How Big Oil Killed Our Political Imagination

How the 'Father of Forestry' Inspired Big Oil

The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Century-Long Quest to Invade Elementary Schools

Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Infiltrated Schools

S7, Ep7 | 

S7, Ep6 | So…What Do We Do About This?

S7, Ep5 | Ben Franta on Oil on Big Campus

S7, Ep4 | We’re Going Streaking

S7, Ep3 | High School

S7, Ep2 | Elementary School

S7, Ep1 | The First Day of School

The ABCs of Big Oil

Dharna Noor

Petroganda: The Original Narrative—Energy Security

2022 IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 1: Debunking Demand

How Big Oil Created Corporate Free Speech, and Why It Matters Today

The Supreme Court Strategy to Take Us Back to Pre-New Deal America

Sackett, West Virginia and the Judicial Strategy to Gut the EPA

New Climate Case Names Enablers: API, Western States Petroleum Association, Koch Industries, and McKinsey

The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Returning to Its Favorite Story

Accountability Must Be the First Climate Solution

Why Climate Litigation Matters

Mea Culpas Are Great, But Climate Leaders Need to Model Real Accountability

Is Big Oil Turning on Big Auto?

Why Is Fairness Being Ceded to the Fossil Fuel Industry?

Petroganda: The World's Greatest Neighbor

The Media’s Role in Criminalizing Protest

COP28 and the Limits of Eco Modernism

Petroganda: We're Part of the Solution

Petroganda: We Make Your Life Work

Supreme Negligence

False Friends of the Court, with Senator Whitehouse

Petroganda: The Economy vs. The Environment

Get 'Em While They're Young

Disinformation Techniques: A Glossary

Meet the Shadowy Network Vilifying Climate Protestors Around the World

Fossil Fuel Industry Ads: You Can’t Live If Living Is Without Us

SCOTUS Says No to Exxon, Now the Corporate Free Speech Fight Begins

Litigation Documents

S10 Real Free Speech Threat Documents

Fossil Fuel Funding In Schools

S5 Chevron Ecuador Documents

Guyana Documents

S3 PR Documents

Petrostate Documents

Climate Cases

IPCC & COP

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petroganda

Mad Men

New Oil Colonialism

Amy Westervelt

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been funding educational materials in high schools that instill a very particular idea of conservation, which sees nature as a resource for humans to extract from as needed. Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies scholar at Rutgers University’s School of Communication, said this view has roots in teachings from a man named Gifford Pinchot. Known as the Father of Forestry, Pinchot was  the first chief of the Forest Service and served twice as the governor of Pennsylvania. He is 

 in high school textbooks across the U.S. as an early conservationist because 

 some parts of the country to conserve them for future generations But a closer look at his worldview reveals what he envisioned for the rest of the public lands under his purview.

 that conservation “means also and first of all the recognition of the right of the present generation to the fullest necessary use of all the resources with which this country is so abundantly blessed. Conservation demands the welfare of this generation first, and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow.”

 that forest managers had “made progress” in terms of the public’s view of conservation. Why? Because “we hear less of the influence of the forest on climate and health, and more of the need for wood.”

This played out in Pinchot’s politics, too. Pinchot was reportedly once close with esteemed contemporary conservationist John Muir, but they had a falling out over a proposal to create a dam in California. Pinchot, unlike Muir, made compromises with logging and mining companies.

As Aronczyk explained in the episode, Pinchot took this message directly to school kids by writing high school textbooks. That means these messages have been forced onto American students since the early 1900s, and they’ve formed the foundation for the extractive industries’ pitch to students in the decades since.

We’ve seen how that’s played out. Extractive industry 

 pushed to open up pristine expanses for their own interests, destroying ecosystems that wildlife and people depend on while filling its pockets. But thanks to this history of propaganda, the fossil fuel industry has a good base to build on when convincing kids that that’s fine, actually—Indigenous people, ecosystems, and climate be damned.

