Meeting global climate change mitigation targets, as enshrined in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, will require a broad portfolio of technologies capable of meeting energy demand while reducing emissions. This portfolio will almost certainly require capturing emissions from energy and industrial production using carbon capture and storage (CCS), as well as removing some previously emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2019). CO2 removal refers to any technique that can remove and sequester CO2 directly from the atmosphere, as opposed to conventional mitigation that reduces the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. CO2 removal techniques are many and varied, and include established practices such as planting trees, “nature-based” solutions such as restoring peatlands, and novel “engineered” techniques including bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct capture of CO2 from the air. The difficulty of fully decarbonizing certain sectors means that adoption of CO2 removal at scale, alongside early and stringent emissions reduction, may be required to limit the catastrophic impacts of climate change (Royal Society & RAEng, 2018). For example, projections indicate that in order to meet its target of net zero emissions, the United Kingdom will require the removal of 90 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year by 2050 (Committee on Climate Change, 2019). However, such technologies and proposals do not exist in isolation; energy and other industrial systems are fundamentally interconnected, and it is therefore important to understand the impacts that policies and interventions in one part of the system may have elsewhere.
Research has also emphasized the importance of attending to public attitudes, because these will be a fundamental component of any effective, timely, and ethical low-carbon transition (Boudet, 2019; Fiorino, 1990). Indeed, establishing a “social license to operate” has been a key challenge for CCS in much of Europe (Gough, Cunningham, & Mander, 2018), and in Section 1.2 we discuss public opposition to shale oil and gas extraction (or “fracking”), which has created severe delays and cost overruns across much of Europe. Significant research has gone into understanding public attitudes to and perception of the risks from fracking, and how these might be influenced by various events, including policy actions and how they are perceived (Thomas, Pidgeon et al., 2017). Adopting a whole-systems approach, we use this case to suggest that policy decisions in one area can have significant secondary knock-on or “ripple” effects on attitudes to seemingly dissimilar technologies, potentially creating public acceptability constraints across multiple sectors, which could jeopardize attempts to adequately mitigate climate change. The purpose of this article is to discuss the possibility that negative public attitudes to fracking may have impacted public perceptions of other technologies, using a secondary analysis of transcripts from a series of public deliberative workshops on technologies for CO2 removal. These workshops were originally intended to explore public perceptions of CO2 removal via three negative emissions technologies, and the analysis of that research question is covered in detail in Cox, Spence and Pidgeon (2020). However, qualitative transcripts sometimes yield interesting insights, which are not what the researchers were originally looking for, in addition to the original research question; thus secondary analysis of transcripts can contribute to literatures beyond the field of the previous research (Henwood, Pidgeon, & Parkhill, 2014; Hinds, Vogel, & Clarke-Steffen, 1997; McLaren, Parkhill, Corner, Vaughan, & Pidgeon, 2016).CX3CR1 Antibody custom synthesis Importantly, our qualitative deliberative approach allows us to explore in depth why certain patterns might have emerged, using an indepth discourse analysis of relevant passages within the workshop transcripts.OPG Antibody Epigenetics
The following section introduces the theoretical literature on processes of “social amplification of risk,” showing that ripple effects to other technologies have been relatively underexplored in the empirical literature. Secondary effects on public attitudes have been examined in the literature on the social amplification of risk, a conceptual framework first proposed by Kasperson et al. (1988). That paper noted that publics sometimes display strong reactions to relatively minor risks as judged by experts, for instance during the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which harmed few people but which had an enormous impact on risk perceptions of nuclear power. Risk amplification leads to behavioral responses, which in turn create second- and third-order impacts such as enduring mental images and perceptions, political and social pressure, impacts on businesses, increased liability and costs, and repercussions on other risk issues and technologies. In this way, the impacts “ripple” out to other parties and places not initially involved. Direct impacts need not be large to trigger huge indirect effects; for example, the Tylenol controversy in 1982 only killed seven people, but inflicted losses of more than $1.4 billion on the company responsible (Kasperson, Kasperson, Pidgeon, & Slovic, 2003). In another example, Barnett, Menighetti, and Prete (1992) report a one-third decline (albeit temporary) in the use of the DC-10 airliner for domestic U.S. flights following a serious and heavily publicized crash of this type of aircraft at Sioux City, Iowa in 1989. The nature of the risk is also important: ripple effects may be much smaller if the risk is associated with a familiar system such as rail transport (Chilton et al., 2002), as opposed to an unfamiliar one such as a nuclear waste store or a lab (Slovic & Weber, 2002).
