Energy efficiency in Norwegian news media

Jens Petter Johansen,Jens Røyrvik,Håkon Fyhn

doi:10.5324/njsts.v8i2.3393

Abstract

This article investigates how energy efficiency features in Norwegian news media discourse. Based on an analysis of 309 news articles, we explore the objectification of energy efficiency and its rhetorical connections to energy savings and reductions. Energy efficiency is surrounded by positive overtones and used flexibly to include different meanings as well as effects. As a discursive object, the term wields significant rhetorical and legitimizing power, producing consensus across conflicting narratives and controversies in what we call the “discourse-as-usual”. We argue that energy efficiency shares characteristics with boundary objects, conveying an interpretive flexibility to bridge otherwise incommensurable perspectives on the need to decrease or increase absolute energy consumption. However, there are a few instances where controversy turns toward energy efficiency itself, revealing different views on absolute limits to energy consumption. By scrutinizing one of these glitches in consensus, we examine the normal through the anomaly to pinpoint the moral prerogative of energy efficiency in the discourse-as-usual. By black-boxing the complex relationship between efficiency and reductions, the term allows for avoiding the question of absolute limits to energy consumption in news media debates. Rather than translate between climate change and economic stability and growth narratives, we assert that energy efficiency as a discursive object conceals opposition between them. We discuss this concealment as a form of system dependency, as it is by black-boxing the effects of energy efficiency that it can unite adversaries and ensure ongoing activity.

Highlights

Energy efficiency has become a key political strategy to reduce carbon emissions in Norway and is promoted as a solution with multiple benefits, such as mitigating climate change, boosting local economies, increasing economic competitiveness, and reducing dependency on energy imports (Enova, 2020; European Commission, 2016)
We found and registered media events, that is, cases where two or more articles revolved around a specific news story
While posing as a scientific concept, our analysis shows how it associates multiple and contradictory meanings and outcomes in media discourse, as evoked by association rather than rigorous academic definitions

Summary

Introduction

Energy efficiency has become a key political strategy to reduce carbon emissions in Norway and is promoted as a solution with multiple benefits, such as mitigating climate change, boosting local economies, increasing economic competitiveness, and reducing dependency on energy imports (Enova, 2020; European Commission, 2016). Throughout this article, we show how concepts such as energy efficiency and energy savings are used interchangeably in media discourse, often so that one term is included in the other. Energy efficiency and savings are scientific concepts used to describe machine performances and optimize consumer products and industry processes, nor behavioral changes reducing energy consumption. They feature in modern language, political strategy documents, and discourses as taken-for-granted concepts legitimizing narratives about the state of the world. Rather than examine the empirical connections between efficiency and savings, we explore the rhetorical and associative connections between them and how they legitimize different policies, financial incentives, moral positions, power, and stakeholder legitimacy in Norwegian news media discourse. These contradictory views (and wants) on increase or decrease in absolute energy consumption speak to the essence of the discourse we unpack in the media narratives explored in this paper

Theoretical and Philosophical Approach

Methodological Approach

Green growth narrative

Findings

Conclusion