The energy sector’s efforts in high schools smack of Pinchot’s ideas. Many of those endeavors have focused on economics, specifically on pushing the idea that all environmental decisions must factor in immediate costs to the economy. In 

, Kert Davies of the Climate Investigations Center, told me about his daughter being fed mining propaganda in elementary school.

“She said we did this really cool lesson today where the teacher gave us a chocolate chip cookie and a toothpick and we had to carefully extract the chocolate chips without breaking the cookie,” he said. “And the lesson was, you can do mining safely.”

Davies looked into the lesson plan and found that the American Coal Foundation and other coal interests. And the chocolate chip cookie lesson plan isn’t just used for elementary schoolers, either.

“There are even economics lessons where they put a price on the toothpick and a price on the reclamation. How much of a mess you make with the cookie [dictates] how much land you have to pay to reclaim, and you pay yourself for how many how many chocolate chips you get out of the cookie,” he said. It’s true, you can see these 

It’s not just coal, either. Oil and gas are deep in high school education, too. To take one example, the STEM Careers Coalition was launched in 2019 by the Discovery Channel’s educational arm. Discovery Education has a solid reputation among teachers for producing slick-looking, 
accessible materials. If you 

But if you look a little closer, things get weird. Check out the coalition’s “About Us” page, and you’ll see that oil and gas interests are listed as partners. Oil giant Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and power and energy distribution company AES are all giving them money. And so, it seems, is If/Then Philanthropies, which is listed as a “content partner.” That group was launched in 2018 by a woman named Lyda Hill, an 

 to an oil fortune amassed by tycoon H. L. Hunt. At one point, Hunt was the richest man in the nation thanks, in part, to the values Pinchot espoused about extraction. This isn’t Discovery’s 

 with oil and gas money, but it feels particularly gross to use those funds for materials for kids.

We’ve reached out to Discovery Education for comment and will update this piece if we hear back. We’d love to know more about this project. If you’re a teacher who has used Stem Careers Coalition materials in your classroom, get in touch with us. You can hit us up at tips@gizmodo.com or send a tip anonymously through 

Research shows that kids under the age of 7 

 that advertisements are trying to sell them something. One 

 found that even middle school kids can’t distinguish between news stories and advertorials.

Which might explain the fossil fuel industry’s long-standing interest in aggressively marketing to children in elementary school.

Gleb Bahmutov learned about the industry targeting young kids 

. One day in May, he was picking up his son and his son’s friend from their elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The weather was beautiful, so he let them play on the monkey bars for a while before taking them home.

Bahmutov usually looks forward to listening to podcasts in the car while waiting for his kid on the playground, but on that particular day, he found something that threw him for a loop: a booklet in his son’s backpack.

“I was like, oh, yeah, it looks like a coloring book,” said Bahmutov. “And then I saw Eversource in the upper right corner.”

Seeing the logo for Eversource—a utility company that serves Cambridge residents and millions of others in the New England area—stamped on both the booklets piqued Bahmutov’s interest. So he pulled out the booklet and realized there was another one behind it. The first was titled, 

. Both sung the praises of fossil gas and explained how dependent our lives are on it.

One page of the first booklet has an activity called “Natural Gas is Great,” which includes a list of positive statements about the dirty power source. Students guess which member of society—an office building owner, a pizza restaurant manager, a bus rider—made which positive statements about gas.

, is somehow even more blatant in shilling for natural gas, which is a 

. An activity focused on using gas for transit says, “natural gas is the cleanest fuel available for transportation.” (Electricity is the 

cleanest fuel available for transportation

We reached out to both Eversource and Bahmutov’s son’s school for comment about the booklets and will update this story if either responds.

 both told Bahmutov back in May that the materials were distributed by accident. But it still concerns him that they exist at all. Bahmutov already struggles with how to inform his child about the climate crisis without freaking him out too much, let alone how to combat industry talking points.

“Apparently there is industry specifically targeting children,” said Bahmutov. “It’s, I don’t want to say propaganda, but it’s specifically to make sure that when they grow up, that they have a special kind of impression of natural gas.”

