Pushkin. Lots of people have been drawing comparisons between the US invasion of Iraq in two thousand and three and the attacks on Iran in twenty twenty six. Alas point to similarities, like claims about nuclear weapons.
It's also Cowbart testified at Barts the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.
What you said, I think they were very close to having.
I take the threat very seriously. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously.
And the preemptive nature of these attacks.
There was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the UN the United States.
But then the conversation turns quickly to the many differences, the fact that, unpopular as it was, the Iraq War did actually have congressional approval, for example, or that there were ground troops in Iraq that we haven't really seen any wrong For me, the way these two moments in US history connect has less to do with intelligence reports and battle plans and Republican presidents than it does with
fossil fuels and propaganda. It pulls together a lot of the stories we've been covering over the past several years into a single timeline, a unified arc towards fossil fascism. To understand what's happening now and where it might head, we need to take a step back and look at where it came from and how the whole thing hangs together. So that's what we'll be doing over the course of this three part mini series. Iimimi Westervelt and this is drilled.
The fossil fuel industry and American identity have always been deeply entwined, and in case anyone ever forgets it, the American Petroleum Institute is there to beat us over the head with it, over and over and over again.
This year we mark America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Since the beginning of our great nation, we have never accepted limits on what can be achieved. That spirit has defined the energy story. In eighteen fifty nine, the Drake Well, America's first commercial oil well struck oil in northwest Pennsylvania. This breakthrough helped launch a new era of prosperity.
Here's Mike Summer's American Petroleum Institute President at the twenty twenty six State of American Energy event, talking about America's first oil well, discovered in Pennsylvania in eighteen fifty nine, and how it sparked the modern global oil industry, which of course he connects directly back to American energy dominance today.
It was a reminder then, as it is now, that the American energy leadership has never been accidental.
In this ten minute or so speech, Summers gives us a neat and tidy illustration of fossil fascism. Not only do you have the nationalism and the idea of a return to previous greatness that is the hallmark of fascism of every kind.
Well, we embrace innovation, growth and prosperity, or slide backward, deny facts, delaying progress and ignoring the realities of rising demand. That's the choice, and the American people have made up their mind. We choose energy success, not surrender.
But you also have that national identity and former glory linked inextricably to fossil fuels.
Americans spent years being told that they should do less, build less, produce less, and pay more. We're done with all of that. American energy is the future, and America is ready to lead.
And importantly threatened by a small minority.
A small fringe is stuck in the past. They oppose growth, expansion, and new infrastructure. They're against new jobs, higher living standards. They resist the energy required, the power modern life. They offer no vision for the future.
Listening to this talk earlier this year, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Brown University environmental sociologist doctor Robert Brule a few years ago about how long the American Petroleum Institute has been connecting fossil fuels to American identity.
The why and share of the effort that these guys are spending money on. And it's not on science denial. Yes, they spend this much on science denial, and you know, I'm not saying that that isn't important and doesn't count, but you know, they're spending probably five or ten times more trying to influence the perceptions of these corporations and the perceptions of their product and tying their product to the American way of life and everything good about America.
You know, apple pie mom, you know the flag fossil fuels, and so by implication, what they do is they basically say any attack on fossil fuels is an attack on our way of life. That's an extremely powerful argument that the fossil fuel companies have been making for decades, that they've been connecting fossil fuels with the American way of life and the good life.
The APA was formed as World War One, the first fossil fueld War came to a close. Oil companies had been coordinating during the war to ensure a study supply of fuel to the front and Standard Oil of New Jersey publicist Ivy Lee thought it would be a shame if that coordination ended when the war did.
After the war ended, there was an interest in sort of coordinating an industry position for the petroleum industry to
represent their interests to the public. And out of that comes the American Petroleum Institute and Ivy lead Ross, on his experience in the War Propaganda Board, effort to start developing larger institutional public relations efforts, and he works with the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which we now know as Exxon Mobil to form the American Petroleum Institute in nineteen nineteen and so the American Petroleum Instudents is now one hundred years old and it's considered to
be the really the first modern, sophisticated, public relations oriented trade association in the world.
