But They Told Us It Was Safe! Carbon Dioxide Removal, Fracking, and Ripple Effects in Risk Perceptions.

Nick Pidgeon,Emily Cox,Elspeth Spence

doi:10.1111/risa.13717

Abstract

Reaching net-zero for global greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 will require a portfolio of new technologies and approaches, potentially requiring direct removal and sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide using negative emissions technologies (NETs). Since energy and climate systems are fundamentally interconnected it is important that we understand the impacts of policy decisions and their associated controversies in other related technologies and sectors. Using a secondary analysis of data from a series of deliberative workshops conducted with lay publics in the United Kingdom, we suggest that perceptions of CO2 removal technologies were negatively impacted by risk perceptions and recent policy decisions surrounding shale gas and fracking. Using the social amplification of risk framework, we argue that heightened risk perceptions have extended via "ripple effects" across these technologies. Participants' attitudes were underpinned by deeper misgivings regarding the actions and motives of experts and policymakers; a pervasive discourse of "but they told us it was safe" regarding fracking negatively affected people's trust in assurances of the safety and efficacy of CO2 removal. This has the potential to undermine attempts to build societal agreement around future deployment of CO2 removal technologies.

Highlights

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
It seems that shared category associations are driving perceptions across the two rather different technology approaches (Visschers et al, 2007). 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
Many policy changes have occurred in the years since that study was carried out, it would be interesting to see whether the ripple effect we found extends to industrial areas proposed for large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployment

Summary

Introduction

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). 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

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