Eversource’s materials are the latest in a long line of 

. In the podcast, Amy and I found examples from as far back as the 1920s showing how oil companies sponsored educational materials. But among the most rage-inducing examples of fossil fuel propaganda targeting kids is a cartoon series from the 1970s called 

Mocha is a fictional place that shows up in comic books, coloring books, film strips, and videos made by the company Amoco Oil, which is now BP. The narrative is full of absurd stereotypes. Take the 1976 cartoon version 
of the story. In it, a caricature of a Black man is delegated to being a town fisherman, and a ditzy, curvaceous woman peddles melons—but we all know they’re not just talking about the fruit.

The bigotry in the video is palpable, but just as awful are its messages about the economy. In the movie, for instance, wood is used to power cars, and the character who starts a logging corporation is the hero of the story. He constantly pushes the 
message that taxation is a burden on the public and serves mostly to enrich government officials. Those in the film who call on him to protect the forest are painted as a silly special interest group, not people concerned about the environmental impacts of chopping down every tree in the kingdom.

These messages and others have been directed at elementary schoolers for decades. If you’ve come across any others, 

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been 

 to limit how Americans think about taking on the climate crisis. They haven’t just done so through political lobbying and advertising. They’ve also taken a much more insidious route: shaping schools’ curricula. 

 did fossil fuel companies think it was worth investing in education in the first place? 

a 1950s video made by Dupont and the American Petroleum Institute to promote petrochemicals to kids in school, which says that petrochemicals “quickened the very pulse of civilization; provided man with an ease of
 living.” Philips Petroleum also commissioned a video series in the 1970s called 

hosted
 by none other than William Shatner—which says that thanks to mining, “we’ve increased and multiplied at a rate unmatched by any nation in history.”

These projects subtly deliver the message that American freedom is the product of extractive capitalism. A slideshow dug up by Carroll Muffett, the CEO and president of the Center for International Environmental Law, lays bare some of 
the thinking behind this messaging. It’s part of a presentation given to the Society of Petroleum Engineers in the early 2000s.

Muffett shared it exclusively with Earther and Drilled, and Amy and I had him walk us through it in the episode. But it really has to be seen to get the full effect. It was made by John Tobin, a well-known oil industry consultant, for an industry-backed group called the Energy Literacy Project.

The slideshow is a little hard to parse at times, but the basic points are clear. In it, Tobin lays out the idea that public education about energy can help the oil industry maintain its social license to operate despite 

 about the role it plays in driving the climate crisis and 

 to get off fossil fuels. In his words, “the industry can be profitable in spite of its image.”

“The public’s perception of the industry has been abysmal for years,” said Tobin in an interview. “And getting a more positive view, starting in K through 12 and keeping going, including adults and so on? We like to call it … developing science-savvy citizens, that will be able to make informed, well-reasoned decisions on their prudent use of natural resources, oil and gas in particular, and be able to make well-reasoned decisions on how they want to see the industry regulated.”

It’s not just any kind of energy education that Tobin’s presentation mentions, though. In the presentation, he specifically outlines an approach called the three Es, which he calls “a path to an improved image (and, potentially, improved profits).” The Es stand for energy, economy, and environment, and it seems they’re in 
that order intentionally.

The idea is that every policy decision must weigh the impact on each of these three facets of human life. Exxon used this three Es paradigm, too—

That may sound reasonable, because sure, we have to consider the economic impacts of policies on ordinary people. Winding down the fossil fuel industry would have both environmental, economic, and energy impacts. (

,
 those impacts are all positive.) But even though one of his Es is “environment,” Tobin doesn’t say much about considering the environmental impacts of oil and gas in his slideshow—the word “climate” appears just once and the word “pollution” doesn’t appear at all. But he does note that preserving the environment comes with a price. One slideshow shows a mountain landscape with the title [sic] “The Price of Pristiness.”

“That’s a wonderful picture of one of our mountains here in Colorado during the fall,” Tobin said in an interview, noting it’s also his screensaver. “These sort of views, these sort of things that we consider to be part of our lifestyle, what we want to have, it costs.”

