broader bitumen debate. All have met with opposition, to the consternation of corporate and governmental actors who consider the expansion of hydrocarbon infrastructure to be apolitical business as usual. Keystone XL, inparticular, is instructive because it proposes to carry additional bitumen from Alberta to the United States, thus relieving the problem of insufficient pipeline capacity that has depressed prices for Alberta crude and limited opportunities for bitumen sands growth, by some estimates costing Alberta $6 billion in lost royalties in 2012 alone (Mayeda and Argitis 2013). Due to its transnational nature, Keystone XL has become central to debates over American energy security, continental energy ties, and the broader bilateral trade relationship, as well as Canadian debates over the bitumen sands. Derek Burney and Fen Osler Hampson, distinguished commentators on Canada-US relations, made President Obama's 2011 decision to delay a decision on Keystone XL the centrepiece of a Foreign Affairs cover article lamenting the decline in North American bilateral relations. To them, "the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline should have been an easy diplomatic and economic decision ... [and] Obama's choice marked a triumph of campaign posturing over pragmatism and diplomacy" (Burney and Hampson 2012). Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed a similar view when he opined that approving Keystone should be a "no-brainer" for the US administration (quoted in McCarthy 2011), comments made shortly before the president indefinitely delayed a final decision on the project.

In this respect, proponents routinely link the bitumen sands and related infrastructure to particular constructions of energy and economic security in Canada and the United States. Typified by the formulation in the Cheney report quoted above, examples of oil sands qua energy/economic security abound: this discursive link is employed by practically every proponent of bitumen expansion cited in this article. The link is evident in an example of oil sands advocacy by Prime Minister Harper in May 2013. Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, Harper made extensive comments defending the bitumen sands, and Keystone XL in particular. Having asserted the energy sector's commitment to environmental sustainability, he emphasized that "on the economic side, [with] 40,000 jobs [in the US] alone over the life of the project, I don't think ... we can afford to turn [Keystone] down.... Energy security-the project will bring in enough oil to reduce American offshore dependence by 40 percent. This is an enormous benefit to the United States in terms of long-term energy security" (Harper 2013). Harper expanded upon the theme of economic security: "There really is ... an unprecedented shift of power and wealth away from the Western world ... [and] if these trends continue, they will be a real threat to our standards of living. And what we keep telling Canadians ... is we can maintain and increase our standard of living and opportunity for our children and grandchildren, but we have to govern ourselves responsibly"; finally, he asserted that "we're prepared as government to make the investments and decisions necessary to grab that future" (Harper 2013). Implicit in this formulation is the claim that failing to support the bitumen sands and the infrastructure to get the commodity to market will hamper Canada's economic success in an increasingly competitive world, imperiling the quality of life Canadians have come to expect. As have many other commentators (Canada-Asia Energy Futures Task Force 2012; Energy Policy Institute 2011; Green and Eule 2013), Harper depicts the expansion of hydrocarbon infrastructure connecting Albertan bitumen to the global energy market as essential to maintaining the economic security of Canada as a whole. He thus situates the bitumen sands within the framework of a liberal problematic of security (Dillon 2007; Duffield 2007), wherein it is the material lifestyle of citizens in advanced industrialized societies, and maintenance of their privileged place within the structures of the international system, that is the implicit referent object of security.

Prime Minister Harper's representation of the security implications of the bitumen sands also demonstrates the reliance upon technology that underpins the neoliberal vision of progress. His comments make clear the extent to which reconciling bitumen development and environmental sustainability rests upon technological innovation:

The province of Alberta already has a technology fund, [and] a regulatory approach in the oil sands that is going to lead to even more investments in technology that will continue to reduce our emissions.... [Regarding climate change] I think, first and foremost, we do need technological change. I am convinced that over time, we are not going to effectively tackle emissions unless we develop the technology-lower emission technology in energy and other sectors. And that is the thing that will allow us to square economic growth with emissions reduction and environmental protection. And I'm convinced that if we cannot square those two things, we're not going to make progress globally. (Harper 2013)

