Disclosure Conflicts

Abstract

Many governments and corporations have embraced information disclosure as an alternative to conventional environmental and public health regulation. Public policy research on transparency has examined the effects of particular disclosure policies, but there is limited research on how the construction of disclosure policies relates to social movements, or how transparency and ignorance are related. As a first step toward filling this theoretical gap, this study seeks to conceptualize disclosure conflicts, the social processes through which secrecy is challenged, defended, and mobilized in public technoscientific controversies. In the case of shale oil and gas development (“fracking”) in the United States, activists and policy makers have demanded information about the contents of fluids used in the extraction process and the routes of oil shipments by rail. Drilling and railroad companies have resisted both demands. Studies of such disputes reveal the dynamic and conflictual nature of information disclosure. In both cases, disclosure conflicts unfold dynamically over time, reflecting power disparities between industry groups and their challengers and requiring coalitions of activists to pursue multiple tactics. When a disclosure policy is established, it does not resolve social conflict but shifts the focus of struggle to the design of information systems, the quality of disclosed data, and the knowledge gaps that are now illuminated.

Keywords

shale oil and gas transparency politics environmental governance information disclosure secrecy social movements

In the last decade, the oil and gas industry has become adept at extracting oil and gas from deep underground shale formations, using a combination of technologies to create fractures that release fossil fuels (a process known as “fracking”). Secrecy and transparency are persistent concerns across many dimensions of fracking governance in the United States. Protesters, investors, and emergency responders have demanded more information about the contents of fluids used in the extraction process, the routes of oil shipments by rail, and other dimensions of extraction. The emerging body of social research on fracking has acknowledged that information flows affect public perceptions of the industry (Mazur 2014; Maule et al. 2013; Evensen, Clarke, and Stedman 2014), and there is a growing body of research on transparency as a new form of environmental governance (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007; Mol 2010; Gupta 2008). However, there has been little research on secrecy and disclosure policies in the case of fracking (for exceptions, see Wiseman 2013; Fisk 2013).

Research on this topic is needed for at least two reasons. First, information disclosure is a central, but frequently misunderstood, part of the governance of fracking in the United States. Past research suggests that poorly designed transparency policies are ineffective and can do harm (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007; Gupta 2010), so there is a need for critical scrutiny of the myriad disclosure efforts that are now taking shape in the arena of fracking. Second, existing research on transparency policies does not provide an adequate theoretical framework to understand the dynamic and conflictual processes through which secrecy and ignorance are challenged and maintained in the case of fracking. Public policy research on transparency examines the effects of particular disclosure policies, but there is limited research on how the construction of disclosure policies relates to social movements or how transparency and ignorance relate to one another.

As a first step toward filling this theoretical gap, this study conceptualizes disclosure conflicts, the social processes through which secrecy is challenged, defended, and mobilized in public technoscientific controversies. Disclosure conflicts unfold dynamically over time, as struggles for information disclosure give way to secondary conflicts over presentation and interpretation of information, the design of disclosure infrastructures, and the credibility of the various experts and agencies involved. We analyze and compare two public conflicts over the disclosure of information about the shale oil and gas industry. The first concerns the chemicals used in the process of fracturing shale rock. The second concerns the risks of transporting crude oil, extracted from shale, by railroad. In both cases, we probe the relationships among environmental activism, industry disclosure, and environmental knowledge, as they evolve over time. This research approach brings attention to flows of knowledge between powerful actors and the public, and the political strategies that affect the design of disclosure systems.

Governance by Disclosure

Objections to industry secrecy are not unique to the case of fracking. We now live in an “information age” (Mol 2006) where “regulation by revelation” (Florini 1998) or “governance by disclosure” (Gupta 2008) is preferred over command and control regulation by government agencies. Policy makers and activists alike increasingly place their faith in transparency as a way to rein in the environmental and health abuses of major industries (Gupta and Mason 2014). As research in science and technology studies (STS) points out, there is often reason for concern about industry secrecy. Allen (2008) has commented on the problem of “missing information” about the health impacts of environmental toxins. Missing information stems not only from the failure to conduct suitable studies but also from secrecy and the hiding of scientific data—topics that have been examined in a variety of other studies (Galison 2004; Martin 1999; Zavestoski et al. 2002).

The “right to know” (Florini 2007) is an expanding policy concept. Initially premised on the idea that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” transparency rules that were put into place in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and other Western democracies focused on the release of government documents (Graham 2002). A “second wave” of transparency policies—targeted transparency—took hold in the 1990s (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007). Many governments and corporations embraced information disclosure as an alternative to conventional environmental and public health regulations. Targeted transparency policies promise “to reduce financial, health, and safety risks; minimize corruption; protect civil rights; and improve public services” (Weil et al. 2006, 155), for example, by improving public participation in decisions about risky technologies. These policies follow a broader set of trends in neoliberal reforms: “The ingeniousness of targeted transparency lies in its mobilization of individual choice, market forces, and participatory democracy through relatively light-handed government action” (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007, 5).

