Carbon Bros, Ep 2: Energy Dominance

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).

AMY: 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.

DANIEL: 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–

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? 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?

AMY: American presidents–both Republicans and Democrats–have always said America needs more energy. why are they always UNLEASHING it?!!

[grunty music cue]

DANIEL:. 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.

OBAMA:

0:01

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.

AMY: 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.

AMY: It’s like that line from Dune…

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.

[music beat]

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

AMY: And I’m Amy Westervelt

DANIEL: On today’s episode: Energy Dominance.

BREAK

Amy: There are a lot of ways we could start this episode about the masculine urge to dominate nature.

Daniel: 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.

Amy: 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.

Daniel:. And this is important when we think about how these macho men treat the natural world.

Amy: 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.

Daniel: 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

image after our likeness and let them

have dominion over the fish of the sea

and over the birds of the air and over

the cattle and over all the earth and

over every creeping thing that creeps

upon the earth

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..

Amy: 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.

Robert Miller:  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.

Amy: 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 is 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.

Amy: 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.

Robert Miller: 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.

Virginia Company Chorus:

For the New World is like heaven

And we'll all be rich and free

Or so we have been told

By The Virginia Company

So we have been told

By The Virginia Company

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 who's authority?

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

Bastard!

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

[beat/music?]

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:

Alyssa:  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.

Like that animals are machines and everything else in the world's just kind of , a soulless thing to be used as we will and sort of put, to human use and so on. And so this is the major division between, human beings and the rest of, the world. And that, basic idea has really structured fundamentally, a lot of western development and capitalism is like one version of the ??.

And then the expropriation account looks at, this, violent process of expropriation, of taking. You know, even John Locke would say, God gave this earth to man in common.

And then what happens is, like some number of people appropriate, those gifts for themselves. They sort of expropriate other people. We think of, you know, indigenous dispossession for instance, or, many other instances of the seizure of land and expropriation of land and other elements of nature from one group of people by another. And the privatization of that, as this very violent process. I think that's the other sort of major story we have about what happens with capitalism. That capitalism sort of just like, going out and seizing stuff from the natural world.

But I think that the free gift I think gets at something else going on, because I think 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

.Amy: Apologies 'cause I know you wrote a whole book about it, but if you can define what you mean by a free gift.

Alyssa: Yeah, so this term, the Free Gift of Nature, is 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. And like the 18th and early 19th centuries who are writing, the early days of, of capitalism and the development of industrial capitalism and they are describing the contributions that non-human nature makes to production. They talk about, the organs of sheep that help produce wool. They talk about the wind that blows sails merchant ships. They talk about soil fertility that helps crops grow. There's a lot of different gifts of nature that give gratuitously to production.

And they're observing all of these wonderful gifts, but they're giving only to capital in a system where  some small people own the means of production and they capture all of the things that come out of that. They're the ones who are benefiting from the free gift of nature.

So, I get this, this term to really explain a lot of what I think is going on in terms of how capitalism does or, or rather, doesn't value the non-human world and the contributions of non-human nature.

Amy: I'm curious what you think about the way that nature has been gendered throughout most of history in general and whether or not calling it Mother Earth or referring to the planet in all of these sort of like feminine terms has contributed to the idea that it should be free.

Alyssa:

I think we should be, more circumspect about just kind of embracing the mother earth language because I think it can suggest almost like rationalization in a way that like, mothers are also supposed to give freely and generously and selflessly and so on, and that we, that we should treat that labor as if it's just kind of available for the taking.

you know, it seems like the earth is just giving them to us, of its own free will, which 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.

Daniel: Ok, we’ve got man’s dominion over nature (and women). The doctrine of discovery to justify grabbing foreign lands. Rich landlords using violence to get rid of the commons and take the land for themselves. And to keep it all humming along, 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.

AMY: Yes! That’s 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 or pollute the air with plumes of CO2.

DANIEL: And while there are many people who helped promote this concept, there’s one guy who did more than most.

Amy: John Locke, baby! The father of liberalism. Or a father.

Rightwing groups like the Federalist Society and the Fraser Institute are always putting out Youtubes about Locke, though if you actually read his work, you realize how much they get wrong.