Similar messages are constantly reiterated by corporate and governmental spokespeople emphasizing that technological advances can mitigate the ecological costs of bitumen development and reconcile the inherent tension between bitumen extraction and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). For example, a primer on the oil sands by the American Petroleum Institute concludes with a section titled "technology is the key to further progress" (2011). In May 2012, the industry organization for the oil sands sector announced an initiative called the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, mandated to drive innovation in mitigating the environmental impacts of bitumen extraction in the areas of tailings, water, land, and greenhouse gases. Improved energy intensity during extraction, which reduces emissions per barrel of oil produced while allowing total emissions to rise from increased production, is expected to form a cornerstone of the federal government's regulatory efforts for the energy sector as part of its sectoral approach to regulating GHGs (Canada 2012). Technology such as carbon capture and sequestration, although speculative, has received more than $3 billion in government funding, and is held out by some as the solution to the bitumen sands' ecological footprint despite expert opinion on its technological and economic non-viability (Alberta Energy 2010; Canada 2012; Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers 2010; Natural Resources Canada 2013; Smith 2012).

The centrality of technology to the bitumen sands is equally evident in statements by Alberta premier Alison Redford. Speaking at the Brookings Institute in April 2013, Redford acknowledged the trade-off between extractive development and environmental quality, but sought to parry critics through a spirited defence of Alberta's environmental regulatory record, the promise of technological improvement, and the expected economic benefits:

Energy does come with an environmental cost since its production and its use generate greenhouse gases that affect the climate.... It's important for us to be building technologies. It's important for us to be greening the energy economy. It's important for us to be investing in things like carbon capture and storage and to have a price on carbon. You can do all of those things, but you can still allow the pipe to go ahead because the pipe will have such a significant impact on economic development and growth in the United States. And in Alberta, certainly. (2013, 7, 19)

In the same speech, Premier Redford advocated US approval of Keystone XL on the grounds that "what we're talking about with Keystone is a pipeline that is going to be, of course, state-of-the-art technology" (15), echoing the oft-cited message that pipelines are the safest method to transport fossil fuels, and that the proposed pipelines from the bitumen sands would be among the safest in existence (Dunn 2012; Enbridge 2012; TransCanada Pipeline 2012). In practice, energy security discourse consistently asserts that since technological innovation will, in the future, sufficiently mitigate the ecological impact of the bitumen sands, short-term economic benefits should trump mediumand long-term environmental concerns.

Several features of the bitumen sands energy security discourse warrant specific notice. First, it eliminates meaningful distinction between energy and oil; rote acknowledgement of the importance of developing other forms of energy, including renewables, is rapidly followed by affirmations of the ongoing centrality of hydrocarbons to the global and Canadian economies, with a focus on fossil fuels from that point onward. This is not new: the discursive pattern of energy security qua oil security is evident in older government statements in Canada (Canada 1987), as well as more recent ones (Senate of Canada 2012). Second, there is fuzziness as to who the beneficiary of energy security actually is. Although official Canadian documents routinely refer vaguely to "Canadian energy security" or "energy security for Canadians" (Alberta 2008; Canada 1987, 2010), the referent object of energy security in the bitumen sands is not entirely clear. Overall, it appears that energy security in Canada has increasingly been framed in terms of the North American continent, with Canada providing the energy necessary to wean the United States from less desirable and reliable suppliers (Green and Eule 2013; Humphries 2008; Levy 2009; McCullum 2006). This formulation is evident as early as the 2001 report of the National Energy Policy Group, and some federal and Albertan government documents explicitly identify that it is American energy security being provided by developing the bitumen sands, not that of Canada or Canadians (Alberta 2008; Canada 2010; National Energy Policy Group 2001). Industry publications are also clear on this point, as the American Petroleum Institute primer titled Canadian Oil Sands: Enhancing America's Energy Security (2011) shows. Given Canada's position as a net exporter of energy, primarily fossil fuels, and since supply and price for Canadian energy consumers are not significantly affected by expanding the bitumen sands or building pipelines, the benefits that accrue to Canada are primarily economic. The duality of the energy/economic security discourse thus derives from the fact that it simultaneously constructs separate, though linked, security interests of distinct audiences in Canada and the United States.