I asked Tobin if he thought that the threat of climate change should be a primary driver of changing the energy mix. “There is no question that climate change is there, and it’s not good,” he said. “Is it Doomsday? That’s a harder argument.”

There are some other interesting slides, like one where Tobin explains how different hydrocarbons end in “ane,” and then adds, for some reason, “cocaine.”

But though some slides are strange, the basic message shines through: The oil industry should make sure people know how dependent their access to energy—and the economy—are on the sector. In one slide, Tobin writes, “The people’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shall be fueled by cheap and abundant energy.”

I asked Tobin if he thought the public needed to be educated in school about the environmental implications of using different kinds of energy. He said, sure, but not separate from the other Es while saying “free markets” should be the driver of any energy transition. “I think the answer is yes, but within the context of the big picture of, what does the economy need in terms of energy?”

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Of all the work out there on the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaign, some of the most important has come from folks at Harvard. This past May, Harvard researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes 

 of 50 years of Exxon documents, showing that the company has used discursive tricks to discourage the public from demanding real climate action.

 the first-ever analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of promoting climate denial.

Another crucial scholar on the fossil fuel industry’s history of promoting climate denial is Ben Franta, a PhD candidate in history at Stanford University. He was also once at Harvard; he got a doctorate in applied physics there and was also a research fellow at the university’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, which is one of the world’s top academic policy think tanks.

When at the Belfer Center, Franta began looking into what programs in higher education were funded by fossil fuel companies. He 

 of policy institutes at top schools that were funded by oil and gas companies, like ones at MIT and the University of Texas. He dug a little further and found that his own university wasn’t exempt: Harvard’s Kennedy School had taken millions from Shell while the founder of the  Belfer Center had also founded an oil and gas company.

Much has been written about oil and gas companies’ funding of universities’ engineering and science departments—from the 

 (no pun intended) that funnels students into jobs in the extractive industry.

But perhaps even more pernicious is the money that energy companies pour into social science departments. As Franta details in a 

 about fossil fuel involvement in economics research, their influence can serve to limit students’ and researchers’ understanding of how governments can take on climate change, inflate the predicted costs of climate action, and generally put a damper on political imagination.

“[The study] tracks the activity of a group of economic consultants who were hired by the petroleum industry for decades to produce analyses that were then used by the companies and
 by others imposing restrictions on fossil fuels to tell the public that it would just be way too expensive to act on climate and that in any case, climate was not going to be a big deal,” Franta said. “So the best thing to do is just do nothing.

This form of influence stretches back decades. While digging through some archives dating to the 1950s, my co-host Amy found that  Frank Abrams, vice president at Standard Oil, led his company’s university investments. Those investments were targeted at pushing some key ideas: 
The free market is good, government intervention is bad, and extraction equals freedom.

Obviously there’s a conflict of interest when these programs are meant to defend society against the problems that these companies are creating, and yet these programs are dependent on those companies to exist,” Franta said.

The very first industry-funded school broadcast in the country was the Standard School Broadcast, put out by Standard of California (now Chevron) from 1928 to the 1960s. The oil industry in particular has been very involved in shaping school curricula over the past 100 years, an effort that really ramped up in the 1950s.

“Pretty much from World War II on, the American Petroleum Institute has been actively pushing outreach to schools, and really trying to get their viewpoint about energy and petroleum into schools,” says Robert Brulle, visiting professor at Brown University. “Certainly they were doing that a lot by the 60s and those efforts continue to this very day.”

Lots of other industries have gotten into the business of creating activity books and curricula that put particular brands and products in front of the next generation of consumers and voters too. In her book 

Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools,

 Sheila Harty highlighted the efficacy of "imprint conditioning," the subliminal impact of advertising. Kids—and their parents and teachers—might not think an industry-funded video or coloring book or lesson plan has had a big impact, but Harty writes, "the next time we go shopping, one brand name or label looks more familiar. and we choose it like an old friend."