However, case studies by Fung, Graham, and Weil (2007), Gupta (2010), Florini (2007), and others indicate that disclosed information empowers the public only in certain conditions. In particular, information must be designed with users in mind and become “embedded” in the decision-making processes of information users (Weil et al. 2006). Mol (2010, 136) observes, “Transparency will only execute its powers…when those meant to use the disclosed information have access to and literacy regarding this information; and when those whose information is disclosed are vulnerable to accusations of poor environmental performance. Both are not always the case.”

Public use of disclosed information is hindered by an array of problems. Industry groups may undermine disclosure policies by lobbying for weaker requirements or by disclosing information in ways that confuse or mislead the public (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007). In some disclosure systems, users “drown in disclosure” (Gupta 2008, 3), a situation in which so much information is disclosed and in such a format that information users do not have the time, resources, or expertise to analyze it effectively. Analysis and interpretation of disclosed information may be difficult, particularly when there are scientific unknowns about potential harms (Gupta 2010). Furthermore, designing technological infrastructures for disclosure may itself become be a resource-intensive process that exacerbates inequality rather than empowering those in need of information (Gupta 2010).

Public policy research has provided crucial insights about how to make governance by disclosure more effective; however, most studies overlook or downplay two aspects of the politics of transparency that are important to understand. First, research on the policy-making process tends to emphasize interest group compromises, when in fact there are often extreme power imbalances between the implicated industry and the affected communities. In a wide-ranging comparative study of numerous information disclosure policies, Fung, Graham, and Weil (2007, xii) found that the policies “were always limited by politics. They represented compromises forged from conflict, as people and organizations with diverging interests and values battled over how much information should be made public and in what forms.” They found that this compromise process can have negative consequences: “When the information from the tug and pull among many interests is incomplete, inaccurate, obsolete, confusing, or distorted, it can contribute to needless injuries or deaths or to large economic losses” (7). This is a crucial insight; however, the depiction of policy-making as a process of compromise among interest groups downplays the significant inequalities that surround industrial secrecy. Low-income communities affected by groundwater pollution, for example, are hardly in a position to make meaningful compromises with multinational oil and gas corporations.

A second shortcoming of many studies of disclosure is that they seek to measure the outcomes or effectiveness of a particular policy rather than analyzing shifts in social relations that are more difficult to quantify. For example, research assesses whether disclosing toxic releases (Kraft, Stephan, and Abel 2011) or reporting public school test scores (Hanushek and Raymond 2005) leads to positive outcomes. However, as STS researchers have observed, disclosure is not just a policy or technical practice; it is a way of organizing power relationships among companies, regulators, activists, various publics, and scientific experts. Writing about online interfaces for disclosing toxic release information, Fortun (2004, 283) argues that “environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project certain modes of subjectivity.” Thus, how information is disclosed may be as important as the content of the information itself. For instance, Delborne and Galusky (2011, 64) argue that by taking “information poverty” as the main obstacle to environmental justice, many well-meaning efforts at transparency create a one-way flow of knowledge that does little to support the political empowerment of affected communities.

Because a disclosure mechanism reorganizes the social field in which it operates, it often inadvertently produces new issues and conflicts that may be as difficult to resolve as the initial problem. Disclosure begets secondary conflicts about the credibility and openness of “the disclosing agency, the media ‘owners’ that facilitate or hinder transparency, and the actors verifying, certifying and auditing environmental information (the new transparency powerbrokers)” (Mol 2010, 139). Further complicating this situation, disclosure is increasingly decentralized and citizen driven (as in the examples of WikiLeaks or in the case of citizen scientists who monitor and report industrial emissions). In the case of fracking, citizen science and counterexperts are important parts of the information landscape (Kinchy 2017; Wylie and Albright 2014; Jalbert 2016).

These characteristics of transparency debates today make them difficult to understand using a static and one-dimensional conception of disclosure policy. For these reasons, we propose an approach to studying disclosure that brings greater attention to dynamic and contentious processes. We draw on the tradition of controversy studies in STS that describes how knowledge claims are mobilized and challenged in ongoing, dynamic conflicts that shift the strategies and even the identities of the scientists taking part in them (Nelkin 1995; Delborne 2011). Our approach also reflects insights from the sociology of social movements about the changes in relations between challengers and targets over time (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). Finally, our analysis brings the literature on disclosure policy into conversation with the growing literature on scientific ignorance, which emphasizes dynamic social relations (Frickel et al. 2009; Gross 2007; Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). Gross (2007), for instance, traces the ways that knowledge and unknowns are produced recursively over time in the context of controversial environmental projects.

Hess and colleagues (Woodhouse et al. 2002; Frickel et al. 2009; Hess 2009, 2015, 2016) refer to conditions of “undone science,” in which social inequities are reflected in patterns of scientific knowledge production.