Significantly, by identifying reliability of energy supply and maintenance of acceptable energy prices as the referent objects, energy security discourse also seeks to legitimize the use of state power against opponents and critics of expanded bitumen development. Philippe Le Billon and Angela Carter describe these efforts through their analysis of the criminalization of dissent against bitumen development in Western Canada, and subsequent developments support their account of the federal and provincial governments' attempts to "[secure] Alberta's tar sands" (2012). Of note has been the depiction by the federal government of environmental groups and those who support them as unpatriotic others, a rhetorical move whose stridency increased as pipeline proposals were increasingly contested by publics, regulators, and other governments. Beginning in early 2012, the Conservative government began publicly characterizing opponents of these and other resource projects as belonging to "environmental and other radical groups" pursuing a "radical ideological agenda" funded by money laundered on behalf of "foreign special interest groups" in order to "hijack" Canada's economic growth (CBC News 2012c, 2012b; Payton 2012). InJanuary 2012, Canada's first counter-terrorism strategy identified animal rights, environmentalist, and anti-capitalist groups alongside White supremacists as the four most likely propagators of "domestic issue-based extremism," likening their potential for violence to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, and the 2011 attacks in Oslo, Norway, that killed 77 (Public Safety Canada 2012). Notably, Building Resilience against Terrorism defines terrorist activity as "an act or omission undertaken, inside or outside Canada ... that is intended to intimidate the public with respect to its security, including its economic security" (emphasis added). It thus links opposition to the bitumen sands, Canada's economic security, and the risk of extremist violence, although according to one legal analysis, "likening environmentalists and animal rights groups to homegrown terrorists and mass murderers raises the question of whether the government is blurring the lines of counter-terrorism in order to target otherwise legitimate opponents and justify questionable surveillance campaigns" (Carter and Claridge 2012, 5). While no specific activities related to protesting bitumen or pipeline expansion have been publicly identified as terrorism, the federal government has taken significant steps towards delegitimizing and securitizing critics of the bitumen sands.

Environmental and Ecological Security

By contrast, the environmental security discourse around the bitumen sands depicts two distinct referent objects: local ecosystems threatened by extraction processes or the accidental release of diluted bitumen, and a macro-level referent in the form of the global biosphere affected by anthropogenic climate change. Local impacts of industrial activity are a mainstay of environmental activism, while the securitization of climate change with a global referent object has garnered recent attention from several security scholars (Buzan and Wæver 2009; Methmann and Rothe 2012; Vuori 2010). In this case, local environmental concerns relate both to point-source land, water, and air pollution at bitumen mine sites in northern Alberta, surrounding areas, and downstream communities, and to the potential for serious contamination should a leak occur along any of the proposed pipeline routes. Of particular note have been the numerous articulations of local environmental insecurity by First Nations claiming to be affected by the impact of bitumen development. First Nations in northern Alberta and southern Northwest Territories whose air, water, lands, hunting game, and country foods are located within the Athabasca River watershed have frequently framed concerns as risks to their security. In addition to broader issues with respect to the use, degradation, and destruction of First Nations' traditional territories, communities and scientists have also reported cases of abnormal cancers in humans and animals, water and air pollution, and limited action by government to investigate the allegations (Indigenous Environmental Network 2013; Kelly et al. 2010; Oil SandsTruth 2013).

There has also been widespread concern over the ecological damage that would be caused by potential pipeline leaks, particularly in the context of increased frequency and severity of hydrocarbon-related accidents. As Sean Kheraj (2012) documents, the number of hydrocarbon pipeline leaks in Alberta rose significantly from 2006 to 2012, including several in close proximity to the bitumen sands. Enbridge Corporation of Calgary, the same company behind the Northern Gateway project, was heavily criticized for its botched cleanup of a 2010 spill that released more than 3 million litres of oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed in Michigan (CBC News 2012a). Globally, the list of recent hydrocarbon accidents includes the months-long BP-Transocean spill in 2010 that released 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest accidental oil spill in history. President Obama's initial rejection of Keystone XL in late 2011 was partly motivated by bipartisan concern in Nebraska over the pipeline's proposed routing through the ecologically sensitive Sandhills region, and potential contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer that supplies drinking water for millions across the US Midwest. The Northern Gateway and TransMountain projects have catalyzed similar concern from communities in British Columbia. Opponents have been mobilized partly by the potential for a pipeline leak in BC's wilderness interior-affected portions of which are largely traditional territories of the First Nations represented by the Yinka Dene Alliance (2012)-and partly by the prospect of increased tanker traffic navigating the shallow and rocky waters of the BC Pacific Coast. This opposition was significant enough for British Columbia's Liberal government to express reservations publicly prior to the National Energy Board's completion of its environmental review process. Concern over Kinder Morgan's proposal to double the capacity of its existing TransMountain pipeline, which would dramatically increase tanker traffic inVancouver harbour, led the project to be opposed formally by Vancouver City Council, whose concerns ranged from a potential spill to the damage that would be caused to Vancouver's image as a leading "green" city if it were to become a major oil exporting port.

