Living with Uncertainty
Chris Groves on the community impact of liquid natu-ral gas (LNG) in south Wales
In the siting of potentially hazardous or polluting infrastructure, acentral issue is how the benefits and costs that come with it get dis-tributed. Is it fair, for example, that people in one locality shouldbear the risks associated with a dirty production process while oth-ers reap the benefits? Where the siting of energy infrastructure isconcerned, the answer may be less obvious. Surely everyone bene-fits from the supply of electricity or gas? And in the contemporaryworld, security of energy supply is surely of national importance?So isn’t it a reasonable trade-off to expect someone, somewhere tobear the costs?However, things are not this clear-cut. The siting of a new en-ergy plant does not happen in a historical vacuum. For example, ithas long been recognised that patterns of development tend to lo-cate polluting industries and potentially hazardous infrastructurewithin materially, socially and environmentally deprived areas.Faced with economic and social inequality, which may includepockets of intractable poverty and chronic ill-health, local govern-ment often finds it difficult to refuse inward investment and thepromise of jobs, however they are being provided. One might thinkof Teesside and Cumbria in England, or the Valleys, Anglesey andPembrokeshire in Wales. Patterns of development in MilfordHaven and Neath Port Talbot attest to this law of attraction. As thesociologist William Freudenberg once remarked, it is remarkablehow often technical planning criteria tend to be satisfied “on thepoor side of town”, leading to inequitable concentrations of risk.If long histories of social injustice lie behind some individual sit-ing decisions, then this brings in another, moral issue: if siting de-cisions imply questions about the distribution of costs and benefits(“who gets what”), then they should also force us to ask whetherpeople have been given the opportunity to consent to bear the costs(including risks) imposed through the planning process (“who de-cides who gets what”). We can draw an analogy with medicine:
when informed consent is sought for an operation, this (at least inthe USA) means that significant risks associated with the procedureto be performed should be fully and transparently disclosed. Theplanning process is similarly intended to allow social and environ-mental impacts, including risks, to be disclosed and debated. How-ever, a problem inherent in discussions of risk is that riskassessment, although it draws on applied scientific knowledge,cannot command the kind of consensus that scientists strive for —even though quantitative estimates of risk are often treated by pol-icy makers and the media as objectively valid statements. Risk as-sessment is not an objective enterprise, it always involves value judgements about what risks are important, what kinds and levelsof risk are tolerable, and what uncertainties still exist once knownrisks have been catalogued. This means that, in the words of thephilosopher Kristin Shrader-Frechette, the main questions to beasked are not “What are the probabilities?” but “[h]ow objective isobjective enough? How certain is certain enough? How just is justenough?”Consequently, if we’re going to ask whether those affected by asiting decision have had a fair chance to give or withhold their con-sent, then we also have to ask another question: has a consensusbeen arrived at as to whether a given project may bring with it sig-nificant risks? It’s true that arriving at such a consensus may bevery difficult. There are limits to how far the risks of any given ac-tivity or decision can be scientifically understood, just as there arelimits to scientific certainty in general. And on whether a given risk— or unquantifiable uncertainty — should be accepted or rejected,science has nothing to say, this remains a moral and political ques-tion. Early and wide formal consultation might help in making pos-sible some form of democratic agreement on how acceptable arethe uncertainties and risks of a given siting decision, but such aprocess would have to include transparent disclosure by operatorsand regulatory agencies of known risks, of the current limits toknowledge about risks, and in addition an honest discussion of po-tential benefits. Unfortunately, the planning system in Wales, andindeed in the UK, tends to hinder rather than help any such processof fully democratic consultation.In the summer of 2008, I conducted a pilot study in south Walesto prepare the ground for a future study of the role which an ab-sence of consultation, consensus and consent plays in producingplanning conflicts. This consisted of 13 semi-structured interviewswith people from communities across south Wales and Glouces-tershire since 2005 who had been involved in a range of differentcampaigns against the building of the 316-kilometre long under-ground gas pipeline that runs from new LNG terminals in MilfordHaven to Trebanos and Cilfrew near Neath, through the BreconBeacons, past Hay-on-Wye, all the way to Tirley in Gloucestershire.
67Planning and Protest
68 Living with Uncertainty
These campaigns had been conducted variously against the sitingof the terminals themselves in Milford, against the routing of thepipeline, and against the siting of various pieces of above-groundinfrastructure required by the pipe. They drew on concerns raisedby professional engineers about the actual construction of thepipeline, in several localities along its length, which had given riseto doubts about its long-term safety. A common factor thatemerged was how those involved had experienced the impact ofuncertainty on their lives, and how this led them to campaign fora full discussion of vital concerns surrounding the siting decisionsthat had, in their view, been left unaddressed. In each case, thespeed with which decisions had been taken was viewed as havingprevented this kind of debate happening. In the absence of full con-sultations, there could be no public consensus on the acceptabilityof the new infrastructure, independent of the claims of the compa-nies responsible for building it. And without such consensus, itcould be argued that no consent to bear risks had been given.The stories I heard showed how people had made considerableefforts to understand the range of potential impacts associated withthe infrastructure projects. As they had collated a wide range ofsources of information, their anger at what they saw as a lack oftransparency on the part both of private companies and public au-thorities had increased. Interviewees recounted how, as attemptsto resolve the uncertainties surrounding the projects came to noth-ing, they and their friends, families and neighbours felt increas-ingly betrayed by local authorities, government agencies and theAssembly and Westminster Governments. The legacy of these ex-periences was described in terms of lingering doubts, and in manycases fears, regarding the safety and security of the interviewees’physical and social environments. In places which in many casesalready suffered significant economic, social and environmentaldeprivation, the experience of having additional uncertainties im-posed from outside created a strong sense of fear, vulnerability andinjustice. Furthermore, it brought into sharp focus for several in-terviewees (who used Aberfan and Tryweryn as examples of pastbetrayals) the distance between local communities and Cardiff Bayon the one hand, and between Wales and Westminster on the other.In every case but two, the stories I was told began with instancesof the coming development being noticed too late to make a dif-ference. Where major installations were concerned, I heard variousaccounts of one-way communication from company representa-tives after planning decisions had already been taken, presentingthe coming infrastructure as a
fait accompli
. In places like Cilfrew,where above-ground gas stations fell under the Town and CountryPlanning Act, people described being told by a friend or neighbourabout a planning notice tucked away in the local paper, or dis-played on a lamppost. National Grid, the private company with re-
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Living with Uncertainty
What impacts do large infrastructure projects have on communities? Drawing on the case of the South Wales Gas Pipeline, this essay summarises the results of an empirical study into how experiences of uncertainty show how imposed uncertainty can itself be a form of social harm. The results are compared with the work of Kai Erikson and Michael Edelstein.
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