Shane Gunster

“Ethereal Carbon”: legitimizing liquefied natural gas in British Columbia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the provincial government of British Columbias recent proposal of building a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry, in which natural gas extracted through hydraulic fracturing will be liquefied and then exported to Asian markets. Drawing upon the growing literature on energopower, petro-state, and petro-culture, selected texts and images from “LNG in BC”—the projects official branding website—were analyzed through a multimodal critical discourse analysis. The results reveal two primary strategies of legitimation: the first emphasizes the economic benefits of LNG development in terms of employment and taxation revenues; the second defines LNG as a means of strengthening B.C.’s environmental leadership. The second narrative depends heavily upon the symbolic values of natural gas, contrasting its “clean” appearance (as a colorless and odorless gas) with the material density and “toxic sensuality” of other “dirty” fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and bitumen). The website also presents a linear and simplified “storyline” of the generation of LNG which emphasizes the simple, “clean” process of liquefaction to distract attention from the ecological and health risks of hydraulic fracturing.

(De)legitimating extractivism: the shifting politics of social licence

ABSTRACT Most scholarly accounts of social licence define it as a public relations strategy to legitimate resource development. In Canadian pipeline politics, however, it has had the opposite effect, crystallizing widespread concerns about industry capture of regulatory processes and affirming the democratic rights of local communities. This assessment of the concept’s critical, counter-hegemonic potential to challenge the policies, practices and logic of state-sponsored extractivist development situates social licence as a key discursive battleground in the struggle between politicization (which accents agonistic confrontation between competing alternative futures) and de-politicization (which defuses conflict and builds consensus around the perception of common interests). Frame analysis of news media and advocacy group texts is used to investigate how opponents of a pipeline project bridged the idea of social licence with movement frames concerning identity, injustice and democratic agency to transform the concept from a public relations term meant to enable corporate activity into a critical trope used to constrain it.

Climate Hypocrisies: A Comparative Study of News Discourse

ABSTRACT This paper conducts a comparative study of how the idea of hypocrisy was invoked in media coverage of climate change in 12 newspapers from four countries (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between 2005 and 2015. It develops the concepts, and explores the characteristics, of three distinct types of climate hypocrisy: personalized (which attacks the moral character of individuals based on inconsistencies between their stated beliefs and behavior); institutional-analytic (which identifies contradictions between institutional rhetoric and ongoing policies and practices); and reflexive (which develops sympathetic accounts of the struggles individuals face in reconciling the tension between values and actions). It explores how these types are used to undermine the credibility of climate advocates as well as to argue for more aggressive climate action, and maps out key features of climate hypocrisy discourse including ideological attributes, targeted actors and behaviors, affective intensity, and regional variations. It outlines a number of surprising key findings, such as (i) hypocrisy discourses are more frequently invoked by “progressives” supporting climate change action than by “conservatives” resisting climate change action, and (ii) while both groups use hypocrisy discourse, they tend to use very different types of hypocrisy discourses which each likely have very different impacts on climate change discourse.

Journalism, Climate Communication and Media Alternatives

Recent scholarship on the media’s response to climate change has eagerly suggested a revamping of the traditional tools of journalism in order to engage and inform audiences. This chapter argues that the proposals currently being put forward are too modest in their demands and scope, failing to respond with the urgency climate change demands and woefully unequipped to combat the anti-environmental logics of commercial news media, which are corporate-owned, dependent on advertising, and therefore inherently consumerist. Instead, this chapter proposes a reframing of climate politics by activist organisations, new and integrated journalistic paradigms, and renewed emphasis on the crucial role of alternative media.