Daniel: Yeah the number of misleading Youtube explainers these guys put out is crazy. I had to wade through quite a few of them preparing for this episode. , but I think my favourite comes from The Cato institute, a conservative/libertarian thinktank set up by oil billionaire Charles Koch, All the way back in the 90s 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.

CATO INTRO:  Welcome to two Treatises of Government by John Locke, a presentation of the Cato University, a project of the Cato Institute.

CATO:  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.

DANIEL: I love this intro. “We needed a way to defend kicking people off common land”

LOCKE: God who has 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.

AMY: Ok. 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 it. But these days, there’s more than one man. So how do you decide who gets what?

CATO:  Beginning with self ownership, Locke develops an ingenious defense of private property

LOCKE: 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,

LOCKE:  When a man gathers acorns in the wild, he mixes his labor with the acorns and thereby becomes their owner.

DANIEL: Ah the classic finder’s keepers defense. But Locke goes beyond the doctrine of discovery. He proposes that if  I used my reason to find and gather those acorns. Now, because I’ve mixed my labor with them, they’re my private property. Sorry Amy, no acorns for you.

Amy: That doesn’t seem fair. But Locke proposed that if value from some resource on your land was derived as a result of your labor

DANIEL: (or the labour of a worker you paid)

AMY: then that value should be yours. And this was a huge influence on the Founding Fathers.

Here’s Robert Miller again:

Miller

John Locke's theory was to meet. 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 befoul it. If there are, if there's oil or trees or minerals on it,  strip mine until you have it all and then leave it and walk away.

Daniel: Okay so really early on, right at the founding of the U.S. you’re getting this fundamental shift in our relationship to land, where the natural world is fully theorized as property with economic value. Property that only white men can own. FROM

DANIEL PLAINVIEW: I... drink... your... milkshake! [sucking sound] I drink it up!

It’s a pretty straight shot to this:

TRUMP:

it's called drill baby drill

DANIEL: We’ll be drilling down more on that after this break.

DAGGET:  American culture is a culture premised on cheap flowing oil and automobility is a pillar of petrocultures 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.

DANIEL: This is Cara Daggett, a Virginia Tech political scientist who coined the term petro masculinity in 2018 with a groundbreaking study titled Petro Masculinity, fossil Fuels, and Authoritarian Desire. In 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.

DANIEL: you point to this term in 2018 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 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, um, it can be understood in this deep structural and historic way, 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.

DAGGET: Out in the road and in their everyday life. Um, when I wrote about this, uh, it 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, um, anti queer politics, and the support for fossil fuel and climate denial.

DANIEL: One of the most visible aspects of this relationship between masculinity on the one hand and fossil fuels on the other, is the obsession so many men have with their cars.

A 2023 study from University of College London found that when men were manipulated into believing their penises were smaller than average, they actually were more likely to want to buy a sports car, or rate a sports car as important in conferring status.

AMY: Oh God, that's so depressing.

DANIEL: For anybody who's ever seen a pair of truck nuts dangling off the rear bumper of a pickup truck, the relationship between driving a powerful vehicle and masculinity is pretty obvious.

CANYONERO CLIP: Can you name the truck with four wheel drive? Smells like a steak and seats 35 Canyonero.

We know from past drilled seasons that Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernas, 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.

BERNAYS AD: It seems so much longer than last year. It is nearly four inches longer in some models. Oh,

DANIEL: That

AMY: It's something I know it's not subtle.

DANIEL: obscene. I can't believe that that past, you know, like the advertising standards of the time, shocking.

Because yeah, so much of American life is built around driving and for the past few years, motor vehicles accounted for around 30% of total US CO2 emissions, which is crazy.

AMY: 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.

DANIEL: Does anybody still do that thing with the cans on the bumper of their car?

AMY: Okay, fair. I have not seen that in a while, but the point still stands, cars 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 innately masculine about cars. So how did men become so enamored with driving that? We wound up with petro masculinity.

DANIEL: 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.

DAGGETT: My sense is that this notion of freedom is really important, um, 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. Um, 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, we're 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. Um, And that's masculinized because often dependency is feminized.

Daniel: 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 a real challenge to the idea of “breadwinner masculinity,” the concept that being a man means being the sole provider for your family, and when you can’t do that, you lose a piece of your masculinity. But when the bosses decide you’re no longer useful, the right is able to blame women and environmentalists.