The original amplification framework article (Kasperson et al., 1988) hypothesized four major pathways or mechanisms that bear upon the secondary stage of risk amplification: heuristics and values, social-group relationships, signal value, and finally stigmatization. High or growing social distrust of risk-managing institutions, and in particular of policymakers, is now realized to be a fifth pathway (Frewer, 2003; Wirz et al., 2018). In conceptual terms Renn and Levine (1991) argue that trust has a number of core determinants: competence (appropriate technical expertise); objectivity (messages free from bias); fairness (all points of view acknowledged); consistency (of statements and behavior); and faith (a perception of good will). Trust could operate in relation to ripple effects in one of several ways. First, and most directly, in light of an accident or other prominent risk signal the immediate blame may well, rightly or wrongly, be placed with regulatory institutions, who as a result become distrusted (Hood & Jones, 1996). Risk perceptions might then be amplified in other issues and sites that the distrusted organization(s) are responsible for. The extent to which different technologies share (or are thought to share) the same risk governing institutions and policy processes therefore brings a potential for secondary amplification across technologies under such a scenario.
Second, in an inverse of this relationship, we know that risk perceptions and distrust can themselves be strongly driven by our more fundamental negative emotional responses, or affect, toward an issue (Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2005; Slovic, 2010). Hence, if we have a prior strong negative response toward something we are unlikely to trust those who manage it, whatever the evidence to the contrary. If such negative associations from one technology transfer across to associated technologies, these might thereby engender both distrust and secondary ripples of risk amplification.PMID:35253445 Other research notes the important role of traditional and social media in risk amplification (Ng, Yang, & Vishwanath, 2018), the importance of power and agency in risk controversies (Pidgeon, Simmons, & Henwood, 2006), and the importance of procedural dynamics: concerns tend to escalate when information about potential hazards is kept secret, when citizens are not allowed to participate, and when the experts are seen as “too close” to the project (Graham, Rupp, & Schenk, 2015; Lofstedt, 2015). Process-based factors have shown themselves to be crucial in the case of energy and infrastructure projects. Perceptions of procedural justice–that is, that individuals have equitable access to decision-making processes–may even be more important for shaping public perceptions than the actual costs and benefits (Boudet, 2019; Cotton, 2013; Evensen & Stedman, 2017).
There is now extensive empirical evidence demonstrating secondary social amplification of risk within a number of technology sectors and risk issues, and exploring the roles of various actors (Kasperson & Kasperson, 2005; Pidgeon, Kasperson, & Slovic, 2003). Yet there is very little empirical work exploring “ripple effects” across issues, sectors, and technologies. What solid evidence there is on the latter comes from studies on novel food technologies. We know that people make use of past associations and analogies to previous risks to make sense of and interpret new or unfamiliar technological risk issues (Pidgeon et al., 2012; Visschers, Meertens, Passchier, & DeVries, 2007). Work on perceptions of genetically modified food (GM) during the “crisis” in Europe in the late 1990s showed how concerns about the then recent BSE (mad cow disease) disaster was a familiar association raised in focus group discussions of GM agriculture risk. Concerns about the safety of industrialized food production, messing with nature, and a perceived lack of regulatory honesty and transparency in the BSE case all combined to fuel public concerns about GM agriculture (Marris, 2001). More recently, evidence has emerged to show how attitudes toward food applications of nanotechnology (atomic-scale science and engineering) might have been impacted by people’s views on GM food (Ho et al., 2020), although as a technology category more generally nanotechnology seems not to suffer from major social amplification effects in public perceptions (Pidgeon, Harthorn, Bryant, & Rogers-Hayden, 2009; Satterfield, Kandlikar, Beaudrie, Conti, & Herr Harthorn, 2009). It seems that shared category associations (in this case “food technology”) are driving perceptions across the two rather different technology approaches (Visschers et al., 2007).
