Microsoft Word - 7360-18377-1-SP_Lopera et al_final.doc ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 60, Fast Track 7, 2017; doi: 10.4401/ag-7360 1 Public policies, social perception and media content on fracking: An analysis in the Spanish context EMILIA HERMELINDA LOPERA-PAREJA Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT) emilia.lopera@ciemat.es ANA GARCÍA-LASO DOMINGO ALFONSO MARTÍN-SÁNCHEZ Polytechnic University of Madrid ana.garcia.laso@upm.es domingoalfonso.martin@upm.es Abstract Energy supply and security is a topic that connects geoscience and ethics to economic, social and sustainable develop- ment. 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 com- monly known as fracking, is one of the most recent and controversial issues arising from the application of energy tech- nologies 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 ana- lyzing 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 commu- nities might be negatively affected by fracking activities. 1. INTRODUCTION urrently hydraulic fracturing tech- niques to extract fossil resources often do not meet with general social accept- ability. The implementation of fracking has aroused public opposition in many local com- munities, becoming a controversial issue both in the United States and in European countries due to its potential consequences on the envi- ronment and human health (Jaspal and Ner- lich, 2014; Negro, 2012). In addition to economic and technical feasibil- ity, the lack of public acceptance emerges as a complementary research field. In this context, 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 evolu- tion of public opposition and the potential un- derlying ethical implications. For this purpose different sources and data were used: a) following and monitoring of public policies related to the topic at national C ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 60, Fast Track 7, 2017; doi: 10.4401/ag-7360 2 and regional level from 2012 to 2016; b) data collected from the national survey on social perception of science and technology conduct- ed in 2014 by the Spanish Foundation for Sci- ence and Technology; and c) data resulting from a content analysis applied to the press coverage on fracking published by the premi- um general information newspaper in Spain, El País, during the timeframe 2013 and 2014. 2. RESULTS Public policies Spanish public policies on energy issues have experienced great changes since 2012 in updat- ing and adapting the national regulatory framework in order to speed up and promote the implementation of fracking extractive technique. The sustained increase of oil prices from 2009 to 2014 and, as a consequence, the interest shown by fossil fuel companies to ex- plore and exploit shale gas fields in several ar- eas of the Spanish territory were some of the key factors behind legal reforms developed by the national conservative Government. At the same time, public policies on renewable ener- gies also experienced significant changes fol- lowing the entry into force of the Decree Law 1/2012 on the abolition of the subsidies to re- newable energies (Official State Gazette, 2012). Hydraulic fracturing was expressly included among the standard technologies for the ex- ploitation of unconventional shale gas in Spain under the Law 17/2013 on the security of en- ergy supply (Official State Gazette, 2013a), amending Law 34/1998 on hydrocarbons (Of- ficial State Gazette, 1998). The environmental impact assessment for fracking projects was also included in Law 21/2013 (Official State Gazette, 2013b), although preliminary projects to study viability through this technique were exempt. Whereas licenses for exploration activities are granted by regional authorities when the whole area is located in a single region, this responsibility falls to the national authorities when the activity covers two or more regions. Given this regulatory situation, three of the Spanish northern regions – Cantabria, La Rioja and Navarra – were adopting respective re- gional laws on the ban of fracking activities in its territories throughout 2013. But the national Government immediately appealed these laws to the Spanish Constitutional Court. At the European level, in January 2014 the Eu- ropean Commission published a set of recom- mendations (2014/70/EU) on minimum prin- ciples for the exploration and production of hydrocarbons using high-volume hydraulic fracturing (Official Journal of the European Union, 2014). But instead of setting a common framework, Member States were simply ‘invit- ed to’ plan developments, assess environmen- tal impacts, ensure the best practice standards, check the quality of the local water, air and soil, control air emissions and inform the pub- lic. Some months later, the three regional laws banning fracking were repealed by the Consti- tutional Court. The respective rulings were based on the existence of a conflict of political and administrative competences between re- gional and national authorities in the field of exploratory drilling and extraction of no con- ventional hydrocarbons. Since hydrocarbon resources are deemed strategic, the regulation falls within the competence of national author- ities. Unlike in the United States, Spanish landown- ers do not have property rights over the ex- ploitation of fossil fuels from the subsoil. In fact, according to the aforementioned hydro- carbon law, gas and oil fields are considered strategic resources of state public