Shale gas has become an energy policy priority in the United Kingdom in light of profitable extraction activities in the United States. Since 2012, the UK Government has created key economic drivers to encourage shale exploration, whilst growing activism in affected site communities has stirred significant media and academic commentary. This study examines the growing national debate as a matter of discourse; adopting an argumentative discourse analytic approach to assess data collected from stakeholder interviews (n=21) and key policy actor statements quoted in broadsheet newspapers. We explore three dominant 'storylines' emerging in relation to shale gas policy.

The materiality of digital communication inflicts substantial environmental damage: the extraction of resources needed to produce digital devices; the toxicity of e-waste; and the rapidly increasing energy demands required to sustain data generated by digital communication. This damage, however, is paradoxically under-theorized in scholarship on environmental sustainability. Despite the existing critique of the "technofix" approach in sustainability studies, digitizationand digital communication in particularcontinue to be celebrated as the tool for environmental sustainability; an approach we coin "digital solutionism." The article presents the first systematic review of the literature to map the implicit assumptions about the relationships between digital communications and environmental sustainability, in order to examine how digital solutionism manifests, and why it persists. We propose a concept matrix that identifies the key blind spots with regards to environmental damages of the digital, and call for a paradigmatic shift in environmental sustainability studies. An agenda for future research is put forward that advocates for the following: (1) a systematic account of material damages of devices, platforms and data systems adopted into sustainability research and practice, resulting in changes in both research framing and methodological foundations; (2) a reconceptualization and denaturalization of the digital itself as a promising solution; (3) a theoretical dialogue between sustainability studies and environmental communication. (4) an expansion of environmental communication as a field, from focusing on the communication aspect of environmental change to include the environmental footprint of communication itself.

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