Practical argumentation in the energy and climate debates

This paper looks at the decision made by the Lancashire County Council (LCC) in June 2015 to reject Cuadrilla’s applications for exploratory drilling in the Fylde area. It looks at the arguments made in favour of shale gas exploration, as formulated by the applicant, the LCC’s Officer’s report and other interested parties, on the one hand, and at the arguments against, made by members of the public and representatives of NGOs, on the other, analyzing the way they were weighed together, prior to the decision made by Development Control Committee of the LCC to reject the applications. By comparing and contrasting these arguments, variously based on alleged positive or negative outcomes (including benefits, risks and impacts), but also on allegedly non-overridable constraints (laws, policies, legally binding commitments, human rights, socially shared values), the paper aims to uncover the institutional constraints on decision-making operating in democratically elected political institutions and thus provide an analytical framework for the analysis of energy and climate debates.

Our aim is to understand the policy debate (argumentation). This requires understanding the place of debate in political problem solving (policy making/implementing). There are a lot of discourses, declarations, policies and strategies around, but they don’t all get to be worldchanging, and which ones do depends on the argumentation in the debate. There are ‘competing arguments’ in the debate – competing policies and strategies. Is the issue ‘argumentative strategies’, or rather argumentation as an inherent facet of energy/climate strategy choice and conflict? How is the current energy/climate state of affairs variously problematized, how do different problematizations (+ values) link to different goals, how are contradictions between multiple goals (cf value hierarchies) addressed in the debate? How do normative and explanatory critique figure in evaluation of the debate from within the debate and by analysts? What are the terms of debate? Do strategies for hegemonic change (implicit eg in ‘zero growth’ positions in the debate) depend on changing these terms?

This presentation discusses the potential for argumentation analysis of large scale societal practices such as production networks around shale gas production and consumption. Data and analysis from an ongoing project around the social organization of the “fracking” controversy in the Marcellus shale region of the Northeastern United States is used to scaffold theoretical and methodological considerations about argumentation analysis. Theoretical considerations include scaling up the conceptualization of argument as repair in human practice for analyzing large scale practices in society. Methodological considerations include the building of macroscopes for describing and reconstructing argumentation at scale through the uses of computational techniques for dealing with big data, such as social network analysis and natural language processing methods. Both considerations address the socio-materiality and polylogical features of large-scale pratice and the role of argumentation in organizing the actional and epistemic consequences of practice.

This talk focuses on the debate between supporters of climate change accounts (IPCC and the scientific community at large) and climate change denialists (who self-identify as climate change sceptics) and in particular on the argumentative strategies deployed by the latter. In an attempt to characterise the argumentative profile of denialist discourse, I analyse the arguments voiced by Werner Munter, a well-known and retired Swiss mountain guide, against the account presented in IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports – these reports representing the scientific consensus that climate change is human-induced. One of the argumentative strategies that will be discussed in detail is the charge of conspiracy (which Zarefsky refer to as “the conspiracy argument”, see Zarefsky 2014: 205-206); Munter indeed accuses the scientific community of lying and scaring the general public in order to preserve economic interests, which is a well-represented strategy among denialists. Drawing on recent literature on conspiracy theories, I try to characterise the argumentative features of such conspiracy charges both from an argumentative and rhetorical perspective and suggest lines of research to account for the likely persuasive success of these strategies.

Contemporary theory of argumentation offers many insights about the ways in which, in the context of a public controversy, arguers should ideally present their arguments and criticize those of their opponents. We also know that in practice not all works out according to the ideal patterns: numerous kinds of derailments (fallacies) are an object of study for argumentation theorists. But how about the use of unfair strategies vis-à-vis one’s opponents? What if it is not a matter of occasional derailments but of one party’s systematic trivialization of the other party’s problems, without taking the other seriously? What if one party systematically forgoes any form of critical testing and instead seems to resort to pressure in the form of threats or blackmail? Can this be countered by the tools of reason? Or should one pay one’s opponent back in the same coin? To gain some grasp of these issues, we describe a number of strategies used in the public controversy about the induced earthquakes in Groningen. We check whether these strategies are fair, i.e. balanced, transparent, and tolerant. We also investigate the effects of the choice for a particular kind of strategy. It appears that, in circumstances, choosing a fair strategy may be detrimental for resolving the controversy and choosing an unfair one beneficial. Following up ideas from social psychology and political science, we formulate some guidelines for the choice of strategies. At the end we stress the importance – especially for those who carry little weight – of having a society in which the ability to perceive the (un)fairness of strategies is widespread.

This talk addresses the theoretical issues of (1) which types of propositions may occur in debates and (2) how these propositions are related argumentatively. First, a typology of debate propositions will be expounded. Attention will be paid to the characteristic differences between the types and to the question of how to identify and reconstruct them in natural language. Then, on the basis of an analysis of the different types of arguments, the PED-model of debate propositions will be presented. It will be explained how this model reflects the various argumentative relations existing between the propositions to be found in debates.