The fate of bitumen: an exploratory study of national newspaper coverage of Alberta's bitumen industry during the COVID-19 pandemic

The study situates the COVID-19 pandemic as both a disruption and a potential inflection point for climate mitigation. While reduced activity temporarily lowered air pollutants and GHG emissions, many governments used recovery spending to subsidize fossil fuels, risking carbon lock-in. In Canada, this tension is pronounced: despite a net-zero by 2050 pledge, federal subsidies to oil and gas increased in 2020. The paper highlights the rise of climate delay discourses that prioritize economic recovery over immediate climate action. Against this backdrop, the research examines how national newspapers framed Alberta’s bitumen industry during 2020, exploring whether pandemic-era narratives supported or challenged decarbonization. The study addresses two questions: (RQ1) How did major national newspapers in Canada report on Alberta bitumen throughout 2020? (RQ2) What overarching narratives concerning the future of Alberta bitumen emerged from these newspapers’ reporting?

Canadian media coverage of climate change has historically tracked major policy and scientific milestones, with thematic frames emphasizing science/technology, policy, and economic/energy interests. However, politicization has intensified, particularly around mega-projects (e.g., Northern Gateway, LNG), where outlets reflected competing stakeholder concerns. Localized framing often eclipses broader climate implications, as seen in coverage emphasizing local risks over climate impacts, and regional media differences exist between anglophone and francophone outlets. The paper situates current debates in the post-Paris, COP26 context: federal pledges to phase out coal contrasted with ambivalence about Alberta bitumen. Environmental groups criticized federal emissions plans as insufficient, while Alberta’s government and conservative commentators defended bitumen, framing critiques as foreign-funded attacks. This aligns with climate delay rhetoric and “denialism 2.0,” which accepts climate science but promotes non-transformative solutions. Buck’s framework contrasts a “cleaner fossil world” with a “near zero world”; the former is often legitimized via net-zero framings that allow continued fossil production. COVID-19 altered media attention and created new frames linking environment and economy, motivating an examination of whether the pandemic was used to justify continued investment in bitumen.

The study analyzes coverage in Canada’s top-circulation newspapers—the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star—during 2020. Articles were collected from Factiva using the query: “oil sands OR oilsands OR bitumen OR tar sands OR tarsands,” with duplicates set to “similar,” yielding 732 items. After manual screening to remove pieces with only passing references (e.g., daily COVID-19 updates mentioning bitumen sites), the final dataset comprised 685 articles: 284 (Globe and Mail), 153 (Toronto Star), and 248 (National Post). The mixed-methods approach combined computational topic modeling with qualitative discourse analysis (“topic modeling meets discourse analysis”). Preprocessing retained only headlines (HD) and lead paragraphs (LP), following best practice to capture article essence and improve LDA performance. Texts were tokenized and cleaned (stop words, punctuation, numbers) using NLTK’s default stop list. LDA topic modeling was conducted with Orange Data Mining, testing k-values from 5–20; a 12-topic model was selected based on the highest Cy topic-coherence score (0.38), acknowledging it was slightly below recommended values, likely due to corpus focus and semantic overlap. Topic interpretability was enhanced with LDAvis, emphasizing word uniqueness. To validate and contextualize topics, a keyword-in-context (KWIC) analysis interpreted concordance lines for selected keywords (e.g., “keystone”), informed by prior literature and the author’s expertise.

- Corpus composition and modeling: N=685 articles (Globe and Mail 284; Toronto Star 153; National Post 248). A 12-topic LDA model (coherence 0.38) revealed clusters corresponding to infrastructure debates, economic conditions, political divisions, and environmental impacts, with one topic mixing environmental and downturn signals. - Salient terms: Top TF-IDF words included “oil,” “Alberta,” “energy,” “oilsands,” “pipeline,” “project,” “Teck,” “frontier,” “mine,” “climate,” “federal,” “Trudeau,” “Kenney.” “COVID” ranked 28th, suggesting less explicit prominence despite its centrality to 2020. - Four overarching themes: 1) Contention over bitumen infrastructure: Coverage (especially Jan–Feb 2020) focused on projects such as Trans Mountain Expansion, Keystone XL, and Teck’s Frontier Mine. Petro-bloc voices (politicians, advocates, corporate reps) framed industry setbacks as due to regulatory/legal hurdles and environmental opposition; Teck’s withdrawal was portrayed as symptomatic of federal “anti-enterprise” policy. 2) Economic challenges for the bitumen industry: The pandemic-driven market slump prompted calls for subsidies and preferential policies over deregulation, with employment and livelihoods used as core justifications. Alternatives to returning to bitumen jobs for affected workers were largely absent, positioning the industry as the primary path to recovery. 3) Political divide over the future of bitumen: Disputes between the federal government’s balanced approach and the petro-bloc’s resistance to added regulation centered on near-term bitumen prospects. While Premier Jason Kenney acknowledged eventual decline due to climate action, he emphasized Alberta’s role in supplying ongoing demand. Critiques targeted federal carbon pricing as harmful to competitiveness, yet federal policy avoided specifying a stringent phase-out, maintaining strategic ambiguity between a “cleaner fossil world” and a “near zero world.” 4) Environmental impacts and decarbonization: Environmentalists framed the pandemic as exposing structural weaknesses in resource dependency and advocated for a green, resilient recovery. The Toronto Star provided comparatively more space to these perspectives, while the Globe and Mail and National Post tended to marginalize them, especially in business coverage. High-profile clashes (e.g., responses to Elizabeth May’s “oil is dead” comment) used pro-bitumen strategies: defining fossil fuels as necessities and invoking energy self-sufficiency. - Temporal and framing patterns: Infrastructure contention peaked early 2020; business reporting emphasized restoring pre-pandemic normalcy; pro-bitumen narratives were pervasive, often overshadowing pro-climate frames.

Addressing RQ1, the newspapers portrayed COVID-19 as a major disruptor of energy markets and a threat to bitumen producers, with coverage dominated by economic and infrastructure frames and frequent amplification of petro-bloc perspectives. Addressing RQ2, overarching narratives emphasized stabilization and recovery of the bitumen sector, while federal policy was cast as ambiguously balancing climate goals and industry interests. Environmental and decarbonization narratives were present but comparatively marginalized—most notably in business sections of the Globe and Mail and National Post—reinforcing climate delay rhetoric that prioritizes economic normalization over transformative climate action. These patterns align with prior research on media attention cycles and suggest that major crises can deflect attention away from urgent climate mitigation, strengthening narratives that legitimize a continued role for bitumen within a “cleaner fossil world.”

The study shows that during the pandemic year of 2020, Canadian mainstream newspapers largely foregrounded bitumen’s economic challenges and infrastructure disputes while downplaying rapid decarbonization narratives, thereby supporting climate delay discourse. Contributions include: (1) theoretically, clarifying how COVID-19 shaped post-Paris climate policy discourse in Canada; (2) methodologically, demonstrating the value of integrating LDA topic modeling with KWIC-based qualitative interpretation; and (3) practically, calling for greater scrutiny of the political-economic legitimacy of pandemic subsidies. Given the dominance of petro-bloc voices in major outlets, environmental groups should leverage alternative communication channels (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, podcasts) to engage the public with compelling green economy stories. Future research should assess the effectiveness of such new media in facilitating public conversations on decarbonization.

Findings are based on an abridged corpus limited to headlines and lead paragraphs, which may omit nuances present in full texts. Topic coherence was modest, likely due to corpus focus and semantic overlap. The exploratory design suggests results would benefit from resource-intensive, in-depth analyses of a smaller set of articles and complementary qualitative methods.