At the macro-level, the link between Alberta bitumen and global climate change has featured prominently inadvocacy against both the "tar sands" and proposed pipelines. Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, stated in 2011 that Keystone XL would amount to a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet," and former NASA climatologist James Hansen morosely observed that "if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over" for the planet (quoted in McGowan 2011). Opposition to the climate implications of tar sands development catalyzed the month-long series of protests against Keystone XL outside the White House inAugust 2011, resulting in the arrest of over a thousand people, including McKibben and Hansen. Environmental and social justice groups like Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Foundation, the Council of Canadians, and the Polaris Institute have framed the bitumen sands in terms of the repercussions for global climate security and existential implications for the planet. While this macro-ecological frame acknowledges the local environmental impacts of bitumen extraction and transportation, it primarily identifies the maintenance of an atmosphere with less than 350 ppm of GHGs as its referent object, and the unmitigated consumption of fossil fuels through current modes of industrial activity as the threat to be protected against. Discourses of ecological and climate security are thus more radically green perspectives of bitumen extraction that position it within a global economic system of industrialized capitalism that is leading humanity towards ecological catastrophe.

Even the Obama administration has employed the discourse of global ecological security in defending its extensive review of, and apparent reluctance to approve, Keystone XL. Having rejected the initial application, the administration later indicated its willingness to reconsider if TransCanada amended its application to account for concerns over sensitive areas along the pipeline's proposed route. In a June 2013 address that listed extreme weather, sea-level rise, access to fresh water, and economic costs as hazards associated with climate change, however, President Obama situated Keystone XL, and America's continued reliance upon "dirty" sources of energy, within the context of global ecological security:

The question is not whether we need to act.... The planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it. So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it's too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.... I'm here to say we need to act. I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that's beyond fixing.... Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be inour nation's interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution. The net effects of the pipeline's impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward. (Obama 2013)

In perhaps the clearest instance of linking the reduction of GHGs to conventional security threats, Obama closed his remarks by noting, "the challenge we must accept will not reward us with a clear moment of victory. There's no gathering army to defeat. There's no peace treaty to sign.... Our progress here will be measured differently-incrises averted, in a planet preserved." Throughout this speech, Obama constructs climate change, and the fossil fuel use that contributes to it, as threatening a range of referent objects at the local, national, and global levels.

Both Canadian and Albertan governments are strong advocates of the bitumen sands, and clearly favour their positive framing in terms of energy/economic security; however, the claims made within the environmental security discourse cannot be summarily rejected because both governments nominally acknowledge the reality of climate change and the implications for public safety. Although neither government has implemented climate change strategies that actually reduce GHG emissions, both accept that climate change is primarily caused by human activity and that it should be a goal of public policy to reduce carbon emissions. Indeed, Premier Redford's acknowledgement of climate change has been credited with helping secure her unexpected electoral victory in April 2012 (Thomson 2012), and as hostile as the Conservative federal government has been towards environmentalists, it none the less claims to accept the reality of climate change, its link to fossil fuel use, and its predicted consequences for Canadians and people around the world. In November 2012, then-federal environment minister Peter Kent explicitly stated that "climate change is a very real and present danger and we need to address it.... We ignore it at our peril" (quoted in McDiarmid 2012). This recognition of the security implications of climate change is difficult to balance with an energy security discourse that constructs the bitumen sands as unrelated to concern over Canada's contribution to unsafe global concentrations of GHGs. As discussed below, proponents of the energy security discourse rely upon the environmental benefits of technological fixes to the bitumen sands to reconcile the two.