Importantly, such ripple effects are often overlooked in policy making, which as this article seeks to argue can have damaging consequences where systems and issues are highly interconnected. We demonstrate this using data from a U.K. study on public perceptions of carbon dioxide removal, during which risk perceptions relating to three major CO2 removal proposals stemmed from participants’ unprompted discussions about unconventional oil and gas (“fracking”), and the policies for promoting it. The following section describes fracking and public attitudes toward it, in particular the stigmatization that appears to have occurred in the minds of the U.K. public, and the social amplification of fracking risk perceptions. However, this literature tends to focus on fracking in isolation from other technologies, with much less research on ripple effects to other technologies and sectors.
Shale oil and gas are unconventional hydrocarbons found in low-permeability rocks, which can be extracted by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Fracking typically involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals under high pressure into a bedrock formation; this creates fractures in the rock which allows the hydrocarbons to be extracted (US Geological Survey, 2019). Fracking in Europe has had a tumultuous journey, with public opposition leading to restrictions or bans on licensing activity in many European countries (Van de Graaf, Haesebrouck, & Debaere, 2018). In the United Kingdom, opposition has increased over time, in line with the “stigmatization” effect noted in the social amplification of risk framework (Bradshaw & Waite, 2017; Flynn, Slovic and Kunreuther, 2001; Thomson, 2015), with a recent survey finding that 56% of the U.K. public are opposed to fracking, compared to 32% who support (Evensen, Devine-Wright, & Whitmarsh, 2019). Deliberative research finds that U.K. publics perceive fracking as very risky, especially regarding effects on drinking water and habitability, and that any benefits are perceived to be inequitably distributed (Thomas, Partridge, Harthorn, & Pidgeon, 2017). Yet, for successive administrations, the U.K. government signaled strong political support for fracking, which was increasingly at odds with growing public opposition (Bradshaw & Waite, 2017). Continued attempts by central government to develop the U.K. shale industry contributed toward growing public distrust (Gough et al., 2018; Williams, Macnaghten, Davies, & Curtis, 2017).
In November 2019 the U.K. government unexpectedly issued a moratorium on fracking (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2019), a decision that was widely seen as politically opportune following years of public opposition and protests. The data collection and analysis for this article was carried out before the fracking moratorium was issued, in a context of strong political support for fracking. Previous research has demonstrated that risk amplification has been important for perceptions of fracking, particularly in North America and the United Kingdom where the concept evokes a powerful, amplified “signature” of risk (Bharadwaj & Goldstein, 2015; Harthorn et al., 2019; Thomas, Pidgeon et al., 2017). Graham et al. (2015) note that fracking is vulnerable to risk amplification because its potential hazards can trigger a variety of factors that are known to elevate risk perceptions, including unfamiliarity, involuntary exposure, and lack of personal control over risk. Fracking also raises all of the sensitive questions of procedural and distributional equity, as well as potential distrust of the motives of powerful outside actors and organizations, that we know from other issues can lead to intense risk siting controversies (e.g., Kunreuther, Fitzgerald, & Aarts, 1993; Pidgeon & Demski, 2012).
One of the main public concerns around fracking is contamination of drinking water (Thomas, Partridge et al., 2017), which gives it a high “dread” factor (Thomson, 2015), shown to be instrumental in nuclear and other risk perceptions (Slovic, 1987). A cross-national study in the United States and the United Kingdom found that the concept of fracking evokes for people multiple high-risk, high-salience perceived hazards relating to seismicity and water supply, which has resulted in “intensification” of risk perceptions (Harthorn et al., 2019: 51). Risk amplification has been a common feature of the fracking debate in some states of the United States, partly because of a failure on the part of policymakers and industry to address public concerns directly, combined with selective and sensational reporting of risks in the media (Thomson, 2015). In the United Kingdom, communities in Lancashire at the center of a controversy over exploratory drilling were found to have experienced a breach of trust between them and local government, negatively impacting their perceptions of fracking and also of analogous CCS technology (Gough et al., 2018). That study remains (to our knowledge) the only existing examination of the cross-cutting impacts of fracking on other technologies, although it did not directly address risk amplification effects. This article does not aim to reiterate the process of risk amplification and stigmatization of fracking, but rather focuses on the second- and third-order impacts of this onto other publics, sectors, and technologies.MedChemExpress (MCE) offers a wide range of high-quality research chemicals and biochemicals (novel life-science reagents, reference compounds and natural compounds) for scientific use. We have professionally experienced and friendly staff to meet your needs. We are a competent and trustworthy partner for your research and scientific projects.Related websites: https://www.medchemexpress.com
