Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis

Hydraulic fracturing is an energy extraction process that is increasingly attracting controversy. This article seeks to outline how the media report hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking"), and to explore its place within the reporting of energy concerns generally. To this end, it draws on an environmental communication perspective to understand the media reporting of the issue and the processes that shape it. This review reveals that media reporting of fracking is partitioned broadly according to discussions of the economic benefits or the environmental risks associated with the process. Further, these observed patterns in the reporting appear to mirror the recognized claims made about the issue, and the influence from protests and online media alongside national polity on energy production and security. While there is evidence that the practices of journalists and the geographic, economic and political contexts of their news production environments shape the amounts and the types of news reporting, the publics' perceptions appear, somewhat knowledgeable, but largely ambivalent or undecided on the issue at present. Therefore, it is argued that future research must continue to examine the reporting of hydraulic fracturing, its context, production, and its wider reception to develop our understanding of the role of the media in national conversations on fracking, energy, and the environment.

Section: Energy As An Environmental Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Fracturing Debate? A Review of Research on Media Coverage of “Fracking”

Matthews

Hansen

2018

“…Drawing on the arguments made in the section Relational Concepts and Theories, such studies could adopt the principle of symmetry through a comparative research design, or by exploring the ways in which different theoretical perspectives might engage with the same case study, potentially producing a diversity of accounts and having broader effects which themselves could be monitored. This recognition of the diversity of energy publics which is increasingly evident in energy communication research (Endres et al, 2016), and the related diversity in ways of studying these publics, offers a challenge to conventional casestudy based approaches which are the way in which most interpretive social scientific knowledge about energy publics is produced. To be clear, moving beyond isolated case studies does not mean simply reverting to large-scale quantitative methods or big data analytics that produce an image of a flat, static, amalgamated public.…”

Section: Methodological and Empirical Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As with recent developments in energy communication (Endres et al, 2016), this is moving beyond a focus of high-level controversies to consider more mundane and distributed engagements with energy in everyday life (Michael, 2016). As demonstrated above, studies of social movements, active communities, deliberative democratic engagement, energy users in the home and more could be considered as relational accounts.…”

Section: Energy Democracies and Publics In The Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While overlaps exist between STS scholarship and the emerging subfield of energy communication (Endres et al, 2016;Cozen et al, 2018), we move beyond the frame of the latter by taking a relational starting point and by considering a wider diversity of energy democracy-related practices within which forms of energy communication exist. In what follows, we first contextualize our argument by reviewing dominant perspectives on energy public engagement in the literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Energy Democracies and Publics in the Making: A Relational Agenda for Research and Practice

Chilvers

Pallett

2018

Mainstream approaches to energy democracy and public engagement with energy transitions tend to adopt specific, pre-given meanings of both "democracy" and "publics." Different approaches impose prescriptive assumptions about the model of participation, the identity of public participants, and what it means to participate well. The rigidity of many existing approaches to energy participation is increasingly being challenged by the ever-multiplying diversity of ways in which citizens participate in energy systems, as consumers in energy markets, protesters against new infrastructures and technologies, as initiators of community energy projects, and as subjects of behavior change interventions, amongst others. This paper is concerned with growing areas of scholarship which seek to understand and explore these emerging energy publics and forms of energy democracy from a relational perspective. Such work, grounded in constructivist and relational ontologies, views forms of participatory democracy and publics as being co-produced, constructed, and emergent through the performance of collective practices. It pays closer attention to power relations, politics, materiality, exclusions, and effects in both understanding and intervening in the making of energy democracy. This in turn shifts the focus from studying discrete unitary forms of "energy democracy" to one of understanding interrelations between multiple diverse energy democracies in wider systems. In this paper, we chart these developments and explore the significant challenges and potential contributions of relational approaches to furthering the theories, methods, and practices of energy democracy and energy public engagement. The paper draws on an expert workshop, and an accompanying review, which brought together leading proponents of contending relational approaches to energy participation in direct conversation for the first time. We use this as a basis to explore tensions between these approaches and set out a relational agenda for energy democracy research in terms of: developing concepts and theories; methodological and empirical challenges; and implications for practices of governance and democratic engagement with energy transitions.

“…However, there is no assumption of democracy or justice within the transition of energy systems. Attempts to integrate energy matters with social issues and public participation have led to the development of the energy democracy movement (Endres et al, 2016), which calls for democratic participatory communication and broader civic engagement in energy systems change (Stephens, 2017). Social justice and public engagement are key to the democratic ideal of voice, trust, and decision legitimacy (Clarke, 2017).…”

Section: Background Energy Democracy As a Communication Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comparative Case Study of Electric Utility Companies’ Use of Energy Democracy in Strategic Communication

McKasy

Yeo

2018

A substantial increase in distributed renewable energy resources is changing the face of the energy environment, leading to strategic communication efforts by key stakeholders. The energy democracy movement supports this transformation from fossil fuels to distributed renewable energy and aims for equitable involvement of publics in energy decision making. These tenets challenge utility company earnings as they are directly related to energy sales and infrastructure returns on investment. Proposals by electric utility companies to restructure net-metering policies as a solution to financial issues have been criticized as prohibitive to the success of renewable energy advancement. To address these disagreements, the Edison Electric Institute and a communication firm, Maslansky & Partners, created The Future of Energy: A Working Communication Guide for Discussion. This handbook provides utility companies with strategic communication guidelines to portray themselves as supportive of renewables within a dynamic energy industry. We posit that aspects of the energy democracy movement have been employed by electric utility companies, as shown through the use of the handbook, as a strategy for communicating with customers in discussions around net metering. We examine two case studies in states with recent controversial net-metering policy changes by analyzing utility company websites and press releases for the use of the communication handbook terminology. We found that, in both cases, the suggested language was used to position their companies as pro-renewable energy and their utility-scale projects as more equitable for their customers. In addition, we found differences between each company's use of key terms from the handbook. We posit that this is due to the temporal context of each net-metering debate at the time of the handbook release. Conclusions and future directions for research in the growing area of energy democracy are discussed.Keywords: electricity, energy, energy democracy, net metering, strategic communication A dramatic increase in solar power adoption has occurred in the last decade, in part because of the growing consumer interest in green energy, coupled with significant decreases in associated costs (Weiner, 2015;Muro and Saha, 2016). The unprecedented speed at which distributed resources are changing energy systems underscores the challenge and importance of understanding the roles of humans in this transition. This evolution is especially apparent in democratic societies in which participatory communication is integral to resolving environmental issues (Stephens et al., 2015). Energy democracy is a movement that aims to involve publics in energy decision making with emphasis on the transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy and distributed systems (Fairchild, 2017). This aligns with a broader effort in environmental communication to address human-caused threats to ecological systems and the failure of social institutions to confront these threats (Cox, 2007). Some propose that scholars...