Technology, Climate Change, and the Integral Accident of Carboniferous Capitalism

The energy and environmental security discourses surrounding the bitumen sands are incompatible, though being socially constructed neither is more true than the other. At levels ranging from local and national communities to particular ecosystems, the entire planet, and the whole human species, these discourses depict different referent objects as requiring protection from radically different understandings of the relevant threat. Proponents of energy security assert that continued extraction of hydrocarbons, their transport to market, and acceptable energy prices for consumers are the things to be secured, and actors or policies that restrict or adversely affect these as the threats to be protected against. Conversely, environmental security advocates posit the maintenance of healthy local ecologies and a stable global biosphere conducive to human flourishing as the referent objects to be protected. The essence of the contradiction between these discourses is that environmental security suggests that the threat to be secured against is the same phenomenon that energy security identifies as the referent to be defended. Inversely, energy security seeks to defend unconventional hydrocarbon extraction from precisely the environmental regulation, cessation of bitumen mining, and ultimately decarbonizing policies that environmental security regards as the solution to the local and global ecological insecurities generated by hydrocarbon consumption. As examples of competing security claims over the same phenomenon, these discourses pose analytical and policy dilemmas. Securitization theory provides no means by which to adjudicate between energy security and our current industrialized mode of life on the one hand, and environmental security and the maintenance of an ecosystem hospitable to human well-being on the other.

The dilemma of assessing energy and environmental security discourses of the bitumen sands may be aided by applying Virilio's theory of accidents, and taking seriously his scepticism of technological progress. The relevance of this theory lies in the fact that both discourses rely upon technology, albeit in different ways. For environmental security, technology is key to the vision of a green energy future in which renewable and other low or non-GHG emitting energy sources are harnessed as alternatives to fossil fuels. Innovation in clean energy generation, the large-scale implementation of existing clean energy technologies, and any potential health or social issues related to them are, in general terms, technological issues. The central security claim made by the environmental security discourse does not rely on further innovation, however: mitigating and reversing human-caused climate change benefits from promises of technological improvements, but does not require them. According to the International Energy Agency, implementation of policies that rely upon existing technologies is sufficient to avert at least an 8% increase in global GHG emissions by 2020 (IEA 2013), and Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi (2009) argue that, with sufficient political will, it will be possible to power the entire planet with current renewable technologies by 2030. In recent years, the United States, Western Europe, and China have all reduced their overall emissions or rates of emission growth through the implementation of existing technologies. Thus, while innovation might help to lower GHG emissions further and improve the prospects for environmental security, the basic security claim of this discourse does not rely upon non-viable technologies or prospective future innovations.

Equally important, it is unclear that the accidents that could be caused by the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies would be overly dangerous. Drawing from Virilio, every new technology necessarily brings with it an integral accident, but for technologies such as photovoltaic power, wind turbines, tidal energy, and other forms of renewable energy production, the accidents that might occur seem modest compared with the threat of catastrophic climate change seeking to be avoided. While turbines might break down, windmills disturb human and animal sleep patterns, or industrial solar farms raise ambient local temperatures, the technological negativities of renewable energy production appear certain to pose less severe accidental risks than comparable accidentsinherent to an energy system powered by fossil fuels. Due to the physical properties of oil, the ecological, social, and health externalities of oil production or an oil spill will likely be worse than a comparable "solar spill" or "wind leak," or the negative consequences of tidal energy extraction.

Energy security discourse is more problematically reliant upon technology. Just as technological innovation underpins modern progress, so it informs efforts to allay public and regulatory concern over the global and local implications of bitumen extraction, transportation, and consumption. In order to reconcile the tension between climate change and bitumen expansion, proponents rely upon promises of technological improvement while employing a strategy of desecuritizing the claims made by environmental security discourse. This typically involves two rebuttals against environmental security's central argument that continued hydrocarbon development will, by definition, only worsen the hazard of climate change. First, as both Harper and Redford emphasize in their remarks in the spring of 2013, the bitumen sands only contribute approximately 7% of total Canadian GHG emissions and 0.15% of global emissions, which may decline if technologies such as carbon capture and storage prove effective and cost-efficient to implement. Proponents thus argue that bitumen development does not significantly affect global emissions, especially since the energy intensity of bitumen production has decreased by an average of 29% per barrel since 1990 (Redford 2013, 7). In this way, they attempt to reframe the bitumen sands as trivial to overall global emissions, and thus undeserving of the criticism they receive from those who link them to climate change.

