Thank you very much for being here. We have largely an energy group today. We're looking to be very energy dominant.
Unleash energy dominance.
This is unleashed the National Energy Dominance Council.
We are unleashing energy dominance, and.
You're going to see this is basically energy dominance, and it's going to be environmentally clean, environmentally wonderful, and we're going to make more money than anybody's ever made with energy. We have more energy than anybody else. I call it liquid gold under our feet.
Energy dominance. That is the Trump Administration's catchphrase when it comes to America's new energy policy, or should we see old energy policy? Always energy policy. In February of twenty twenty five, Trump established the National Council on Energy Dominance, whose aim is basically more oil, natural gas, and coal, with a smattering of geothermal and nuclear thrown into me AI demand. He's promising cheaper prices at the pump for consumers and no more of that pesky wind and solar.
You just heard the voices of President Trump, his Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgham, and EPA administrator Leez Eldon All repeating that same line energy, energy, energy dominance, like it's a magic spell. But what does energy dominance actually mean? Who or what is the Trump administration trying to dominate with it? Is it the energy itself?
Those molecules of freedom as the Trump administration was calling it back in twenty nineteen, But they're trying to dominate.
American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have always said America needs more energy. Also, why are they always.
Unleashing it.
Totally? In his first term, you may remember Barry President Braco was pitching the idea of energy independence, which was basically covered to justify lifting the export ban for the fracking guys.
Hello, everybody, I'm speaking to you today from a UPS customer center in Landover, Maryland, where I came to talk about an issue that's affecting families and businesses just like this one, the rising price of gas and what we can do as a country to reduce our dependence on foreign ore. This week, I released a blueprint for a secure energy future. Part of the strategy involves increasing our oil exploration right here in America.
And of course becoming a net exporter. Did the opposite of making the US energy independent, Instead it hogtied US to an energy commodity market that's been jerking prices around ever since. And despite all the industry's talk of Biden's environmental policy getting in the way of its growth, the US actually became the world's top oil and gas producer and exporter under Biden.
Let's debunk some miss here. My administration has not stopped or slowed US oil production. Quite the opposite. We're producing twelve million barrels of oil per day, and by the end of this year, we will be producing one million barrels a day, more than the day in which I took office. In fact, we're on track for record oil production in twenty twenty three, and today the United States is the largest producer of oil and petroleum products in the world.
So Obama and Biden basically had an all of the above energy strategy, boosting fossil fuel production along with solar, wind and other renewables, while Trump is really only interested in liquid gold.
Yeah, Trump loves gold so much and he hates building renewables, even in places like Texas where they secretly make a bunch of Republicans a lot of money. He is, as we tape, actively trying to kill the clean energy industry a free markets.
But I do think the crucial difference beyond just the policy is also the way Trump and his cronies think about energy and the way they talk about it. They keep hitting on that word dominance, and that's the keyword here. The Dems wanted market dominance for American energy, and they were fine getting there with wind or solar, but with Trump and MAGA, it's more than that. Whether or not they believe in climate change is almost beside the point.
It's the idea that fossil fuels are at the center of the global economy and that power comes from controlling them. It's not about independence or security. It's about power, and not just on a geopolitical level of being able to bully other countries, but almost like on an individual one.
It reminds me of that line from Doom.
Yes, he who controls the spice, it drove the universe spice. And it's that word dominance, not spice, that we want to talk about in this episode of Carbon Brows, because the idea of trying to dominate through taking possession of natural resources goes back a lot further than Trump or even the fight over climate change.
It's the story of how masculinity and extraction got linked in our collective imaginations, how we went from thinking of the earth of a living organism or mother even to something we can plunder and destroy and profit from as we as men see fit, And how the fight over climate change became bound up with the backlash against feminism, transgender rights, and the rights of anyone or anything that challenges the supremacy of men.
Welcome back to Carbon Bros.
I'm Daniel Penny and I'm Amy Westervelt.
On today's episode, Good Energy Dominance.
There are a lot of ways we could start this episode about the masculine urge to dominate nature.
