TRUMP: thank you very much for being here we have a largely an energy group today we're looking to be very energy dominant (00:00)

PRESS SEC: unleash energy dominance (1:58)

Bergum: this is unleashed - the national energy dominance council (3:00)

EPA: we are unleashing energy dominance however we can help (6:31)

TRUMP: and you’re going to see this is basically energy dominance and it's going to be environmentally clean environmentally wonderful we're going to make more money than anybody's ever made with energy we have more energy than anybody else and we're lucky we have it I call it Liquid Gold under our feet (18:49).

: Energy dominance. That’s the Trump administration’s catchphrase when it comes to America’s new energy policy. Or should we say old energy policy? In February of 2025, Trump established the National Council on Energy Dominance, whose aim is basically more oil, natural gas, and coal–with a bit of geothermal and nuclear thrown in to meet 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 Karoline Leavitt,  Secretary of the Interior Doug Bergum, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin–all repeating that same line–

–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? Or is it the energy itself, those molecules of freedom, as the Trump administration called them back in 2019, that they’re trying to dominate?

 American presidents–both Republicans and Democrats–have 

said America needs more energy. why are they always UNLEASHING it?!!

:. In his first term, President Obama was pitching the idea of “energy independence,” which was basically cover 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 oil (0:28)  This week I released a blueprint for a secure energy future. Part of this strategy involves increasing our oil exploration right here in America.

: Of course, becoming a net exporter did the opposite of making the U.S. independent energy-wise, it hog-tied 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 their growth, the U.S. actually became the world’s top oil AND gas exporter under Biden.

BIDEN: (1:26) Let's debunk some myths here. My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production; quite the opposite. We're producing 12 million barrels of oil per day.  In fact, we're on track for record oil production in 2023. (1:51) And today, the United States is the largest producer of oil and petroleum products in the world.

DANIEL: 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.

AMY: 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. Ahhh free markets!

DANIEL: But I do think there’s another crucial difference in how Trump and his cronies think about energy. The way they keep hitting on that word “dominance” is really the key here. The Dems wanted market dominance for American energy; they’re fine getting there with wind or solar, too. But with Trump and company, 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, but on an individual one.

BARON HARKONEN: He who controls the spice controls the universe. (2:48)

DANIEL: And it’s that word, dominance–not Spice–that we want to talk about in this episode of Carbon Bros. 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.

AMY: It’s the story of how masculinity and extraction got linked in our collective imaginations, how we went from thinking of the earth as a living organism, our 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, trans-gender rights, and the rights of anyone or anything that challenges the supremacy of men.

DANIEL: Welcome back to Carbon Bros, I’m Daniel Penny

DANIEL: On today’s episode: 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 convo, 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 Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychologist and one of the leading academic researchers who helped popularize the term “toxic masculinity.”

Dr. Terry Kupers:  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.

DANIEL  What is hegemonic masculinity and what distinguishes that from toxic masculinity?

Dr. Terry Kupers:  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.

Dr. Terry Kupers:   At different points of time, different forms of masculinity emerge and become more or less powerful, dominant..  Hegemonic masculinity looks at that historical development with the question, what kind of masculinity is dominant now or hegemonic?

Dr. Terry Kupers:  For instance, I believe in the United States, we're having a culture war about that.  Indeed,  we have a former president.  explicitly advocates, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, et cetera, all of which are 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 doesn’t have to be aggro. But hegemonic masculinity—the kind of images and behaviors and social scripts we encounter everyday—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, from Pachamama amongst the Indigenous peoples of Peru.

And of course the Greeks had Gaia, and the Romans had Terra Mater…Mother Earth. This familial relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world goes back to way before hippies were making bumper stickers about it. And it’s remained a recurring theme in pop culture ever since.

I was just listening to this clip that I found from a 1990 Earth Day TV special featuring Robin Williams and Bette Midler as Mother Earth.

ROBIN WILLIAMS What are you worried about? Everyone's saying, mother nature, mother Earth. People say, we gotta respect Mother Earth. Well we do. But she loves us.

She's always there for us, isn't she? She's always got one more tree up her sleeve, doesn't she? And she's the type of mom who could never say no.

BETTE MIDLER Stop. Stop. Please, please. I can't bear to hear another word of this drivel

Robin Williams: What is this? Mardi Gras or Macy's? Thanksgiving day Parade? Come on.

BETTE MIDLER: WHY you arrogant, 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 blue, I was pristine.

I'm Mother Earth and I'm sick, and it's all your fault.

ROBIN WILLIAMS: Me? Why is it always my fault?

AMY: Yeah the Mother Earth thing really cuts both ways, eh? 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 get coded as feminine in the first place.

SOPHIE: a certain kind of European Christianity really, 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

DANIEL: That's Sophie Bjork James. She's a researcher at Vanderbilt, focused on the intersection of gender, environment, religion. Her work often looks at the connections between the antiabortion movement and other far-right projects, including climate change.

SOPHIE:  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, you know, 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, um, far right movements of today are also generally opposed to, um, acknowledging the, our, our, our current environmental reality, which is we need a different relationship to the natural world.