But it's not just the American Petroleum Institute that emerges out of World War One. There's also a newly delineated region with a whole bunch of new states and borders carved up by the fossil fuel industry and its government backers in France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the US after the break. How the thirst for Middle East oil both contributed to World War One and reconfigured global politics when the war ended. From the very early days of the
oil industry, it's been tied to national identity. It is inextricably linked to both nationalism and imperialism. That one hundred year history is covered in great detail and a whole bunch of really good books I'm going to link to in the show notes, but will now attempt to summarize. In about five minutes. Here we go history time. Okay, So, just as the Americans are getting going in Pennsylvania, Russia's czar opens up the Baku region of Azerbaijan to private
oil prospectors. By eighteen ninety, Russian oil is giving American oil a run for its money. At the same time, the Dutch have moved to modernize the oil industry in Indonesia and start the Royal Dutch Oil Company. Then they merge with Shell Transport to create Royal Dutch Shell and ship oil all over the world. So within really just a few decades, the oil industry is taking root everywhere.
But that's not happening in the Middle East, although lots of people are speculating that there are large oil reserves there. Why well, because it's mostly controlled by the Ottoman Empire, the so called sick man of Europe, which is in economic freefall and limping toward collapse. Various countries start jocking to grab the Arabian Peninsula and the oil that lays
below it. Germany, Britain and France are all there. Germany starts building the Baghdad Railway from Baghdad to Berlin, which would give them access both to the oil fields of Bastra and the ports of the Persian golf An Australian gold miner William Darcy begins exploring for oil nearby in Persia today Iran and putting bids in on oil fields in modern day Iraq. In nineteen oh eight, just as he's getting ready to shut down the Persian exploration, he
hits black gold. He creates a new company, the Anglo Persian Oil Company. That's the company known today as BP, and guarantees Britain a study supply of Arabian oil. They want more, particularly those Mesopotamian oil fields in what is today Iraq. For years, Anglo Persian tries to convince the Ottoman Empire to give them a concession there. Twice they have contracts drawn up and ready to sign, and something happens. The first time, rioting breaks out in Istanbul and the
sultan is deposed before he can sign. The second Archduke Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro Hungarian Empire, is assassinated, kicking off World War One. During the war, Britain takes possession
of Baghdad and Bosra. As the war comes to an end, several secret treaties come to light, among them a collection of letters between diplomats Mark Sykes of Britain, George Picot of France, and Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazanov, known collectively as the Pike's Picot Agreement, negotiated in early nineteen sixteen. It splits up the Arabian Peninsula between the three countries, without of course, consulting any of the people who actually
live there. Britain gets Bagdad and Basra, France gets Mosul, and Syria Persia's split between Russia and Britain. Anglo Persian is not happy about this. They do not like the idea of giving Mosul to the French and immediately begin working behind the scenes to undermine this arrangement. Yeah, another secret deals signed in late nineteen eighteen, the French agree to give up Mosil so long as they can retain a share of the oil there and control of Syria.
Digging up shares of the Arabian Peninsula's oil even enters into the Versailles Peace Treaty talks in nineteen nineteen, where Royal Dutch Shell also enters the chat. There's a whole bunch of geopolitical jockeying and a lot of drawing of lines and creation of new countries that absolutely sets up the next one hundred years of conflict in the region. For our purposes, I'm going to jump to the formation of Iraq in nineteen twenty two via a treaty that
Britain drafts with its personally selected monarch King Feisal. It's important not just because it creates modern day Iraq, but also because it's where an oil giant that had been missing from the conversation suddenly appears. It's right, it's the US, and particularly Standard Oil of New Jersey, the company known today as Exxon mobil. The US had provided most of Britain's oil during World War One, and oil for a lot of the other allies too, and now they want
in on divvying up the Ottoman oil spoils. But in typical American fashion, the US had also refused to join the League of Nations and had never declared war against the Ottoman Empire, only Germany, which had targeted US vessels. At one of the very first meetings of the American Petroleum Institute, US oil executives began agitating for a way
into Iraq's oil fields. They start releasing all these white papers and pamphlets and memos and talking to the press about how the British and French oil monopolies are anti democratic and anti American. British inspire back that America has established monopolies for itself in the Philippines and Haiti, only to turn around and criticize Britain for supposedly doing the same in Iraq. A massive amount of imperialist sword fighting ensues, all while pretending to be very very concerned for the
rights of the Ottoman Empire's former citizens. Of course, when the alliance between Britain and King Faisal is finalized at the end of nineteen twenty two, it includes an open door for American oil companies in the region. Success except that the Turkish Petroleum Company still legally holds the oil concession in Iraq, and its negotiator, holosed Sarcus Gulbenkian, a Turkish born Armenian educated in Britain, is outsparting all of them.