And it should be said right from the top that dominance and aggression are not innately masculine traits, nor do all men exhibit them hashtag not all men. But for the purposes of this combo, we're talking about hegemonic masculinity or toxic masculinity, the type that Trump, MAGA and the global far right view as the only proper way to be a man. Last year, I spoke with doctor Terry Cooper's who's one of the leading academic researchers that helped popularize the term toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity is not synonymous with masculinity. We have to be clear about what we're talking about. There are multiple masculinities. There's a hegemonic masculinity which is being contested right now.
What is hegemonic masculinity and what distinguishes that from toxic masculinity.
There's a dominance hierarchy, and within that framework we can look at characteristics what we call in psychology traits like hyper competitiveness, like brutality towards those lower on the dominance hierarchy. Those things I believe are socially evil, They're not appropriate aims to strive for, and a group of those things
I lump under toxic masculinity. At different points of time, different forms of masculinity emerge and become more or less powerful, dominant hedgebonic masculinity looks at that historical development with the question what kind of masculinity is dominant now or hegemonic? For instance, I believe in the United States we're having a cultural war about that. We have a president who explicitly advocates sexism, misogyny, homophobia, islamophobia, etc. All of which you're part of toxic masculinity.
So to recap, just like there are many ways to be a woman based on cultural and historical context, masculinity is not all one thing, and it does not have to be agro, but hegemonic masculinity that's the kind of images and behaviors and social scripts we encounter every day does equate manliness with dominance.
And this is important when we think about how these macho men treat the natural world.
To understand how dominating nature got all tied up with masculinity, we have to talk about how ideas about nature became gendered in the first place. And for about as long as we have documentation of humans, there is this idea of Earth as a womb, as a maternal figure nurturing humans. It spans back for centuries across cultures and religions from Pacha Mama amongst the indigenous peoples of Peru.
And of course the Greeks had Gaya and the Romans had Tera mater mother Earth. This familiar relationship between humans and the rest of the national world goes back to way before hippies were making bumper stickers about it, and it's remained a recurring theme in pop culture. I was actually just watching this clip that I found from a nineteen ninety Earth Day TV special with a lot of celebrities in it, including Robin Williams and Bette Midler playing Mother Earth. What are you worried about?
Everyone's saying Mother Nature?
Mother Earth?
People said, we gotta respect Mother.
Earth what we do. But she loves us.
She's always there for us, isn't she. She's always got.
One more tree upper sleeve, doesn't she.
And she's the type of mom who could never say no.
Stop praise He's I can't marry her another word.
It's second.
Enough of this drivel.
What is this?
Marny grown may see Thanksgiving day break?
Come on, are you arigant?
Little Homo sapiens?
You don't know me?
I'm not surprised.
It's hard to recognize me anymore.
Oh.
Once I was so fresh, so green, my skies were so bloom.
I was pristine, my Mother Earth.
And I'm sick and it's all.
Your fault to me?
Why is it all it's mart fault?
Yeah?
The Mother Earth thing really cuts both waysy. On the one hand, it's presented as a reason to respect the planet, on the other as a reason to endlessly extract with impunity. It makes me wonder how nature even got coated as feminine in the first place.
A certain kind of European Christianity has been very influential in the United States in terms of kind of framing that men should have dominion over women and children, but also over the environment. That has been really foundational to the story of the United States.
That's Sophie Burke James. She's a researcher at Vanderbilt focused on the intersection of gender, environment, and religion. Her work often looks at the connections between the anti abortion movement and other far right projects, including climate change.
We can see a very clear through line across anti environmental movements that they generally are also anti feminist and opposing gender equality and supporting various kinds of male supremacy. That those are often very much linked, particularly in the
United States, but elsewhere as well. It's a power relation, and I think that's what's really important in trying to understand why the anti feminist far right movements of today are also generally opposed to acknowledging there our current environmental reality, which is we need a different relationship to the natural.
World, like this idea of dominion. It's not coming from nowhere. It's a specific interpretation of the Bible. This is Genesis, right.