The term “undone science” refers to a situation of unequal power that involves a conflict between reformers, such as social movement leaders, and industrial and political elites, and that is associated with absent knowledge…. [T]he idea of undone science draws attention to a kind of non-knowledge that is systematically produced through the unequal distribution of power in society, where reformers who advocate for a broad public interest find that the research that would support their views, or at least illuminate the epistemic claims that they wish to evaluate, is simply not there. (Hess 2015, 142)

Studies of undone science portray advocacy organizations not just as political interest groups but also as important forces shaping scientific knowledge—and challenging power disparities between experts and laypeople. However, the theory of undone science focuses on conflicts over broad research agendas, not the disclosure of specific factual information that is often the focus of disclosure policies (such as gallons of toxic discharges or rates of equipment failure). They are related—as when science depends on access to industry data—but the dynamics that are particular to information disclosure are obscured when it is conflated with the larger, heterogeneous category of “ignorance.” Therefore, we suggest the concept of disclosure conflicts to distinguish conflicts over information transparency from conflicts over “undone” research agendas.

We develop the concept of disclosure conflicts as a first step toward theorizing the dynamics of transparency politics more generally. Disclosure conflicts arise when regulators, information disclosers, and potential information users disagree about what types of information are important, relevant, or safe to disclose. Industry or government secrecy is often the initial target of public protest, but disclosure of information does not necessarily bring a disclosure conflict to a conclusion. Problems associated with transparency policies can spur new conflicts. As critics draw attention to these problems, the focus of disclosure conflicts may shift over time. We develop further insights about the features of disclosure conflicts in the case studies below.

Research Methods

Data for this analysis were gathered through an extensive review of policy documents, publications, and press releases by industry and environmental organizations, news reports, and secondary sources, such as law review articles. The research approach was inductive. Questions about disclosure arose out of exploratory research in a region of Pennsylvania that was undergoing a fracking boom in 2009-2010. Interviews with landowners and community leaders and observations of the growing national movement against shale gas development revealed widespread preoccupation with questions about the chemical makeup of fracking fluid—a chemical solution used in the drilling process that may leak into groundwater or contaminate surface environments—amid an array of other troubling impacts and risks of the industry. We began to wonder how activism became focused on this specific factual question and how challenges to secrecy fit into larger social conflicts over the risks of shale energy development in the United States.

To probe whether the conflict over fracking fluid secrecy was representative of a more general phenomenon, we sought another case where activists were framing industry secrecy as a problem. Secrecy and information disclosure are concerns across many dimensions of oil and gas development including methane emissions, regulatory findings on groundwater contamination, and the routes of trains carrying crude oil. We chose to focus on the last of those topics because it has been the subject of a great deal of rulemaking and investigative reporting since 2013, making research materials readily available. Future research should take up comparisons with other cases, including cases unrelated to oil and gas. For the purposes of this study, however, we chose to focus on oil- and gas-related issues because of their contemporary environmental and political significance.

Our research process was to read widely on the two controversies, constructing chronological histories of the initiation of conflict and the subsequent dynamics of debate and contestation. We constructed each case study by beginning with a “flare-up” of controversy and then working backward and forward in time to contextualize it and understand its aftermath. This method is useful for identifying the actors involved in a complex case. Its shortcoming is that it ignores those actors who may be relevant but who do not appear in the documentation surrounding the “hot” portion of a controversy. By tracing the conflict over time, we were able to observe the dynamics of each case, as decisions about disclosure set off secondary waves of conflict. A limitation of relying on documentary sources is that we have no direct information about the strategies and rationales for the actions and decisions that activists, firms, and state actors took in each case. However, we can observe the sequence of events and changes in the discourse, by reading legal and policy documents, news reports, and materials produced by the various actors involved in these cases. By making comparisons between the cases and comparing our evolving understandings to the literature on transparency and ignorance, we were able to identify the features of what we eventually conceptualized as disclosure conflicts.

Fracking Fluid

Anti-fracking organizations in the United States have fought the oil and gas industry on a wide range of issues, but one of the most persistent demands is for disclosure of the contents of fracking fluid. The oil and gas industry was initially secretive about the makeup of fracking fluid but has come to embrace transparency on its own terms—through the disclosure website FracFocus—in order to meet activist demands without having to change its drilling and waste disposal practices.

Finding the Gaps in Disclosure Policies

The fracking fluid disclosure conflict suggests that environmental advocacy organizations with legal and scientific research staff have a vital role in investigating and challenging the limitations of disclosure policies. Hess (2009) found that such organizations frequently “get undone science done” by producing or commissioning scientific reports on underexamined issues. We observe that they also contribute to environmental knowledge by initiating disclosure conflicts, challenging public policies that allow certain forms of industry secrecy. In this case, policies that exempted oil and gas drillers from reporting toxic releases became a focus for environmental activism and policy-making in the context of the shale oil and gas boom.