Second, the improved efficiency of bitumen production processes allows proponents to claim that the bitumen sands are compatible with responsible climate policy rather than inherently linked to ecological destruction. Recognizing, as it must, that fossil fuel extraction and consumption generate environmental damage and contribute to climate change, energy security relies on technology to mitigate these hazards. The desecuritization of the bitumen sands' environmental impacts is made plain by Premier Redford: "The stark choice that Keystone's opponents have put at the heart of the debate is an illusion.... They proclaim that either you stand against the oil sands or you write off the environment, along with any hope for sustainable existence, and that is completely wrong" (2013, 6). More broadly, the industry-funded and Conservativelinked advocacy group Ethical Oil depicts Canadian bitumen as preferable to oil produced in less democratic states with worse environmental records. Ethical Oil's raison d'etre is to propagate the eponymous argument that Alberta bitumen is a more ethical choice than purchasing oil from despotic regimes unfriendly to Western interests who inflict relatively greater damage upon their own environments (Levant 2011). Without denying the link between fossil fuels and climate change, energy security discursively minimizes the role of the bitumen sands in the bigger picture of global emissions, while relying upon technologically improved efficiency of the production process, and the promise of further technological improvement in both extraction and consumption, to emphasize the economic benefits as greater than the specific environmental costs. These improvements-such as safer pipeline technology, energy intensity targets, and carbon capture and sequestration technology-are touted as essential to the future of the bitumen sands, and can be understood as technological fixes whose primary purpose is maintaining and increasing current rates of bitumenextraction.

In this respect, accidents are a central theme of energy security, with the potential for catastrophic technological failure a reality that bitumen proponents routinely address. Prime Minister Harper observed that the greater likelihood of accidents for oil being shipped by rail supports arguments for pipeline expansion (2013), a view likely to be strengthened after a spike in rail accidents involving crude oil products in late 2013, including a shipment of crude that derailed and exploded in the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July, killing as many as 50 people. Perhaps recognizing that Alberta has experienced a number of serious pipeline leaks in recent years, Premier Redford stated,

We have to be honest about the fact that if we do have energy development there is the risk of really unfortunate incidents happening. And it is an unfortunate incident. It impacts people's lives. But the strength that we have is that we have a regulatory process and we have industry that is accountable for when those actions happen.... We walk around our communities and probably don't realize how much pipe there actually is underground. We shouldn't be worried about that because the point is we don't know it's there because overall these are very isolated incidents and they don't happen as often as people might suggest that they could. (2013, 15)

Desecuritization and technological fixes are essential tools for those trying to convince uncertain publics that the environmental externalities of bitumen extraction and transportation remain within the power of government and corporate actors to manage effectively.

In the context of the bitumen sands and proposed pipelines in Western Canada, technological fixes are the thin reed on which rest assurances that concerns over greenhouse gas emissions, local pollution, and pipeline spills can be mitigated while bitumen extraction continues. Ultimately, the claim that insecurities posed by bitumendevelopment can be solved through technological fixes is a false promise of the energy security discourse. While it is conceivable that the local environmental insecurities could be mitigated through technological improvement, focussing on pollution and pipeline leaks overlooks the basic fact that the commodity being shipped will be burned for energy, contributing to total atmospheric GHGs already certain to exceed the dangerous and unpredictable threshold specified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007). The macro-global insecurities of climate change are inherent to our contemporary "hydrocarbon society" (Yergin 2003, xvi) that relies upon an economic system of "carboniferous capitalism" powered by fossil fuels (Dalby 2009, 71; 2002, 74; 1992). These security implications are increasingly evident, and are drawing attention from scholars and policy-makers alike (Matthew et al. 2010; Pumphrey 2008; Schnurr and Swatuk 2012). Moreover, climate change represents only one aspect of the broader ecological crisis facing the planet, as demonstrated in the work of Johan Rockström and colleagues (2009) who depict three of seven quantifiable planetary ecological boundaries being exceeded by human activity. Present and recent-historical interactions between humanity and the global biosphere characterize a new geological era termed the "Anthropocene" (Crutzen 2002, 23), characterized by "the emergence of wide-scale fossil-fuel use in the industrial revolution period ... innovations of carboniferous capitalism that began what has become a worldwide transformation of rocks into air, a geological reversal of hundreds of millions of years of carbon sequestration from the atmosphere" (Dalby 2009, 99). The structures of industrial capitalism, with its reliance on carbon fuels, and contemporary neo-liberal market civilization (Gill 1995), which privatizes resource wealth while collectivizing environmental costs, are thus central to contemporary security analysis because "it is the broader social and ecological degradation wrought by modernity which is the overriding context for any discussion of security" (Barnett 2001, 65).

