Review of Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy: 15 Contentious Questions

In a so-called “Post-truth” era, the role of facts in society has become ever more ambiguous and contentious. Increasingly, facts are simultaneously used as a tool for risk assessment and risk management on the one hand, and an instrument of politicking and social polarisation on the other. That facts are subjective artefacts is not new. Pioneering sociologists like Emile Durkheim (Durkheim, 1996), Michel Foucault (Foucault, 2008, Burchell et al., 1991), and the Frankfurt School (Nicholas, 2012) (to name a few), have ruminated over the subjectivities of knowledge more than a century ago. But the difference in our current modern, hyper-globalised world is that the subjective nature of facts are increasingly both the best tool we have to deal with global risk, and a prime source of global risk at the same time. The question this raises, is how to deal with this paradox in policy? And is cooperation possible without consensus on whose facts are more true?