Secrecy around the activities of oil and gas drilling was built into the original industrial disclosure legislation created by the United States in the 1980s. Following the Bhopal chemical release disaster in 1984, the US government passed into law the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. This legislation requires many categories of manufacturing facilities to report their inventories of hazardous chemicals and their environmental releases, making this information available to the public through a database called the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI; Graham and Miller 2001). The TRI had an impact on activism (Fortun 2004; Delborne and Galusky 2011) and contributed to decreases in toxic releases on the part of many industries (Graham and Miller 2001), but there are exemptions to the TRI that weaken its impact. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulemakers have excluded oil and gas industry wastes from the TRI since its creation, citing the low concentrations of wastes from any single facility. This exclusion set the stage for disclosure conflicts over fracking.

While oil and gas exemptions did not get much public attention in the early days of the TRI, some groups raised objections. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) pointed out gaps in the TRI in a 1991 report (Sheiman 1991) and called for the TRI to add oil and gas extraction to these lists of industries. The same year, the US General Accounting Office (1991) reported widespread support for expanding the TRI to cover nonmanufacturing pollution, like that produced by drilling. These challenges had no apparent effect on disclosure policy.

As the oil and gas industry was pursuing new shale formations in the United States, regulators gave the industry even greater protections from disclosure requirements in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Among other things, the Energy Policy Act exempted companies from federal reporting requirements when materials (such as fracking fluid) are injected into deep underground wells. Environmental groups nicknamed this exemption the “Halliburton loophole” because it was introduced by former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney and served the company’s interests (Earthworks 2016).

Again, environmental advocates protested the inadequacy of US regulations and disclosure policies (Sumi 2005). The Earthworks Oil and Gas Accountability Project, for example, called for regulating fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) as well as eliminating potentially toxic substances from fracking fluids. They also called for public accountability mechanisms, including disclosing the contents of fracking fluid (Sumi 2005). These ideas were taken up in some policy proposals; in 2008 and again in 2009, Democrats in Congress introduced the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act to bring fracking into the regulations of the SDWA and require disclosure of the contents of fracking fluid. While the bill earned significant media attention, it failed to pass (Lustgarten 2009).

Environmental advocates continue to call for disclosures of fracking fluid releases under existing public policy. In 2012, a coalition of nineteen organizations petitioned the EPA to require oil and gas facilities, including fracking wells, to report their toxic pollution to the TRI. Petitioners included the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), Earthworks, the Sierra Club, and the NRDC, along with a variety of local water protection organizations. In 2015, the EIP sued the EPA to respond to the group’s petition (EIP vs. US EPA, 2015). Finally, at the start of 2017, the EPA proposed regulations requiring that natural gas processing facilities report to the TRI, but this did not address the questions about fracking fluid, which are used in production, not processing (EIP 2017). Public disclosure of fracking fluid information is still not required by federal policy.

Seeing inaction at the federal level, some states worked to provide oversight of fracking. While three states and many municipalities enacted fracking bans (Newman 2017), more relied on mandatory or voluntary disclosure mechanisms. Between 2009 and 2012, fifteen states had mandatory disclosure laws for fracking that required drillers to reveal some amount of information on the contents of fracking fluid. However, these requirements were limited. Only seven required disclosure of all additives used, and only two of these required identification of the concentrations. All but two states gave permission to use “trade secrets” as a reason not to disclose information about toxic releases. Most importantly, these regulations were not specific about the mechanisms for disclosure, which opened the door for the industry-run disclosure website FracFocus, discussed below (McFeeley 2012).

Framing Secrecy as Threat

Pressure on governments to require industry disclosure did not just come from professional advocacy organizations. There was a rising wave of public alarm about the mystery of “what’s in the fracking fluid,” particularly after 2009, when residents of one small Pennsylvania town found their well water undrinkable, a case that received national attention over several years (Bateman 2010). Supporters and opponents of fracking engaged in framing and counterframing efforts, seeking to shape public interpretations of frack fluid secrecy in ways that would motivate action or acceptance (Benford and Snow 2000; Shriver, Adams, and Cable 2013; Heikkila et al. 2014). When effectively framed, secrecy itself can become a powerful motivation for public protest because it allows speculation about worst-case scenarios. The anti-fracking movement used unknowns about fracking fluid to heighten public concern about the shale boom.

One of the more visible public calls for information disclosure in this time period was the documentary film Gasland (2010), directed by Josh Fox. Gasland presents a harrowing image of the impacts of fracking on communities and wildlife, and the contents of fracking fluid become a central question that provides much of the investigative tension in the film. Fox explains that “fracking chemicals are considered proprietary like the special sauce for a Big Mac.” The film highlights investigative work by concerned scientists like Theo Colburn who uncovered knowledge about the health risks posed by fracking fluids. Colburn’s research with the Endocrine Disruption Exchange compiled Material Safety Data Sheets and other hard-to-obtain sources of information about the chemicals used in fracking (Wylie et al. 2016; Wylie 2018). At least three scenes of Gasland feature lengthy listings of different fracking fluid chemicals, and viewers are repeatedly reminded that drillers are not required to share this information with people who are potentially exposed.