DANIEL: Like this idea of dominion. It's not coming from nowhere. It's a specific interpretation of the Bible. This is Genesis, right?

BIBLE: and God said let us make man in our

SOPHIE: Yeah. A specific interpretation of the Bible that really prior prioritizes this notion of power over others.

there's many. Uh, 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, um, dominion over and control over nature, but can be actually read as a text about how to celebrate nature and, um, kinda live in harmony with nature.

Protestantism is is often very much in line with capitalist values around property, and around, viewing the, the natural world, not as something that we. Rely on, and that requires like 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, if kind of do whatever you want with it. It's again about power and control and not about a kind of symbiotic relationship.

DANIEL: what's the connection then to the plight of, of women? Because obviously, , today women aren't property, but they once were.

SOPHIE: Mm-hmm. There are some parts of the current Christian right that want not to turn women into property, but they are opposed to the 19th Amendment, which allows women to vote. , , when I start, first started studying, uh, the Christian right in the United States, over 15 years ago, that was a really radical position.

That's become, actually, that's becoming much more. Um, kind of not mainstream, but talked about more broadly like that women should be, should no longer have the right to vote. Um, but I think it's really, if we kind of step back and look at what these movements are about, they're about asserting a relationships of power and control, , in the world.

And that means. Men should have power and control over women that, uh, feminism is a direct assault to this worldview. , But also recognizing the reality of climate change is also a direct assault to that worldview in that , if you have to recognize that you as a human being are dependent on a much broader, um, 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 that power and the power and control over is, is the kind of foundation to both of those issues

AMY:   This idea of men having domination over nature got really baked into social and political theory during the famously scientific and anti-religion Enlightenment, this period from the late 1500s to the early 1800s when scientists and philosophers had people questioning not just religion but also the aristocracy, and developing all sorts of new ideas about freedom...for men. The one religious ideal they *didn't* get rid of was male domination...over both nature and women. It's during this time period, for example, that the idea of childhood emerges and alongside it all sorts of notions about what makes a good mother. Spoiler alert: it's not hosting salons and having intellectual pursuits. So really extractivism and patriarchy grew up together.

DANIEL: But a certain version of Christianity that says “Man has dominion” isn’t the only thing driving a wedge between humans and the natural world. 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. The Pilgrims, like most Europeans during the so-called “age of discovery” believed this new world was promised to them by god, 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 Christian? That didn’t count.

Pocahontas Clip: I hereby claim this land and all its riches in the name of his majesty king james the first and do so name this settlement jamestown.

The doctrine of discovery is one of the original international law doctrines that was developed in the 1400s 

to control the actions of European Christian nations. 

as Europeans began to sail outside the site of land.

This is Robert Miller. He’s an expert in Federal Indian Law and an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe

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 empire. How they acquired fortunes and how they just took over rights around the world is really what the doctrine of discovery was about and what it is still about. we've called this. The doctrine of discovery 

 because Europeans were discovering other cultures, other peoples other lands, and then wanted to be able to claim them and have those claims recognized under international law.  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 to Christian nations colonizing other parts of the world. But it’s basically 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 north pole of the ocean bed under the north pole in 2007. And in, uh, 2010 China pudding. Flag on the bottom of the south China sea. So nations are still using this idea that where they arrived first or the rights they have, they can acquire by claiming this area.

DANIEL - While the Virginia and East India company were sailing around 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 Marx writes a lot about. And this was, this idea that in the feudal era you had Lords who owned land, but there was also something called the Commons, which was land that everyone got to make use of and they could graze their animals there, they could take firewood, et cetera.

And at some point in the 16 hundreds, the rich and powerful realized that they could actually just take that land entirely for themselves and kick all the peasants off of it.

CROMWELL CLIP:  man who raises a hand against the King's Bend will be arrested. You have no right to do this. This land is ours.

Well, now it belongs to the Earl of Manchester.

By the authority of the king. Then I say the king is a thief. You’re under arrest. Take him away.

And this is what, according to Marx, created the working class.

I. People without land who had to sell their labor in order to survive.

AMY: Living in 2025, 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 intact ecosystem or clean drinking water, then it’s worth nothing! We got to read a new book about all this stuff recently, called 

Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, 

by Alyssa Battistoni, who explained it in more detail:

 Western culture and enlightenment , there's a Moment that comes about with, with Descartes and then other enlightenment thinkers that really institutes a separation between like the thinking, rational human being and the like dumb matter of the world.

Transcription

When it comes to powering the US, “energy dominance” has become a favorite phrase of the Trump administration. But who or what are they trying to dominate with all that oil and gas? In this episode, we zoom out from climate change to trace how gender became so embedded in our collective understanding of nature. How did we go from worshipping Gaia and indigenous earth-mother figures to extracting “natural resources” from private property? And how did oversized gas-guzzlers become a symbol of proud American … manhood? It all goes back to dominance.

Carbon Bros

Carbon Bros, Ep 3: Climate Hysteria, Doomers, and Boy Math Solutions

Carbon Bros, Ep 2: Energy Dominance

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A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Carbon Bros, Ep 2: Energy Dominance

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