Let us make men in our after our likeness, and let.
Them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and.
Over the power of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Yeah, a specific interpretation of the Bible that really prioritizes this notion of power over others.
There's many biblical scholars that say that the Bible is actually could be read as an environmental text, that there's many themes in the Bible that talk about not just dominion over and control over in nature, but can be actually read as a text about how to celebrate nature
and live in harmony with nature. Protestantism is often very much in line with capitalist values around property and around viewing the natural world not as something that we rely on and that requires respect and care, but as something that can be parceled out into private property. And that's a very different kind of relationship.
Right.
If it's your property, you can kind of do whatever you want with it. It's again about power and control and not about a kind of symbiotic relationship.
What's the connection then, to the plight of women, because obviously today women aren't property, but they once were.
There are some parts of the current Christian right that want not to turn women into property, but they are opposed to the Nineteenth Amendment, which allows women the vote. When I first started studying the Christian right in the United States over fifteen years ago, that was a really radical position that's becoming much more, not mainstream, but talked about more broadly, like that women should be should no
longer have the right to vote. If we kind of step back and look at what these movements are about, they're about asserting relationships of power and control in the world, and that means men should have power and control over women.
That feminism is a direct assault to this worldview, but also recognizing the reality of climate change is also a direct assault to that worldview, and that if you have to recognize that you, as a human being are ten on a much broader ecological system that you know is vulnerable to human impacts, then it's a very different relationship than one of power and control. And so I think that the power and control is the kind of foundation to both of those issues.
But a certain version of Christianity that says man has dominion isn't the only thing driving a wedge between humans in the natural world. During this time, this Protestant theology was brought to the US by settlers. Where I live on the outer tip of Cape Cod is actually the first place the Pilgrims landed on their way to Plymouth. But I think they couldn't get much food here, and
a lot of them starved to death. Anyway. The Pilgrims, like most Europeans during the so called Age of Discovery, believed this new world was promised to them by and whoever was first to lay claim to it was the rightful owner. This is known as the doctrine of Discovery.
Exactly, and a really cool loophole to this approach was that if someone did make it there first, but they weren't a Christian, that didn't count.
I hear I claimed this land and all literally tests in the name of His majestin kaing James the past, and to so name the settlement James Town.
The Doctrine of Discovery is one of the original international law doctrines that was developed in the fourteen hundreds to control the actions of European Christian nations.
This is Robert Miller. He's an expert in federal Indian law and an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.
As Europeans began to sail outside the site of land, they began to be interested in acquiring empires in Africa and then into the Americas and into Asia. And this idea that the Church and the kings and queens of Europe could develop international law to control how they acquired empires. We call this the doctrine of discovery. Because Europeans were discovering other cultures, other people's, other lands, and then wanted to be able to claim them and have those claims
recognized under international law. It's finders keepers to the extent that they were finding lands that were truly vacant. They very rarely found lands that were truly vacant. They were claiming the lands of indigenous peoples in Africa, in the Americas, and in Asia.
Robert really blew my mind when he pointed out that the doctrine of discovery is still alive and well today, though it doesn't just apply two Christian nations colonizing other parts of the world anymore, but it's still justifying what it did back then resource extraction.
It is still the law today. Russia and China have planted their national flags on the bottom of the ocean bed under the North Pole in two thousand and seven, and in twenty ten China puty its flag on the bottom of the South China Sea. So nations are still using this idea that where they arrived first, they can acquire by claiming this area.
So while the Virginia and East India companies were sailing around the world laying claim to new lands, the British upper classes were also busy at home kicking peasants off their land. This was a process called enclosure, which Karl
Marx writes a lot about it. And this was this idea that in the feudal era you had lords who were given land by the king, but then there was also something called the commons, which was land that everyone got to make use of, and they could graze their animals there, and they could take firewood, etc. And at some point in the sixteen hundreds, Parliament got together and they started passing laws that allowed the wealthy to take that land entirely for themselves and kick the peasants off
of it in the name of agricultural improvement.
Who raised a hand against the king's men will be arrested.