The film had a visible impact on the anti-fracking movement, inspiring discourse around the dangers of fracking and encouraging attendance at anti-fracking demonstrations (Vasi et al. 2015; Mazur 2014). Industry secrecy—while intended to evade public alarm about pollutants—thus became a reason to protest. By 2012, environmental groups, activists, and policy makers across the country were trying to force the industry to disclose the contents of fracking chemicals, as part of campaigns to either end fracking or at least create reliable knowledge about its impacts (Mazur 2014).

Initially, supporters of fracking attempted to minimize public concerns about fracking fluid by framing it as benign, not worthy of detailed disclosures. For example, proindustry websites featured information graphics claiming that fracking involves only ingredients that are common in household products. Soon, however, industry groups began to acknowledge that they needed to share information in order to regain public trust. The British consulting group Control Risks published a white paper on the anti-fracking movement acknowledging that “its war on disclosure is largely won” (Control Risks 2012, 5). The International Energy Agency likewise recommended public disclosure of water volumes used and chemical compositions of wastes as a means of earning public confidence, explaining that failure to disclose can “breed mistrust among local citizens and environmental groups” (Birol 2012, 43). According to the “golden rules” of drilling they outline, drillers’ “social license to operate” is earned through good behavior on the part of industry, including transparency.

Constructing Audiences for Disclosed Information

How would the industry disclose information about fracking fluid? Disclosure systems are not just flows of data; they also construct roles for “the public” in the governance of industry. Many transparency policies construct the public primarily or exclusively as consumers; for example, mandatory food labels and car safety ratings are designed on the principle that it is possible to change industry behavior through the marketplace, by mobilizing consumer preferences. In other disclosure systems, users of the data must act as citizens and activists in order to pressure companies to change their behavior. In an analysis of websites that seek to make toxic release data available to users, Delborne and Galusky (2011) find that the design and implementation of web-based information sharing sites construct particular audiences based on geography and define roles for those audiences. For example, users are provided with toxic release information based on their ZIP code, county, and state rather than potentially more salient designations such legislative district, locally defined community, or watershed. People are then guided into particular actions such as faxing a letter of concern to a polluting factory or calling a political representative.

It seems unlikely that a disclosure system voluntarily created by the oil and gas industry would be designed to facilitate protest in the ways described by Delborne and Galusky (2011). Indeed, when oil and gas companies began disclosing information about fracking fluid on the website FracFocus, it was evident that it was meant to educate the public about the safety of fracking chemicals rather than to stimulate further activism. The industry-sponsored Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission launched the website in 2011 to provide a place where people can get “accurate, factual information” about fracking—specifically the contents of fracking fluid (FracFocus 2015). The FracFocus website allows users to find specific releases on a well-by-well basis, but it does not provide the tools to analyze or compare toxic releases from fracking operations. Furthermore, FracFocus places any information about releases in a context that explains that these chemicals pose minimal threat, for example, by including descriptions of industry efforts to protect groundwater and explanations of the uses of fracking chemicals (Gosman 2013). Thus, FracFocus makes it difficult for users to be anything other than passive consumers—not just of data on the activities of specific wells but also of pacifying explanations of the fracking process.

FracFocus has become the primary mechanism for disclosing fracking data in twenty-three states (FracFocus 2015). The EPA turns to the website as a source of data on the safety of fracking (US EPA 2015). Environmental advocacy groups have used FracFocus data to investigate drilling practices; for instance, the EIP found that hundreds of well operators have violated environmental regulations by using diesel fuels in the fluids used in hydraulic fracturing operations (Greene 2014). But the website has come under fire from activists (Mall 2011), researchers (Gosman 2013; Konschnik, Holden, and Shasteen 2013), and regulators (US EPA 2015) for making it difficult to extract the sort of data that is necessary to carry out systematic and cumulative analysis. The website has been criticized for being voluntary, for offering an incomplete list of chemicals, and for being controlled by the gas industry (Gosman 2013; Konschink et al. 2013). Furthermore, critics observe that reports are only available in PDFs that describe the releases from individual wells, which makes it difficult to draw out larger pictures of the impacts of fracking (Konschink et al. 2013; US EPA 2015).

FracFocus has not reached its final form. In 2015, the website announced the upcoming release of FracFocus 3.0, which promises to expand the public’s ability to search records, yet it is still “ALMOST HERE…” in early 2018. To the extent that FracFocus has been upgraded to allow extraction of data, it provides a visceral experience of the “drown[ing] in disclosure” described by Gupta (2008, 3). The data can only be accessed in 13 Excel spreadsheets of 250,000 rows each.

