When the conversation opened up on the second day of our November workshop, after my presentation on acceptable risk, the project team and the invited participants spent much of the remainder of the morning developing and jotting down ideas for fostering better, more informed and more constructive public deliberation about hydraulic fracturing.
Our initial ways of phrasing the questions were rough, and many of them were likely to be perceived as biased against one group or another, playing on stereotypes, say, of engineers or of some of the more strident individuals who might show up for a public hearing.
In the weeks that followed, the project team at Georgia Tech revised the list, and reconsidered it, and revised it again.
The end result is a set of questions that will frame the work of our second workshop, now scheduled for early April: Continue reading “Hydraulic Fracturing: Toward Better Deliberation”