You'll have no right.
They've signed it out.
Well, now it belongs to the Earl of Manchester, by whose authority, by the authority of the king.
Then I say that.
King is a thing.
You're under arrest. Take them away.
And this is what, according to Marx, created the working class people without land, who had to sell their labor in order to survive.
Living in twenty twenty five, when absolutely everything has been commodified, it's hard to remember that there was a before to the way we live now. But it was during this transition hundreds of years ago, when capitalism was just getting started, that a lot of our collective ideas about nature were starting to crystallize. One of the more important ones was that if you can't price something like the value of an impact ecosystem, for example, or clean drinking water, then
it's worth nothing. We got to read a new book about all this, recently called Free Gifts, Capitalism and the Politics of Nature by Elisa Battistoni. Here she is explaining it in more detail.
Western culture and Enlightenment, and there's this moment that comes about with Dick part and then other Enlightenment thinkers, that really institutes the separation between like the thinking, rational human being and the dumb matter of the world, Like that animals or machines and everything else in.
The world is just kind of a solis nothing.
To be used as we will and sort of put to human use.
Major division between human beings and the rest of the world. Then the basic idea has really structured fundamentally a lot of Western development.
The expropriation account.
Looks at this violent process of expropriation of taking. You know, even John Locke would say God gave this orth command in common, and then what happens is like some people appropriate there's.
And the privatization of that by this very violent process. I think that's the other sort of major story we.
Have about what happens with capital.
So the free gift is really built into sort of like the daily processes of capitalism in a way that's not necessarily about what we think or what we believe, because there's this sort of foundational reality.
Apologies because I know you wrote able book about it, but if.
You can define what you mean by a free gift, So.
This term the free gift of nature.
There's a term that I really get out of looking at a lot of classical political economy.
So people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo and Jambetts, and a lot of the people writing and like the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who are writing the early days of capitalism and the development of industrial capitalism, and they are describing the contributions that non human nature make to production. They talk about the organs of sheep that help produce full they talk about soil fertility that helps crops grow. There's a lot of different gifts of nature
that give gratuitously to production. They're observing all of these wonderful gifts, but they're giving only to capital in the system where they're the.
Ones who are benefiting from the free gifts of nature.
I'm curious what you think about the sort of way that nature has been gendered throughout most of history in general, and like weather call it Mother Earth or referring to the planet, and all of these sort of like feminine terms, has contributed to the idea that it should be free.
Yeah, I think we should be a more circumspect about embracing the Mother Earth's language, because I think it can't suggest this rationalization in a way of on the one hand, that mothers are also supposed to give freely and generously and selflessly and so on, and so we should treat that labors if it's just kind of like available for the taking, you know, it seems like the earth.
Is just giving them to us of its own free religion.
I think is rarely the case.
I think it's maybe more of like a thing where it kind of ends up justifying that rather than causing it.
Okay, we've got man's dominion over nature and women, the doctrine of discovery to justify grabbing foreign land, rich landlords using violence to get rid of the commoners and take it for themselves, and to keep all of this humming. You've got the free gifts from mother nature. This stuff may sound abstract, but it's still shaping so much conservative opposition to environmental rules and the fight to stop climate change.
Yes, this is a super important point. The importance of private property is at the core of American conservatism today. The rights of property owners get invoked every time environmental regulations threaten to limit how people use their land by not allowing them to dump chemicals into rivers, for example, or pollute the air with plumes of CO two.
And while there are many people who helped promote this concept, there's one guy who did more than most, John Locke.
Maybe father liberalism or a father anyway. Right wing groups like the Federalist Society and the Fraser Institute are always putting out youtubes about luck, though if you actually read his work you realize how much they get wrong.
Yeah, the number of misleading YouTube explainers these guys put out is crazy. I actually had to wade through quite a few of them preparing for this episode, But I think my favorite comes from Cato Institute, which is a conservative libertarian think tank set up by oil billionaire Charles Koch.