The case of fracking fluid disclosures leads us to several insights about disclosure conflicts. First, conflict between environmental advocates and industry can emerge when a new threat—in this case fracking—reveals the shortcomings of existing disclosure policies. Disclosure conflict can also begin when a polluting industry seeks exemptions from disclosure requirements, as in the example of the so-called Halliburton loophole. Industry secrecy, while meant to avoid public scrutiny, can lead to public outcry, particularly when activists, reporters, and filmmakers frame secrecy as a sign of danger. Finally, when industry groups make information disclosures in an attempt to regain public confidence, this shifts the focus of the disclosure conflict but may not resolve it. Environmental activists have demonstrated agility in shifting focus from regulatory exemptions to industry secrecy to faulty disclosure systems. In the next case, we further probe these patterns and observe some additional dimensions of disclosure conflicts.

Crude Oil Train Routes and Risks

Between 2008 and 2014, the production of crude oil in the United States increased from 5.1 million barrels per day to 8.8 million (Energy Information Administration 2017), far exceeding the capacity of the existing pipeline infrastructure. This led to an enormous increase in oil shipments in railroad cars: from 9,500 carloads to nearly one half million carloads (Association of American Railroads 2015). These factors resulted in a corresponding increase in train accidents. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 646 spills involving crude oil trains in the United States alone, including ninety-four derailments, which spilled over 300,000 barrels of oil, injured twenty-two people, and caused $800 million in damages, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA 2017). Furthermore, since this oil comes from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, its unique composition makes it more combustible and therefore more dangerous in the case of a derailment (Lord et al. 2015). The danger of Bakken oil shipments was made plain in the devastating Lac-Mégantic accident of 2013, which killed forty-seven people and destroyed a town (Transportation Safety Board of Canada 2014).

National advocacy groups such as Sierra Club and ForestEthics, as well as local communities residing near railroad tracks and terminals, have called for a ban on crude by rail and demanded more information about crude oil train routes and cargos, in order to ensure public safety. In response to information demands, the railroad industry has resisted disclosure, arguing that secrecy improves public safety by keeping that knowledge out of the hands of potential terrorists. As in the case of fracking fluid, this case illustrates how environmental advocacy organizations identify and struggle against gaps in disclosure policies, how activists and industry frame secrecy in competing ways, and how disclosure mechanisms construct audiences. In addition, this case highlights industry’s capacity to roll back already existing disclosure mechanisms in favor of greater secrecy. It also demonstrates the capacity of civil society organizations to generate grassroots transparency mechanisms that mobilize collective opposition to oil trains and shale oil development more generally.

Finding the Gaps in Disclosure Policies

As in the case of fracking fluid, professional environmental advocacy groups have played an important role in investigating and challenging gaps in disclosure policies pertaining to crude by rail. Following the Lac-Mégantic disaster and other incidents, the Department of Transportation (DOT) issued an Emergency Order (US DOT 2014) requiring railroads with trains transporting one million gallons or more of Bakken crude oil—about thirty-five tank cars—to submit notifications to state emergency response centers (SERCs) in each state in which the railroad operates trains. The disclosures were to include an approximate number of trains expected to travel weekly through each county within the state, a description of the crude oil expected to be transported, basic emergency response information, the rail routes over which the material will be transported, and a railroad point of contact for SERCs and other emergency responders. Railroads were required to provide this information by early June 2014 and then update the notifications whenever there was a 25 percent increase or decrease in the number of implicated trains per week.

After the Emergency Order, there was a formal process, including the collection of public comments, to create a Final Rule on crude oil by rail. When the Final Rule was released in May 2015, it appeared to backtrack on several aspects of the previous year’s Emergency Order—despite tens of thousands of comments in favor of greater transparency (PHMSA 2015b, 26710). Notably, DOT agreed to treat some information about oil shipments as “sensitive security information” (PHMSA 2015a). Senate Democrats quickly responded with a letter to the Secretary of Transportation, laying out three transparency needs that were, in their view, not sufficiently addressed in the Final Rule. They demanded that the DOT continue to require disclosures to SERCs, provide information proactively to first responders, rather than requiring first responders to make requests for information, and ensure that the information is available to the public (Cantwell 2015).

By the end of May, the DOT was backpedaling on the disclosure-related aspects of the Final Rule, explicitly acknowledging public criticism. The DOT asserted that the disclosure requirements in the Emergency Order would remain in effect and that railroad companies would have to continue reporting information about crude oil shipments to SERCs in a timely way (PHMSA 2015b; Federal Railroad Administration [FRA] 2015). This was a win for challengers, but it left the DOT with two conflicting sets of rules for train transport of crude oil: the more open Emergency Order and the more secretive Final Rule.

