Contesting Energy Discourses through Action Research (CEDAR) is a five-year project studying energy generation in Canada. Our focus is New Brunswick.
Canadians are experiencing more high temperatures, wildfires, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events. Burning massive volumes of fossil fuels has changed the climate. Climate scientists are urging us to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure and to rapidly reduce our fossil fuel use.
However our societies and economies are largely powered by fossil fuels. How will we transition to more sustainable energy generation?
The CEDAR project studies, questions and challenges corporate claims about energy transitions and we support alternative voices and perspectives.
In Canada and many other countries, renewable energy use is increasing while fossil energy use has plateaued or is also increasing – fossil fuel extraction continues, more power is added to electrical grids, and carbon emissions are barely changing overall.
How can we talk about “energy transitions” when the structures and relations of power shaping energy generation remain the same? The federal government wants Canada to be an “Energy Superpower” – what about climate action?
The media – corporate, independent, alternative and social media – feature competing discourses about energy transitions.
In corporate media across the country, the dominant energy transition discourses – voiced primarily by by government and industry spokespersons – promote economic growth fueled by fossil fuels or biomass paired with carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Fossil energy such as fracked gas is positioned as a “transition fuel” to low-carbon energy in the distant future, and experimental nuclear reactor designs are promoted.
New Brunswick is an ideal location to study these dominant discourses. Saint John is home to the largest oil refinery in Canada and gasoline is the province’s top export. Corporate voices urge the provincial government to build a fossil ‘natural’ gas-fired electricity plant, and they promote shale gas fracking, all despite widespread opposition by rural and Indigenous communities.
The province wants to operate a coal-fired energy plant beyond the 2030 federal coal phase-out deadline. The public utility NB Power is relying on speculative small nuclear reactor or new CANDU designs while undermining the ability of renewable energy to meet New Brunswick’s electricity needs.
At the other end of the spectrum, counter discourses challenge the industry hype and promote energy conservation, reductions in aggregate energy use, decentralized and community-based renewable energy generation, autonomy and control over energy access, and ending social and environmental injustices related to energy production and consumption.
CEDAR is studying how these contesting discourses for energy transitions are framed in the media, the networks of actors, organizations and institutions promoting the dominant discourses, and how action research can produce and publish counter discourses in the media and contribute to a more democratic media environment.