Shout out Koch Brothers, the original Carbon Bros. All the way back in the nineteen nineties, they were putting out cassette tapes to try to win the hearts and minds of young conservatives, and they dedicated a whole self study tape on John Locke's Two Treatises of Government.
Welcome to Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, a presentation of the Cato University, a project of the Cato Institute. The notion that property was originally owned in common had been defended by Christian thinkers for many centuries. Therefore, philosophers had to explain how private ownership arose from communal ownership and why this transition was morally justified. This was the task undertaken by John Locke.
I love this intro. We need to find a way to defend kicking people off their common land, And thankfully here's John Locke.
God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience. The earth and all that is therein is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. Yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use or at all beneficial to any particular man.
Okay, man has dominion over the earth, that's from Genesis, Adam and Eve, and man is supposed to use his reason to decide what to do with that. But these days there's more than one man. So how do you decide who gets what?
Beginning with self ownership, Locke develops an ngous defense of private property.
The labor of a man's body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in. He hath mixed his labor with and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.
When a man gathers acorns in the wild, he mixes his labor with the acorns and thereby becomes their owner.
This is the classic finders keeper's defense. But Locke goes beyond the doctrine of discovery. He's proposing that if I use my reason to find and gather those acorns, then I've mixed my labor with them, and they become my private property. So sorry, Amy, no acorns for you. That doesn't seem fair.
But Locke proposed that a value from some resource on your land was derived as a result of your labor or.
Or the labor of a worker you paid.
Then that value should be yours. And this had a huge influence on the Founding followers. Here's Robert Miller again.
John Locke's theory was to put land to its best and highest use, and in American society that seems to be make the most money off it as you can plunder it for its resources. If there's water, use it, use it, even if you use it up or defolid If there's oil or trees or minerals, it's strip mined until you have it all and then leave it and walk away.
So, really early on, right at the founding of the US, you're getting this fundamental shift in our relationship to land, where the natural world is fully abstracted as property with economic value, what Marks would call a commodity property that only white men can own.
I drink your milkshake.
I drink it up.
It's a pretty straight shot to this.
It's called drill, baby, drill.
We'll be drilling down more on that after the break.
American culture is a culture premised on cheap, blowing oil, and automobility is a pillar of petra cultures in the United States. It's also that it's very difficult to even imagine how life could be otherwise because everything is cemented around us. As long as there's power and profit to be had from fossil fuels, we will continue to see some form of petro masculinity.
This is Kara dagget A Virginia tech political scientist who coined the term petromasculinity in twenty eighteen with a groundbreaking study titled Petromasculinity, Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire and It, Daggett lays out the case for fossil fuels being about more than just profit and energy and digs into the ways our social and political lives have been shaped by an attachment to oil, gas and coal. You poined this term in twenty eighteen in an academic article. This was
during Trump's first term. What exactly did you mean by that term and what were you seeing or reading at the time that led you to this insight with that term.
I think it took on a life of its own, which was a total surprise to me because.
It can be.
Understood in this deep, structural and historic which is really where I wanted to go with it in the article. And at the same time, it's so visibly present that I think just saying the word people can understand or think of examples that they see out on the road
and in their everyday life. When I wrote about this, that was during the first Trump administration, and what I wanted to do was understand this connection and far right movements between misogyny, anti feminist politics, anti queer politics, and the support for fossil fuel and climate denial.
One of the most visible aspects of this relationship between masculinity and fossil fuels is the obsession that how many men have with their cars. A twenty twenty three study from the University College London found that when men were manipulated into believing that their penises were smaller an average, they were actually more likely to want to buy a sports car or rate a sports car as important and
conferring status. For anybody who's ever seen a pair of truck nuts dangling off the rear bumper of a pickup, the relationship between driving a powerful vehicle and the masculinity is pretty obvious.
Can you name the truck with pool wheel drime, smells like a steak and seats thirty bad rule?
Can we know from past drilled seasons that Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Berneze actually introduced this idea of cars being an extension of manhood. Here's an example from a car ad he was involved with back in the fifties.
Taking so much longer than nast year it is really is longer than some levels.