Advocacy groups took legal action in search of clarity. Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law organization, filed an administrative appeal on behalf of a coalition of municipalities and civil society organizations across the country, including Sierra Club, ForestEthics, Waterkeeper Alliance, Riverkeeper, and others. The appeal requested that the DOT modify the information disclosure sections of the Final Rule to align with the Emergency Order. The appeal addressed specific details, such as the role of SERCs and the timing of disclosures, but also made a more general defense of the public’s right to have access to the information about crude oil routes. However, just a week after submitting the administrative appeal, Earthjustice (2015b) reluctantly withdrew it, to avoid jurisdictional obstacles to other oil-train-related petitions that the environmental groups and communities had filed with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Framing Secrecy as Security

In the previous case, drilling companies tried to deflect calls for disclosure by framing fracking fluid as benign. Railroad companies took the opposite approach, arguing that releasing the information could pose a national security risk. Like drilling operators seeking to protect their “secret sauce,” they also characterized their shipping routes as confidential business information that should be protected from rival companies (PHMSA 2014, 45041). However, the security argument was pivotal. The FRA, an agency within the DOT, determined in 2014 that the railroad disclosures would not constitute “sensitive security information” (Conti 2014). Nevertheless, railroad industry leaders continued to argue that disclosing information threatens national security. For instance, in a spring 2015 public forum, a spokesperson for the rail company BNSF said, “We’re always cognizant of what information is shared, because we don’t want to see an incident that involves terrorism or anyone else who might have that kind of frame of mind” (Ahearn 2015). This position was reflected in the 2015 Final Rule.

In contrast, Earthjustice (2015a) and other environmental advocates argued that restricting public access to crude oil shipment information would amount to “disregard of open government principles,” that the public had a fundamental “right-to-know” about oil train routes and cargoes, and that the Final Rule “would unreasonably restrict the public’s access to information that is important to its safety” (p. 24). These ideas were not incorporated into DOT rules, but were reflected in an array of alternative efforts to inform the public about crude oil rail shipments, discussed below.

Connecting Audiences and Information

When the Emergency Order asked railroad companies to disclose information, the intended audience were State Emergency Response Commissions—not the general public. Unlike FracFocus, which addresses a public audience, albeit with unnavigable data, railroad companies shipping crude oil do not make public disclosures. However, journalists sought to make the information disclosed to SERCs available to a public audience. Journalists used public records requests to obtain the information that rail companies provided to states after the Emergency Order. Journalistic access was limited: at the request of railroad companies, some states refused to provide oil train information to reporters (Vock 2015). And when information was disclosed, it gave a sense of the scale of the shipments but was otherwise sparse on details. One typical investigative report revealed that dozens of oil trains per week pass through the Midwest and West Coast including urban centers such as Chicago and Seattle (Brown 2014). The BNSF Railways disclosures to California included only the number of Bakken crude oil trains passing through each county and no further information (Bizjak and Tate 2014). The Wall Street Journal compiled state-by-state disclosures to create a map showing the weekly average number of crude oil trains moving from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota through each county of the United States (Wall Street Journal News Graphics 2014). While illuminating at a national scale, the information was not of great use to concerned communities who worried about particular train tracks running through their neighborhoods. A spokeswoman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services recognized this limitation, attesting that, “frankly, the disclosures weren’t of that much use….The expectation of the public is very far from the reality of what we’re actually getting” (ProPublica 2014).

Activists were not satisfied by disclosures to SERCs, so some began to gather information themselves, in efforts similar to the investigations by Theo Colburn in the case of fracking fluid. FracTracker Alliance and a research team at Carnegie Mellon University announced in October 2014 that they were seeking volunteers to record video footage of train cars passing near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Rubight 2014). In Washington State, volunteers with the Snohomish County Train Watch took shifts to count oil trains passing through their communities (Ahearn 2015). ProPublica created a map of reported crude oil safety incidents, which, when aggregated on a US map, provided an outline of the rail routes commonly taken (Qiu et al. 2014).

In contrast to the official disclosures to SERCs, activist-led efforts were meant to construct an active public audience. For example, the Blast Zone Map, developed by ForestEthics (now called STAND), used industry data, census data, and Google Maps to create an interactive website where users could find out whether they were in the “blast zone” in the case of an oil train explosion (ForestEthics 2014). This tool was available as part of the organization’s “Stop Oil Trains!” campaign. With the slogan “Millions of North Americans live in the blast zone, do you?” STAND framed users as part of a large, impacted public. For STAND, information about train routes should be used to stop the transportation of crude oil, not just to mitigate the risks of crude oil transport by improving emergency response capabilities. They worked to translate information into activism by encouraging users to sign a petition demanding the release of “oil train secrets” and to more broadly use this information to pressure the government to regulate the oil and gas industry.

The oil train disclosure conflict clarifies two important points. First, disclosure conflicts do not necessarily result in greater disclosure. Industry opposition to the disclosure required by the Emergency Rule resulted in an even less transparent disclosure policy. The railroad industry has appeared less susceptible to public image concerns than the industry groups seen in the fracking fluid case and have used a national security framing to their advantage. Second, when disclosure systems are unhelpful for mobilizing publics, activists may take disclosure into their own hands and create their own mechanisms to understand and communicate about the activities of industry. We suspect that like official disclosures, grassroots disclosure mechanisms do not conclude disclosure conflicts but move the focus of struggle to a new set of concerns.