domain. However, the strong opposition against frack- ing expressed by local and regional authorities plus the public rejection and protest move- ment promoted by local platforms on social networks and in the streets could have moti- vated the adoption of a new national regula- tion in 2015 that provided for economic bene- fits for individuals, local, and regional authori- ties. In fact, in order to further promote the use of fracking despite the controversial social debate at the local level, the new Law 8/2015 called for a system of financial compensation and in- centive for property owners, municipalities, and regions (Official State Gazette, 2015); in this latter case through taxes and fees paid by ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 60, Fast Track 7, 2017; doi: 10.4401/ag-7360 3 the operating industry. But the promise of economic benefits did not prevent Catalonia and the Basque Country from banning frack- ing in their territories over the course of 2015. At present, these laws await a ruling by the Spanish Constitutional Court. Disagreement over fracking was also a reason for the confrontation between regional and na- tional political leaders, especially within the right-wing party, Partido Popular. Generally, local and regional institutions geographically closer to the citizen daily life shared the same view against fracking including worries about possible negative effects derived from such energy facilities. The opposition to fracking shown by the conservative regional govern- ment of La Rioja is a paradigmatic example of this situation. Social perception and public interest The last edition of the Spanish survey on social perception regarding science and technology (FECYT, 2015) featured two new questions about the consequences of scientific and tech- nological development in general (Q.14) and about specific technological applications (Q.15) such as hydraulic fracturing and nuclear ener- gy (Muñoz-van den Eynde, 2015). According to the results, almost 60 per cent of the re- spondents admitted they did not have an opin- ion on fracking whereas only 9 per cent re- ported the same answer regarding nuclear en- ergy, a much more controversial issue in Spain and abroad for a much longer time. From the remaining 40 per cent of respondents with an opinion on fracking, 24 per cent considered that it represented higher risks than benefits whereas 7 per cent believed the opposite. Fi- nally, for 10 per cent of the interviewers risks and benefits were balanced (Fig. 1). Figure 1: Social perception on technological applications, fracking and nuclear energy in Spain. Data source: Muñoz-van den Eynde (2015). The fact that six out ten Spaniards do not have an opinion on fracking should not be inter- preted as a lack of concern or interest to know more about this matter. As in a previous study analyzing the fracking debate in the United States and United Kingdom (Mazur, 2016), we used the monthly frequency of web searches on “fracking” as reported by Google Trends as a measure of public interest (filtering on Spain), along with media trends in the time period of 2013 and 2014. Google Trends and El País media attention is shown in Fig. 2 using normalized data, that is, adjusted so that the month with the higher web searches and arti- cles were indexed as 100, and numbers of searchers and articles for other months are a proportion of that number. This is an effective strategy to compare public and media interests on a similar issue. Data represented in Fig. 2 show that while media attention suffered great fluctuations during the period in question, the public interest remained more stable and in- creased on December 2014. Accordingly, it could be interpreted that in some manner me- dia attention boosted public interest during 2013 although public interest on fracking re- mained active and even surpassed media at- tention for most of the year 2014. By regions, web searches on fracking were much more frequent in northern regions of Spain more af- fected by exploratory efforts and where local authorities tried to ban this activity: Cantabria, Basque Country, La Rioja and Navarra. Con- cern, public opposition and confrontations be- ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 60, Fast Track 7, 2017; doi: 10.4401/ag-7360 4 tween regional and national Governments could have made the issue more salient for online users from these communities. Figure 2: Spain web searched on “fracking” and report- ing in El País, 2013-2014. Media content On a quarterly basis (Fig. 3), our results reveal that the tone of media discourse evolved from a perspective mainly dominated by pessimism concerning the viability of fracking in 2013 – representing the technique as a threat rather than as an alternative source of energy and prosperity – to an increase of news stories written from a neutral view in 2014. Optimistic approaches supporting the implementation of this type of extraction were clearly scant throughout the studied timeframe. Figure 3: Tone of media discourse (El País) on fracking in Spain, 2013-2014. In order to have a comprehensive understand- ing of how pessimistic and optimistic views about fracking were constructed in the Spanish press coverage we applied a content analysis (data collection, sampling and complete list of variables are available in: Lopera et al., 2015) whose risk and benefit variables were inspired by the sociological theory of post-materialism (Inglehart, 2008). According to this theoretical