Oh that is obscene.
It's really something.
It's not subtle.
I can't believe that that past advertising standards of the time. I know, because yeah, so much of American life is built around driving, and for the past few years, motor vehicles accounted for around thirty percent of total USCO two emissions.
And this stuff is baked into our lives in the most intimate ways. Just think of all the little boys playing with hot wheels, or the teenage boys dreaming of picking up their prom dates with their own set of wheels, prepping for their first job interview in the front seat, putting those just married cans on the back.
Does anybody still do that thing with the cans on the bumper of their car?
Okay, fair, I have not seen that in a while, but the point still stands. Cards are integral to the American way of life, and most Americans cannot imagine their lives without them. But women drive too, right, There's nothing innatly masculine about cars. So how did men become so enamored with driving that we wound up with petro masculine the.
Car and the infrastructure and economy that we've built around. It represents, for Daggett, a fantasy of freedom, one that is deeply at odds with the reality of climate change. It starts with the idea of dependency. Here's Daggett.
My sense is that this notion of freedom is really important, and underlying it is a desire to escape relations of dependency of all sorts, so to escape the fact of dependency, which is really a fact of life.
It's most obvious when.
You're a kid, or when you're an old older person, or if you have some sort of illness and you need care. But really every minute of our life where dependent on not just other people, but most obviously.
On our ecologies. And so it's not only the car.
It's also a broader notion of the way technology becomes a source of escaping dependency. And that's masculinized because often dependency is feminized.
A lot of the issues that men are grappling with are real. Wages have stagnated, University tuition is ridiculously expensive, jobs have been lost to offshoring and automation. This is all a major challenge to the idea of bread winner masculinity, which is this concept that being a man means providing for your family, and when you can't do that, you
lose a piece of your manhood. But when the bosses decide you're no longer useful, the right is able to blame women for taking your jobs, or environmentalists for weakening the economy with their stupid.
Rules, moving ahead full steam to try to switch many of our everyday appliances from gas to electric cars and stoves to water heaters and air conditioners. Doing us now were public and gonger'smen. Bill Johnson, I've always heard, Congressman, that electric energy is the least efficient way, for instance, to heat your household water. Why is the administration so hell bent on making.
Americans do it that way?
Well, let's be clear about something, john This is not about carbon it's not about climate change.
This is about control.
On the one hand, these environmentalists want to ruin all the nice things about being an American man and a feminists are going to come and take away your masculinity. But in addition to this fear, there's also a kind of pleasure in the destruction of those enemies, which is where things get really twisted, you know, like blowing a thick, black plume of smoke onto a cyclist or driving through a crowd of climate protesters.
Angry mogorists have clashed with climate protesters who blokuded Melbourne's busiest road during the morning peak. Drivers and even pedestrians got involved in the fiery confrontation, with police nowhere to be seen.
Frustration boils over on Punt Road.
In this fantasy of petromasculinity and the violence that goes along with it, in some ways is an expression of an acknowledgment, albeit on an unconscious level, of the existential crisis that we are actually facing in terms of climate change.
And the fantasy element.
Is I think the fact that all of us who live in very energy intensive cultures are every day living on top of violence, living through violence. But there's a lot of work that's done to hide that. There's a lot of hypocrisy, there's a lot of suppressed and repressed shame and violence that comes with this way of life. For those of us like you, I'm sure and me and others who study and work on climate, it's heavy.
People talk about climate anxiety, climate grief. This fantasy is another psychological position to respond to the acknowledgment of this violence in the world. And it is to refuse to feel shame and to say I embrace this, and this actually is righteous, and I'm going to somehow fold this into a story that supports me in my sense of goodness, and that therefore feels very pleasurable and very good. And so in some ways it's a fantasy, because of course
it is denying a whole of real problems. But on the other hand, I think we need to understand the fantasy and kind of denial that is happening in what you might think of as the centrist liberal space. Sometimes I think that this reactionary politics feels.
More deeply the crisis.
Of climate than sometimes some liberal politicians do.