, Vance Packard quotes a marketer encouraging his colleagues to embrace this new strategy: "Eager minds can be molded to want your products! In the grade schools throughout America are nearly 23,000,000 young girls and boys. These children eat food, wear out clothes, use soap. They are consumers today and will be the buyers of tomorrow. Here is a vast market for your products. Sell these children on your brand name and they will insist that their parents buy no other."

The photos below are from a comic book that Disney put out in conjunction with Exxon in the 1980s, at the same time that Exxon was sponsoring the Universe of Energy Center at Epcot. Both were aimed at shaping kids’ 
understanding of energy and the economy.

This one has an energy conservation theme—and also makes the point that solar and wind are, you know, 

Exxon’s Universe of Energy Center was at Epcot from 1982 through 1996. That’s fascinating, because that’s 

 that Exxon went from researching climate change to explicitly denying it. (Exxon’s denial started in the late 80s and picked up steam throughout the 90s). The exhibit was originally intended to be called The Future of Energy, and was supposed to focus only on renewable energy, but when Exxon got involved they changed the scope to include fossil fuels as well, and present an "all-of-the-above" approach to 
energy. Sound familiar?

This exhibit touting fossil fuels opened in the same year that Exxon’s manager of environmental affairs, M.B. Glaser, 

 out to company executives about the greenhouse effect. This memo noted that fossil fuel combustion, along with clearing of virgin forests, were the primary contributions to the warming trend.

The memo added: “Our best estimate is that doubling of the current concentration could increase average global temperature by about 1.3 degrees Celsius to 3.1 degrees Celsius.”

“[Exxon] put out these in conjunction with Disney to teach kids about renewable energy and energy conservation and environmental concerns,” says Carroll Muffett, the president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. “And it's perhaps unsurprising that what children learn from Mickey and Goofy about energy conservation and environmental concerns was we really need gas, we really need fracking, we win. Nuclear energy is fine. There are a lot of problems with wind and solar. It may work out eventually, but thank goodness for this bountiful resource of oil, gas and tar sands.”

Exxon wasn’t the only one using comic books to reach the youths. In the 1970s, Amoco put out a wildly racist comic book about “The Mochans,” a “primitive” people who wanted to do unseemly things like use renewable energy. The comic was released as part of a study guide for 7th to 12th graders studying economics—which Amoco graciously provided 40,000 copies of to Indiana public schools.

“The industry was teaching kids to be skeptical of regulation, skeptical of the agendas of environmentalists or people who were socially concerned, from their very earliest ages,” Muffett says, “and [they were] constantly emphasizing that anyone who talks about the environment, who talks about human health, should immediately be 
weighing that and defending it against the economic costs.”

These are the same refrains the fossil fuel industry uses today in its various attempts to shape the minds of young people, both in schools and in the media. And it’s reflected in the way most political pundits seem to think about what’s possible for climate action. You want to preserve a livable world? Well, how much will it cost?

Here’s one more example of the oil industry getting into teaching economics: Phillips’ Petroleum’s 

educational film series—hosted by none other than William Shatner. (I got my hands on the VHS and digitized it, scroll down to watch all five parts.)

The subtitle is: How Did this America, in its 200 Years of Independence, Become a Nation of Supermarkets, Stock Markets, Skyscrapers and Split Levels; A Country With the Greatest Economic Output in the World?

Phillips took a hands-off approach with the film series in order to make sure it would be acceptable in classrooms.

Instead of developing it themselves, the marketing company that produced it for them contacted economists and historians who helped them put together a five-part series that enthusiastically affirms capitalism. And the series was an unmitigated success. It was picked up by 10 different state education TV programs, and more than 50 percent of the country’s secondary schools had booked the series by 1978, two years after its 1976 release. By the end of 1978 it had been seen by more than 5 million American high school students.

 on the series in 1976 as it was being released, calling it, “the latest contribution to the ongoing business effort to interest the American people in the free‐enterprise system.” (See our post on 

S1, Ep6 | The First Step to Influencing Policy: Setting Research Agendas

Transcription

Reporter Katie Worth has been researching climate education in the U.S. 
for years and that research forms the basis of her new book 

. In this interview we delve into what she found.