Discussions drag on for years, mostly because of Glbenkian, and finally in nineteen twenty eight Glbenkian is ready to sign a deal. Turkish petroleum will be divided four ways equally between Anglo Persia BP today, Royal Dutch Shell Combani Foncees de Petron Total Energies Today, and a consortium of US companies called the Near East Development Corporation led by Standard Oil of New Jersey, later Exxon and Socony Vacuum later Mobile.
Each group has also given one point twenty five percent of their share to the only private stakeholder in the agreement, Gulbenkian himself. Accompanying the agreement is a map of the Arabian Peninsula with a red line drawn around it, which gives the document its name, the Red Line Agreement. Standard Oil's publicist Earl Newsome, was educating executives and Washington politicians about it back in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.
When I came across those documents in his archive, suddenly the strong sense of entitlement that US oil companies had seemed to feel around a rock and its oil made sense. It wasn't justified, not at all, but at least I knew where this entitlement had come from. It also helped make the American Petroleum Institute's power make more sense. It wasn't just operating as a trade group lobbying for this or that policy. It was actually negotiating foreign policy on
behalf of the US. No wonder it and the industry it represented saw itself as just an extension of America and American identity and no wonder, it was so important to protect that connection.
Not only smooth and efficient, but powerful as well. I watched them for hours. Great Jinny meed they were superb. I just couldn't help comparing them with ours. If you call that a comparison, surely these vehicles must be the property of the highest officials.
I was wrong.
It seems that almost everybody in this country has one of those. They call them automobiles.
This is a clip from an American Petroleum Institute propaganda film that came out in the fifties. Doctor Brule told me about it a few years ago, and I think about it all the time. It's done in the style of the Jetsons and depicts Martians landing on Earth. The Martians are communists for some reason, and they visit Earth and they see cars and oil and decided capitalism is the way to go.
And only one in almost a thousand makes a major discovery, pretty big odds. Yet America has proved reserves, the oil supplies still underground have kept increasings heavily. I couldn't imagine how this ever increasing supply of oil was achieved until I found out that there's not just one but thousands of oil companies, all competing with each other to discover and develop new sources of oil for believe it or not, in the USA, anyone who was willing to risk it can drill for oil.
The American Petrolling Institute has only increased its power since then. It commissioned one of the industry's first reports on global warming in the late nineteen sixties and was integral and shaping the economic argument against acting on climate change.
I was interested in the American Petrollum Institute, and I downloaded all the news articles that talked about the American Petroleum Institute and climate change, and there, as you can imagine, there are thousands of them, and they go all the way back to the nineteen eighties. So I downloaded them and I sorted them chronologically, and I just started reading all of them just to get an idea of what
the American Petrollum Institute was saying about climate change. And I noticed that in the early nineties, the American Petroleum Institute is quoting these economists saying, you know, climate change is not a problem. It's not going to hurt society that much, and it's going to be too expensive to get off the fossil fuels, so we shouldn't do anything about this problem.
That's Ben Fronte, who heads up the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University and uncovered a lot of early API documents on climate change.
And then I saw them the American Petroleum Institute quoting and referring to these same economists again and again and again for decades in the late nineties and then the early two thousands, like wow, these are the go to guys for the American Patrollum Institute. And then I discovered that a lot of those studies that the American Petroleum Institute was citing by those economists were actually funded and commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute. So that was incredible.