FOX:  administration moving ahead. Full steam to try to switch many of our everyday appliances from gas to electric, from cars and stoves to water heaters and air conditioners. . Joining us now,  Ohio Republican Congressman Bill Johnson.. I've always heard congressman, that energy, uh, I'm sorry that electric energy is the least efficient way, for instance, to to heat your household water.

Why is the administration so hell bent on making Americans do it that way?

Well, let's, let's be clear about something, John. This is not about carbon. It's not about climate change. This is about control.

Daniel:   on the one hand, these environmentalists wanna ruin all the nice things about being an American man, and that feminists are gonna 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 protestors.

7 news host:  Angry motorists have clashed with climate protesters who blockaded 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.

Angry motorist: You, you get the outta the way. All of this, get the outta the road fed up motorists confront a climate protest blockade.

Run over. You lucky my car's bro.

Dagget:  this fantasy of petro masculinity and, 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, is,  I think the fact that all of us, um, who live in very energy intensive cultures,  are every day living on top of violence, uh, living through violence.  But there's a lot of work that's done to hide that. There's a lot of hypocrisy. Um, 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. It really, people talk about climate anxiety, climate grief. Um,  this fantasy is another psychological  position to respond to acknowledgement of this violence in the world, and it is to, 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 about,  um,  that supports me in my sense of goodness, and that therefore feels very pleasurable and very good, um,  and so in some ways it's a fantasy, because of course.

Um, it is denying a whole host of, 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.  Um, so sometimes I think that this  reactionary politics feels  more deeply the crisis of climate than sometimes some liberal politicians do.

Daniel: You argue that petro masculinity is a form of climate refusal.  not just kind of ignoring climate change, but it's actively asserting a retrograde, anti-democratic vision of of life in order to prevent society from engaging with climate reality,

Dagget:  we can look at the example of coal.

And see how it could play out. And this is, um, of my colleagues and coauthors named Shannon Bell did this research into friends of coal, which was a Ali at AstroTurf Advocacy Campaign for the coal industry. question is 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 less public support.

Especially because some of the ways that coal was using less labor in things like mountaintop removal, where they're just exploding mountains leading to a lot of environmental damage in communities.  Friends of Coal  started,  um, 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.

Um, so that's a possibility. I think also the problem with,  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.  Um, 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.

DANIEL: So even if we get rid of gas cars, we’ve got to roll back an entire lifestyle predicated on fossil fuels.

DAGGET: I think there's a problem of petrochemicals. So even as we might decrease some oil. oil use for motive force. The oil industry is expanding their petrochemical  production.

And they're using the same tactics to bring these, like, they're bringing 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 industries.

But they say, well, you know, but we're going to give you jobs.

Um,  and this is what I was talking about that, that 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,  has sort of entered every facet of our lives is, is going to take a transformation.

It's not as simple as just switching a fuel.

[music/transition]

Amy:. Wow, that was such an interesting conversation to listen in on. On that last point, I’ve been saying 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 definitely hard to look back at the whole history of patriarchy and colonization and the way fossil fuels and climate denial are woven in and not see it. 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 Daggett really gets at how deep our attachments to fossil fuels run. How irrational they may be, but how they meet these needs for security, status, identity.

DANIEL: Or more darkly, give men 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. Whereas the neoliberal policy talk and technocratic language of abundance just doesn’t quite hit.

AMY: And that’s what we’ll be talking about in our next episode. The way that technology and science have taken on their own dorkier shade of expert masculinity, and the way climate activists, from Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg, have been dismissed as hysterical because they just don’t understand the science of carbon credits and blue hydrogen.

DANIEL: 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, geo-engineering, or nuclear energy, solutions that ignore the social dimensions of climate change, and often don’t even add up.

AMY: And they don’t like it when cranky lesbians, Swedish doom goblins, and blue-haired weirdos question their calculations.

Peter Thiel  the antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that in our world. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

DANIEL:  That was Peter Thiel. You may know him from such companies as PayPal, and  Palantir, and also from his political work as the chief backer of JD Vance. Teal and many of his minions are a big part of what we'll be talking about. Next time on Carbon Bros.

AMY: Join us next time for Climate Hysteria and Boy Math Solutions.