Conclusion

This study has illuminated political struggles over disclosure of industry information about activities relating to oil and gas extraction in the United States. These struggles, characterized as disclosure conflicts, involve dynamic interactions between activists, industry, and the regulatory state. To interpret these disclosure conflicts, we brought the social science literature on governance by disclosure into conversation with STS perspectives on controversies and the production of ignorance. Most research on “governance by disclosure” has focused on static policies and their measurable effects, sometimes demonstrating their ineffectiveness at achieving public health and environmental goals. Such studies provide insights about how to construct more effective disclosure schemes. However, disclosure has secondary and sometimes cascading social effects, even when transparency is incomplete or faulty, and these require further analysis.

Disclosure conflicts are dynamic, changing focus and character as information is released or concealed over time. Furthermore, the policies that govern disclosure are often contradictory; this is most evident in the DOT’s divergent rules on railroad disclosures but also seen where state and federal policies differ on fracking fluid disclosures. In each case, environmental advocacy groups, often working in coalitions, analyzed public policy and fought to change policies that enabled industry secrecy. They framed secrecy as a threat to the public, countering industry defenses of trade secrets or national security. They also critiqued disclosure mechanisms, sometimes creating alternative approaches to information sharing when the official systems were unsuited to mobilizing public action.

Activism surrounding disclosure resembles social movements contesting “undone science” (Hess 2015). Research has documented an array of cases in which social movement groups identify knowledge gaps and contest ignorance, both through citizen science and by targeting knowledge producing institutions, such as the medical profession (Frickel et al. 2009). Our account of disclosure conflicts is similar in that pressure from social movement groups encourages industry to fill in knowledge gaps, but providing information does not necessarily mean that the undone science is now “done.” Instead, the presentation and interpretation of disclosed (or undisclosed) information sparks or defuses further rounds of protest. For example, environmental advocates and journalists have been able to analyze and reframe data from limited or misleading disclosures, in order to create new knowledge that is more useful for communicating risks to a broader public, or for enforcing environmental regulations. In this context, the technologies of disclosure can themselves become targets of protest, as their credibility and openness are called into question. However, the limitations of disclosures may not be immediately apparent, and disclosures might only lose credibility when environmental advocates gain access to counterexpertise or data from citizen scientists who challenge disclosed information.

Public pressure does not always succeed in yielding disclosures of desired information, as seen in the case of crude by rail. However, when protest does lead to a public disclosure policy, industry disclosures can paradoxically produce new (but less obvious) forms of ignorance. Disclosure mechanisms can guide the interpretation of information, or they can incompletely fill knowledge gaps, by providing information to restricted audiences or leaving out information that could spark outrage. The case of FracFocus suggests that industry groups do not only use secrecy to protect their interests, they also use disclosure as a means of shaping how the public perceives oil and gas fracking. Constructing that disclosure mechanism was not just capitulation to public pressure; it seemed to be aimed at defusing public alarm by reducing the mystery of fracking fluid contents through selective transparency. For the oil and gas industry, disclosure—when done its way—can secure public confidence and minimize evidence of problems.

Understanding these dynamics could be valuable from different perspectives. Environmental and social justice activists may need to develop strategies for mobilizing politically engaged audiences even when information is scarce or when disclosures are confusing or distracting. Policy makers can anticipate that disclosure policies will not close debate but rather shift its focus. Those in industry who are committed to corporate social responsibility ought to advocate for approaches to disclosure that enable affected communities to identify and act on specific areas of concern rather than attempting to provide blanket reassurances. Scientists, engineers, and other experts may step into the role of analyzing and interpreting disclosed information for public audiences, when infrastructures for disclosure fail to do this adequately.

Further research is needed to understand the strategies behind calls for disclosure: why has information disclosure become such an important policy debate and feature of anti-fracking activism and other technology-oriented social movements? It is hard to craft effective disclosure policies, and research on this mode of governance suggests that it is often ineffective or even counterproductive. The various social movement organizations that are advocating for information disclosure in our cases have more ambitious aims to ban or significantly regulate shale oil and gas development, so why invest time and effort demanding disclosure? While disclosure can be understood to reproduce a neoliberal, market-oriented approach to governance that is little help to environmental movements, our case studies suggest that advocacy for disclosure may be strategic. Not only do calls for disclosure stimulate public concern about unknown industry behavior, but shaping the formats of disclosure can also contribute to mobilizing public audiences to action.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express gratitude to Wynne Hedlesky for her contributions to the crude oil trains case study. Thanks are due as well as to David Hess, Michael Bouchey, Beth Berman, Kendra Smith-Howard, Jennifer Dodge, Steve Breyman, Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Katie Vann, Ed Hackett, and the anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided critical feedback on various versions of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Initial research for this project was supported with seed funding from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

ORCID iD

Abby Kinchy

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