Drawing from Virilio, anthropogenic climate change is the integral accident of hydrocarbon extraction, transportation, and consumption, and ceteris paribus cannot be overcome within the continued parameters of those basic technologies. As the danger of sinking is integral to the ship, collision to the automobile, and derailment to the locomotive, so climate change is integral to the industrialized system of hydrocarbon extraction and consumption that characterizes the modern world. Technological fixes such as fail-safe pipelines and low intensity bitumen extraction cannot mitigate the context in which such extraction and transportation are occurring, or the conditions of global ecological crisis to which they contribute. The integral accident of climate change does not arise from any one pipeline or project, but is inherent to a planetary economic system premised on infinite growth and unconstrained resource development, of which unconventional hydrocarbon extraction and transportation are emblematic. Climate change cannot be resolved by technological fixes to the basic practices and structures that have brought it into existence, and brought it to the point of compounding and accelerating global environmental changes.

The current energy security discourse fails to address the fact that carboniferous consumption contributes to greater insecurity than what it proposes to defend against. As such, the method this essay employs of evaluating different securitizations by assessing the material implications of security claims is unsatisfied by those made within energy security discourse. Energy security seeks to defend the bitumen sands, the hydrocarbon industrial sector, and the short-term interests of energy consumers while contributing to the further weakening of the global ecological systems necessary for human well-being and, ultimately, survival. Given the core questions of security analysis-who is being secured, from what, and how?-the bitumen sands must be evaluated in light of the fact that any understanding of security that degrades and undermines the capacity of physical environments to support the necessities for human well-being is a hollow and non-anthropocentric enterprise: security for referent objects other than people in their communities or as part of the human species. A functioning and stable environment is an essential condition for the maintenance of human security and well-being (Greaves 2009), since "the environment, modified by human interference, sets the conditions for socio-political-economic life. When these conditions are poor, life is poor" (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 84). Technological innovation holds great promise in helping to resolve the most pressing aspects of the global ecological crisis, but not if put towards amplifying the very processes threatening to rupture global conditions of ecological sustainability. This analysis challenges the depiction of the bitumen sands as a source of "ethical oil" that is normatively superior to "conflict oil" from non-liberal and non-democratic polities. In the context of global climate change, oil cannot be ethical, and it cannot make us secure.

Conclusion

This essay has brought together diverse theoretical and empirical components in an analysis of security discourses around the bitumen sands of Western Canada. In an effort to break the analytical impasse of securitization theory when confronted with incompatible social constructions of security, I propose that Paul Virilio's theory of accidentsprovides a means of evaluating the security claims made by the energy and environmental security discourses of the bitumen sands. In the final analysis, "energy security" requires a belief in technological innovation to address the negative environmental impacts of bitumen extraction, impacts that even bitumen proponents acknowledge pose serious hazards to human well-being. Drawing on Virilio's concept of the integral accident as inherent to the operation of a given technology, this essay challenges the contention that pursuing energy security through expanded bitumen extraction and transportation can result in meaningful conditions of security. Rather, if climate change is understood as the integral accident of industrialized global hydrocarbon consumption, then pursuing energy security in the bitumen sands promises to contribute to material conditions of insecurity far more extensive than the security it supposedly offers. Given the geological Anthropocene we now inhabit, citizens and policy-makers in Western Canada and beyond would be well-advised to heed sceptics who doubt whether more or better of the same modes of technology that have brought us to our current ecological moment are likely to make human lives significantly safer or better in the midand distant futures. The alternative is, as Virilio warns, "the madness of deliberate blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and our inventions" (2007, 6). Such blindness has consequences for us all, starting in communities close to sites of bitumen extraction and transit but spanning around the globe.