framework it is assumed that Western societies have been gradually switching from the ac- ceptance of material values (calculated as ben- efit variables) to the defense of post-materialist values (calculated as risk variables) (Table 1). Table 1: Categories and subcategories of the variables coded in the content analysis applied to the press cover- age on fracking. Risk variables (worries) Environment Water Soil Air quality Human health Induced seismic activity Benefit variables (promises) Economy Job opportunities Competitiveness Energy supply and security Post-materialism emphasizes non-material goods focusing on a clean and healthy envi- ronment instead of materialism positions that argue that economic growth is strongly articu- lated with energy security and supply. Fig. 4 shows a quantitative snapshot of frack- ing social representation through the daily press in Spain in terms of risks and benefits. Our findings revealed that media content pri- marily highlighted certain endangered post- materialist values, mainly focused on negative impacts on human health (51 per cent of the news articles) and several environmental as- pects at a local scale such as water resources (groundwater) (49 per cent). To a lesser degree soil (23 per cent) and air quality (17 per cent) were shown to be under risk as well. Possible induced seismic activity was also a narrative element taken into account by the news media (16 per cent). The connection be- tween seismic movements and fracking was not only based on describing the tremors that ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 60, Fast Track 7, 2017; doi: 10.4401/ag-7360 5 have occurred abroad (Lancashire, in UK, and Oklahoma, in USA) (El País, 2013a; El País, 2013b), but also those in Spain along the Medi- terranean coast, in Valencia region (El País, 2014). The occurrence of several earthquakes, with magnitude (M between 3.8 to 4.3) (Juanes et al., 2017), forced the closure of a megaproject that was supposed to store injected natural gas using the old facilities of an oil exploitation in Amposta, known as the Castor Project. The New York Times made a connection between potential impacts of fracking and the severe consequences of the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on April 2010 (Mazur, 2016), whereas in Spain El País connected the tremors occurred due to the gas storage of the Castor Project in 2013 to the potential impacts of induced seismic activity resulting from fracking activities. On the other hand, materialist values were highlighted as key narrative elements in the articles offering a neutral and/or optimistic approach, especially the economic benefits (39 per cent) and energy security and supply (30 per cent). We stress that whereas these benefits were depicted at a national scale in a very dif- fuse way, the aforementioned risks were rep- resented as a close threat for local and tradi- tional lifestyles based on agriculture, livestock and tourism. This results fall in line with the data obtained by Davis and Fisk (2014) when analyzing public attitudes toward fracking use and policies in the USA. Previous studies ana- lyzing representations of fracking on YouTube videos from a cost and benefits angle identi- fied threats to environmental, human and eco- nomic values (Jaspal et al., 2014). Social and psychological impacts on small communities were highlighted as well. Figure 4: Risks and benefits of implementing fracking according to the media content. 3. CONCLUSIONS This paper reveals that the prevailing media discourse on the use of fracking in Spain has been pessimistic and neutral, almost always underlining the potential negative impacts on human health, environment and local natural resources rather than as an exclusive energy issue providing economic growth arising from energy security and supply. This was com- bined with the lack of a clear public opinion at a national level despite strong local opposition in the affected regions. Moreover, the analysis and monitoring of the public policies on this issue indicate a deep confrontation between national and regional Governments, especially controversial in those regions where explora- tion studies have been completed or are being planned in order to study the economic and technical viability of the fracking projects: Can- tabria, La Rioja, Navarra, Catalonia and Basque Country, among others. While national policies are designed to promote the imple- mentation of fracking attending to the industry claims, the main goal of regional policies was to avoid the use of fracking in their territories. In this regard, local and regional authorities showed to be more sensitive and receptive to the instances of the public opposition than the directives of the national Government. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was carried out as part of the project “Concept and dimensions of scientific culture” (MINECO-15-FFI2014-58269-P) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competi- ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 60, Fast Track 7, 2017; doi: 10.4401/ag-7360 6 tiveness and by the Department of Economy and Employment of the Principality of Asturi- as for the “Grupo de Estudios CTS” (FC-15- GRUPIN14-128). REFERENCES Davis, C., and Fisk, J.M. (2014). Energy abun- dance or environmental worries? Analizing public support for fracking in the United States, Review of Policy Research, 31(1), 1- 16. 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