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Drilled

Drilled S10: The Real Free Speech Threat

Drilled S9: Herb

Drilled S8: Light, Sweet Crude

Drilled S7: The ABCs of Big Oil, with Earther

Drilled S6: The Bridge to Nowhere

Drilled S5: La Lucha En La Jungla

Drilled S4: There Will Be Fraud

Drilled S3: The Mad Men of Big Oil

Drilled S2: Hot Water

Drilled S1: The Origins of Climate Denial

Big Oil infiltrated schools across the country. Earther and Drilled take you inside the campaign to miseducate American students.

Over the last five episodes we've tracked how long the fossil fuel industry has been investing in schools, why, and what impact it's had. In this episode, we look at what can be done, and who's trying to do it.

The Economy vs. The Environment

Bringing you our entire interview with Stanford researcher Ben Franta on fossil fuel influence at universities because it was just too good not to share.

A look at how fossil fuel companies influence curricula and research at the university level.

In the third episode of our mini-series with Earther, we head to high school, where the fossil fuel industry's efforts to shape Americans' thinking on economics and policy really ramps up.

Since the 1920s, oil companies have been creating music, activities, coloring books, comic books, movies and more to shape how American kids think about society, the economy, and the environment. Today, we look at their efforts in elementary school.

We Make Your Life Work

Fossil fuel companies didn't start infiltrating schools when climate change appeared on the scene, they were there shaping the minds of future citizens for decades before then. The industry has been laying the groundwork for inaction on climate since long before this crisis reared its ugly head, limiting how Americans are allowed to think about the environment and the economy. In this first episode of our new miniseries we look at how Big Oil first got into the education game, and why it worked so well.

Newsom Documents

Blood of the Devil

“Like a War on the Environment” —Texaco’s 30 Years in Ecuador

Secret Tribunals and Hand-Picked Arbiters—A Little-known System Undermines Environmental Regulation

S5, Ep10 | The Kill Step

S5, Ep9 | The Judge

S5, Ep8 | Damages

S5, Ep7 | The Linchpin

S5, Ep6 | A Verdict And a New Charge

S5, Ep5 | The Big Guns

S5, Ep4 | The Secret Tribunal

S5, Ep3 | The Trial

S5, Ep2 | The Colonizers

S5, Ep1 | Lockdown

La Lucha En La Jungla

Revealed: UAE State Oil Company Planned Major "Green" Rebrand Ahead of COP28 Climate Summit

Lawrence Carter

Ben Stockton

For a long time there’s been a call amongst some climate advocates in the U.S. for the government to nationalize oil in order to manage the transition away from fossil fuels. The counter-argument is usually to point at countries like Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates, all of which have only doubled down on fossil fuel development since nationalizing their industries. With that in mind, we began in 2023 to dig into this question and get a feel for how petrostates operate, starting with the host of this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP28), the United Arab Emirates. 

Our partners on much of this first phase of petrostate reporting are the Centre for Climate Reporting in the U.K. 

The ABCs of Big Oil

The fossil fuel industry has been invested in education for decades.

S7, Ep7 |

S7, Ep6 | So…What Do We Do About This?

S7, Ep5 | Ben Franta on Oil on Big Campus

S7, Ep4 | We’re Going Streaking

S7, Ep3 | High School

S7, Ep2 | Elementary School

S7, Ep1 | The First Day of School

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Petrostates

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The ABCs of Big Oil

The fossil fuel industry has been invested in education for decades.

S7, Ep7 |

S7, Ep6 | So…What Do We Do About This?

S7, Ep5 | Ben Franta on Oil on Big Campus

S7, Ep4 | We’re Going Streaking

S7, Ep3 | High School

S7, Ep2 | Elementary School

S7, Ep1 | The First Day of School

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La Lucha En La Jungla

Petrostates

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IPCC & COP