Abstract
Energy supply and security is a topic that connects geoscience and ethics to economic, social and sustainable development. It also involves a wide range of interests and social actors, such as politicians, experts, industry, environmental NGO and citizen organizations and platforms. The fossil fuel extraction industry using hydraulic fracturing, and commonly known as fracking, is one of the most recent and controversial issues arising from the application of energy technologies in North America, South America and Europe. This paper examines the public debate in Spain on the topic of fracking from a multi-level and complementary perspective, based on data collected during 2012-2016 by exploring the development of public policies at national and regional levels, monitoring public perception through a survey, and analyzing the media content. From the theoretical frameworks of social amplification of risk and post-materialist values, a content analysis was applied to assess the relevance and the social, cultural and human values distributed by the press when dealing with fracking in Spain. Our results concerning public policies show that there are different positions on the matter between national and regional authorities, even if both authorities belong to the same political party. Regarding social perception, almost 60 per cent of Spaniards have admitted to having no opinion about fracking. Finally, media discourse has been driven by pessimistic views, focused mainly on cost-benefit analysis and emphasizing how human health, natural resources and local communities might be negatively affected by fracking activities.
Highlights
Hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract fossil resources often do not meet with general social acceptability
In addition to economic and technical feasibility, the lack of public acceptance emerges as a complementary research field. This contribution examines the development of public policies, social perception and media discourse on fracking in Spain with the aim to understand the dynamics and synergies that may be influencing the emergence and evolution of public opposition and the potential underlying ethical implications. For this purpose different sources and data were used: a) following and monitoring of public policies related to the topic at national and regional level from 2012 to 2016; b) data collected from the national survey on social perception of science and technology conducted in 2014 by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology; and c) data resulting from a content analysis applied to the press coverage on fracking published by the premium general information newspaper in Spain, El País, during the timeframe 2013 and 2014
The sustained increase of oil prices from 2009 to 2014 and, as a consequence, the interest shown by fossil fuel companies to explore and exploit shale gas fields in several areas of the Spanish territory were some of the key factors behind legal reforms developed by the national conservative Government
Summary
Hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract fossil resources often do not meet with general social acceptability. The implementation of fracking has aroused public opposition in many local communities, becoming a controversial issue both in the United States and in European countries due to its potential consequences on the environment and human health (Jaspal and Nerlich, 2014; Negro, 2012).
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