But what really got my attention was back in twenty seventeen, I think, and Donald Trump had announced that he was going to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and in a speech he gave to justify doing that, he cited some economists and said that the Paris Agreement was going to be economically devastating for the US if
the US stayed in it. And I thought that was really surprising, and so I went to go find that study, and it was authored by some of the same people that had been quoted by the American Patrolium Institute for decades, and it was the exact same situation. It was a study funded by industry, published by a think tank or consulting firm, and then it's quoted as being reliable and being rigorous research.
In late twenty twenty one, before Putin invaded Ukraine, the American Patrolling Institute took to cable news shows and the Internet to warn the American public that the Democrats and their climate policies had made us vulnerable in this situation, that if they'd just been allowed to drill as much as they wanted, America would be able to rub Russia's nose in it and sweep in to save Europe with plentiful gas.
There is a lot of concern about what has been put forth by this administration, and there's a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty is leading to a lack of investment in the United States.
And when the.
Administration is continually putting forward new proposals the limit production in the United States, American oil and gas companies are cutting back on production.
That was our friend api President Mike Summers again, and it wasn't just Summers. Lots of other industry spokespeople were out saying similar things very early on. In fact, it was so early and the messages were so similar that I figured there must be some kind of coordination. So I called that PR expert, Christine Arena, to ask. She thought, for.
A media campaign where you're engaging different stakeholders and you're writing the talking points, if you want your proxies, you know, other political officials, other organizations to repeat the same talking points, that takes at least three or four weeks. If you're producing a creative ad that is on television, that could take two months plus in a tight timeline.
This was just too coordinated.
Given the timeframe from the triggering event when Putin invaded to the release of this creative the intervals were too tight, the messages were too word for word. This is an organized disinformation effort geared towards affecting policy in the short term.
I do personally believe that the communications pieces were put into place and ready to go prior to February twenty fourth, and that the fossil fuel industry knew it stood to benefit from Russia's war, not just in terms of near term gas prices, but you know, a shorter term scrap.
It didn't matter that the Democrats hadn't actually managed to pass any climate policy, or that permits for oil and gas drilling had actually increased under Biden. It didn't matter that oil and gas production in the US had just hit a record high, or that it was Obama and Biden who had led the charge to lift the export ban in twenty fifteen, opening the door to the US becoming the world's top gas supplier in just a decade. What mattered was the story and being able to tell it first and loudest.
The notion that it's octivists and woke people they should be the ones to fight climate change. You know, it's not relevant for real Americans, this notion that President Biden cares more about climate activists than he does about real Americans. So there's a concerted push around these narratives.
Again, it's the industry pulling on the thread of American identity, and oil being a fundamental part of it. Worked. Within a month, the Biden administration had lifted any delayser restrictions on liquefied natural gas terminals and ink to deal with Europe that locked them into purchasing large volumes of American gas for years to come.
We're going to work to ensure an additional fifteen billion cubic meters of liquified natural gas LNG for Europe this year. We will also work to ensure additional EU market demand for fifty billion cubic meters of LNG from the United States annually by twenty thirty.
What we heard from industry at the time was the same thing we'd heard from President Trump during his first term and are hearing from him and his administration today. The idea of a lost and former greatness, of an identity in a global dominance that's being threatened not by climate change or by war, but by a pesky internal
minority leftists, environmentalists, climate activists. In his twenty twenty six speech, API President Mike Summers described them as people who oppose progress and American greatness and will therefore be left behind.
The future belongs to those who are willing to meet demand and to lead with realism. Those who claim to scarcity and stagnation will be left behind.
He hammered. On energy dominance too, a theme repeated often by Trump and his administration.
We're looking to be very energy dominant, and we will be in a very short.
Order unleash energy dominance.
This is unleashed the National Energy Dominance Council.
We are unleashing energy dominance that taps into another key marker of fascism, the strongman leader guy who's going to lead us back to that former glory. In the case of fossil fascism, we call it petro masculinity. And the current US President is a walking example.
When I wrote about this, that was during the first Trump administration. 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. And they still tend to be talked about separately, as if they are sort of coincidentally inhabiting the same movement.
That's our story next time. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Austwick. He also composed original music for this episode. Matt Fleming created the series artwork. Our first Amendment attorney is James Wheaton. The show was reported and written by me Amy Westervelt