Jen Schneider

Corporate Ventriloquism: Corporate Advocacy, the Coal Industry, and the Appropriation of Voice

In the second decade of the 21st century, the U.S. coal industry is facing unprecedented challenges. While for many years coal provided nearly half of U.S. electricity, in the spring of 2012 that share dropped to below 40% and is expected to continue falling (Energy Information Administration, 2012).1 Coal production is increasing not in Appalachia, the primary U.S. source for coal historically, but in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (Goodell, 2006). Market competition from the natural gas industry combined with well organized climate and anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) campaigns have significantly curtailed the production of new coal-fired power plants in the United States (EIA, 2012). Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be somewhat more amenable than the Bush administration to regulating carbon emissions as a pollutant, and more interested in enforcing Clean Water Act provisions applicable to MTR mining (Broder, 2012). Combined with sharp reductions in the number of coal mining jobs due to the increased efficiency of coal mining techniques, these circumstances have put the coal industry in Appalachia in a precarious position.

The Energy Covenant: Energy Dominance and the Rhetoric of the Aggrieved

The Trump Administration has adopted “energy dominance” as its guiding ideology for energy policy, marking a notable shift from decades of “energy security” rhetoric. This paper analyzes how Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke, one of the administration’s key spokespeople for energy dominance, uses “energy covenant renewal” to frame the importance of energy dominance for the conservative base. Covenant renewal is a modified form of the jeremiad; Zinke uses it to unite conservative identities around energy politics and policies. Energy dominance thus invites those who feel aggrieved under Obama administration regulatory policy and the multicultural identity politics of the left to renew their commitment to fossil fuels, American exceptionalism, and a restored social order and privilege.

The Nuclear Pipeline: Integrating Nuclear Power and Climate Change

This chapter focuses on nuclear scientists and engineers, and the effectiveness of small-scale interventions that could be made to prepare them to consider novel kinds of climate disruptions and how such considerations could affect plant design and operations. Events at Fukushima in 2011 prompted renewed attention to nuclear safety. Soon after, scientists recorded record-breaking global temperatures, particularly during the summer of 2012. Perhaps as a result of these two events, academics and the media have begun asking whether nuclear power plants are robust to natural events beyond the range of available historical data (beyond design basis), including climate-related events such as increasing drought and rising cooling-water temperatures. Science policy scholars, scientists, and engineers outside nuclear science and engineering have begun to pose such questions and model possible effects. This study demonstrates there is almost no public discourse and very little professional discourse within the nuclear science and engineering community on this topic. We posit that this is largely because of the insular culture and professionalization standards of nuclear science and engineering, which could limit the effectiveness of curricular interventions made in engineering education.

“Convoluted Journeys”: Integrating Nonprofit Organizations and University Science

Abstract University scientists are frequently challenged to embrace stakeholder engagement in a way that departs from traditional contract-oriented relationships; this is occurring within water management across the American West. However, few studies specifically address how university scientists engage nonprofit organizations as stakeholders in collaborative water management research. This manuscript reports on an examination of a key set of stakeholders—nonprofit environmental organizations—with a goal to better understand how such organizations conceptualized, created, and implemented scientific data in water management decision making. The study provides insights into why interactions between university scientists and nonprofits are infrequent and underdeveloped. The project identifies how nonprofit organizations strategically use scientific information across a variety of contexts and for diverse purposes. These practices may sometimes be at odds with how university scientists conceive of or practice science, making stakeholder engagement challenging. The study also provides suggestions for how universities might address some of these challenges.

The Technological Shell Game

“The Technological Shell Game” examines the industry’s persistent use of the “clean coal” trope to resist environmental regulation. The chapter interprets “clean coal” as a case of strategic ambiguity in which the industry invokes different definitions of “clean coal” to play a “technological shell game” with audiences, offering the promise of clean coal while hiding what exactly is meant by clean coal. This rhetorical strategy can unite disparate audiences in support of “clean coal,” but it obfuscates the coal industry’s resistance to regulation by appearing to work voluntarily and proactively toward technological solutions to environmental problems. The shell game enables the industry to finesse contradictions between its neoliberal calls for smaller government and deregulation, and its demand that the federal government subsidize carbon capture and sequestration technologies.

The Hypocrite’s Trap

“Hypocrite’s Trap” examines the coal industry’s response to the fossil fuel divestment movement. Using a realist style of rhetoric, the coal industry and its allies in the oil and gas industry, conservative think tanks, and conservative media set a rhetorical trap for divestment advocates, the “Hypocrite’s Trap.” Three moves set the trap: establishing ignorance, exposing complicity, and naming hypocrisy. Industry advocacy characterizes the divestment movement as idealistic and unrealistic, elitist and dangerous, and hypocritical and immoral. In so doing, the hypocrite’s trap thus reinscribes divestment activists as individual consumers, rather than members of a collective movement. It also positions itself as a heroic provider of energy for the poor. This strategy positions the advocates of divestment as hypocrites but also reasserts the neoliberal reality, reasonableness, and virtue of the market.

Coal and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

This concluding chapter examines the contradictions and fissures in the rhetoric of coal industry advocacy. By identifying inconsistencies in the coal industry’s public discourse, the chapter shows where neoliberalism’s footing is not secure and reveals how the coal industry’s rhetoric is a cobbled-together project, not a discursive and ideological monolith. It buttresses a rationality that requires constant rhetorical upkeep, a smoothing and suturing of the various and contradictory neoliberal impulses. The authors argue that these contradictions are sites where environmental and climate advocates can continue to apply pressure and leverage, and that coal is the harbinger of things to come for oil and gas, as climate change awareness, renewable fuels, and regulatory policies continue to apply pressure to the fossil fuel industry.

Environmental melodrama, coal, and the politics of sustainable energy in The Last Mountain.

The Last Mountain is a 2011 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) film. It examines an aggressive form of strip mining in West Virginia known as mountaintop removal (MTR). The Last Mountain was the first of more than 40 MTR films to be distributed nationally and, as such, marks the entry of the issue onto the political scene in the USA. This essay analyses the films use of environmental melodrama to define the problems related to MTR and create identification between victims of MTR and viewers. However, the latter portion of the film attempts to scale up from the melodramatic depiction of MTR to advocacy on broader issues regarding renewable energy and global climate change. In doing so, the film breaks with melodramatic form, draining its emotional power, foreclosing systemic political action, and limiting its overall effectiveness as a sustainability narrative.