It. You argue that petro masculinity is a form of climate refusal that's not just kind of ignoring climate change, but it's actively asserting a retrograde, anti democratic vision of life in order to prevent society from engaging with climate reality.
We can look at the example of coal and see how it could play out, and this is one of my colleagues and co authors named Shannon Bell, did this research into Friends of Coal, which was an AstroTurf advocacy campaign for the coal industry that when there were a lot of jobs lost over the years in the coal industry, and there was concern on the part of the industry exactly like you're saying, that there would be a less public support, especially because some of the ways that coal
was using less labors, things like mountaintop removal, where they're just exploding mountains leading to a lot of environmental damage, and communities. Friends of coal started attaching coal to masculine symbols like NASCAR, hunting, the military and making it into this like, instead of being attached to your union, which was usually maybe how your strongest emotional attachment would be as a coal miner, you become attached to coal itself as in this symbolic territory as power.
So that's a possibility. I think.
Also the problem with oil that we've been talking about is it's not just on the producer side, it's on the culture and consumer side. People understand that oil is part of their everyday life, and there's a lot of fear in what that means in terms of how ways of life need to change.
So even if we get rid of gas cars, we've got to roll back an entire lifestyle predicated on fossil fuels.
I think there's a problem of petrochemicals.
So even as we might decrease some oil use for motive force, the oil industry is expanding their petrochemical production, and they're using the same tactics, like they bring these facilities into communities that maybe have lost a lot of industry and say, these are communities that had maybe strong grassroots environmental movements against former extractive industry, but they say, well, you know, but we're going to give you jobs. And this really is deeply existential. On the one hand, there
are fossil fuel elites who are villains. We should point to them on a broader sense. Public interest should not be in oil, but detangling the ways that oil has sort of entered every facet of our lives is going to take a transformation.
It's not as simple as just switching a fuel.
Wow, that was a really interesting conversation to listen in on. On that last point, I've been seeing for more than a decade that solving the climate problem requires moving beyond looking at the energy source and really interrogating the power structure. I think maybe people are finally starting to see that it's really hard to look back at the whole history of patriarchy and colonization and capitalism and the way fossil fuels and climate denial are woven in there and not
see that. But I think so much of the climate conversation has been about communicating the truth. If people just understood the science, then we could all agree and finally do something. But Dagett really gets at how deep our attachment to fossil fuels actually runs, and how irrational it can be, but how it meets these needs for security and status and identity, or.
More darkly, give them a sense of power through violence. That was one of the more eye opening moments in our conversation, the idea that climate denial at least offers a psychological medicine powerful enough to take on the pain and uncertainty of the climate crisis, and even offers a kind of sick benefit, whereas the neoliberal policy talk and technocratic language of abundance just doesn't quite hit.
And that's what would be talking about in our next episode, the way that technology and science have taken on their own Thorkier shade of expert masculinity, and the way climate activists from Rachel Carson to Greta Tunberg have been dismissed as hysterical because they just don't understand the science of carbon credits and blue hydrogen.
Because there are a lot of dudes in the climate space too. They just often happen to be in favor of very tech heavy approaches like carbon capture, geoengineering or nuclear energy solutions that ignore the social dimensions of climate change and often don't even add up.
And they do not like it when cranky lesbians, Swedish doom goblins, and blue haired weirdos question their calculations.
The Antichrist is like some evil tech genius evil scientists who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
That was Peter Teo. You may know him from such companies as PayPal and Pallenteer, and also from his political work as the chief backer of JD Vance. Teel and many of his minions are a big part of what we'll be talking about next time on carbon Brose. Join us for boy math solutions.
Carbon Brose is an original series from Drilled and Non Toxic, written by me Amy.
Westervelt and by me Daniel Penny.
Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoldzbostwick. He also composed our theme song.
Check his stuff out.
Our engineer is Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilpa Jindia.
Original artwork by Matthew Fleming.
Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. Marketing by Maggie Taylor. Check out the Non Toxic Podcast for more on the Mannos here, and good to Drill Dot Media for more climate reporting and to support artwork