Cross-Border Energy Infrastructure: The Politics of Intermesticity

Abstract

This chapter explores the politics of building, maintaining and expanding cross-border energy infrastructure between Canada and the United States as an evolving set of challenges in intermestic governance. Energy policy convergence between the 1980s and early 2010s contributed to significant, but largely asymmetrical energy interdependence for multiple energy commodities including oil, natural gas and, to a lesser extent, electricity. However, significant economic, technological, and political shifts since the mid-2000s—periodically reinforced by significant operational and tactical errors by Canadian utilities operating in the United States—have vastly increased the challenges of securing regulatory approvals and social acceptance for new and expanded pipeline and electricity transmission networks. These challenges are reinforced by the widely distributed character of regulatory functions within the U.S. federal system, broader social and political conflicts over the appropriate extent and pace of broader energy transitions and wider environmental issues in North America, and conflicts among North American, national, regional, and local policy objectives facing policy-makers and regulators.