Petroganda: The Original Narrative—We Keep You Safe

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

 [00:00:00] Lots of people have been drawing comparisons between the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the attacks on Iran in 2026. Analysts point to similarities like claims about nuclear weapons

 Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that, that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.

I don't care what she 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.

 it 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 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 in Iran. For me, [00:01:00] 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. I'm Amy 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 250th birthday.

Since the beginning of our great nation, we have never accepted limits on what can be achieved. [00:02:00] That spirit has defined the energy story. In 1859, 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 Summers American Petroleum Institute President at the 2026 State of American Energy event, talking about America's first oil well discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859 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 10 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 [00:03:00] kind.

 Will we embrace innovation, growth, and prosperity or slide backward, denying 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 are 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 [00:04:00] infrastructure. They're against new jobs, higher living standards.

They resist the energy required to 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 Dr. Robert Brule a few years ago about how long the American Petroleum Institute has been connecting fossil fuels to American identity.

 The lion's share of the effort that these guys are spending money on is not on science denial. Yes. They spend this much on science denial, and I'm not saying that that isn't important and doesn't count, but you know, they're spending probably five or 10 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 [00:05:00] America, you know, apple pie, mom, you know, the flag fossil fuels and you know, and so by implication, what they do is say, 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 API was formed as World War I. The first fossil fueled war came to a close. Oil companies had been coordinating during the war to ensure a steady 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 [00:06:00] position, for the petroleum industry, to represent their interests to the public.

And out of that comes the American petroleum Institute and Ivy Lee, 

draws 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 mobile to form the American petroleum Institute in 1919.

And so the American petroleum Institute is, is now 100 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 I. There's also a newly delineated [00:07:00] 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 I 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 a hundred year history is covered in great detail in a whole bunch of really good books that I'm gonna link to in the show notes.

But we'll 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 1890, Russian [00:08:00] 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 free fall and limping toward collapse.

Various countries start jockeying 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 Basra and the ports of the Persian Gulf.

An Australian gold miner, William [00:09:00] Darcy begins exploring for oil nearby in Persia, what is today Iran, and putting bids in on oil fields in modern day Iraq. In 1908, 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, but 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 an 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 I during the War. Britain takes possession of Baghdad and Basra. [00:10:00]

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 Sergei Sazenov known collectively as the Sykes Pico agreement. Negotiated in early 1916. It splits up the Arabian Peninsula between the three countries without, of course, consulting any of the people who actually live there.

Britain gets Baghdad 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 In

In yet another secret deal signed in late 1918, the French agree to give up Mosul so long as they can retain a share of the oil there and control of Syria. Divvying up shares of the Arabian Peninsula's oil. Even enters into the Versailles Peace Treaty Talk in [00:11:00] 1919, 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 hundred years of conflict in the region.

For our purposes, I'm gonna jump to the formation of Iraq in 1922 via a treaty that Britain drafts with its personally selected Monarch King Faisal. 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 ExxonMobil.

The US had provided most of Britain's oil during World War I and Oil for a lot of the other allies too, and now they want [00:12:00] 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 begin agitating for a way in to Iraq's oil fields. They start releasing all these white papers and pamphlets and memos, and talking to the press about the Brent, about how the British and French oil monopolies are anti-democratic and anti-American, British Lords fire 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.[00:13:00]

When the alliance between Britain and King Faisal is finalized at the end of 1922, 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, Calouste Sarkus Gulbenk ian, a Turkish born Armenian educated in Britain is outsmarting all of them.

Discussions drag on for years, mostly because of Gulbenkian. And finally, in 1928, , Gulbenkian is ready to sign a deal. Turkish Petroleum will be divided four ways equally between Anglo Persian. It's BP Today, Royal Dutch Shell Total Energies today, and a consortium of US companies called the Near East Development Corporation led by [00:14:00] Standard Oil of New Jersey later, Exxon and Socony Vacuum later Mobil.

Each group has also given 1.25% 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 Newsom was educating executives and Washington politicians about it back in the 1920s and 1930s. When I came across those documents in his archive, suddenly the strong sense of entitlement that US oil companies had seemed to feel around Iraq 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 [00:15:00] actually negotiating foreign policy on behalf of the U.S.

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. Annie Mead, they were superb. I just couldn't help comparing them with ours. If you call lad 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, uh uh, they call them automobiles.

 This is a clip from an American Petroleum Institute propaganda film that came out in the fifties. Dr. 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 [00:16:00] 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 decide capitalism is the way to go.

 And only one in almost a thousand makes a major discovery. Pretty big odds. Yet America's proved reserves. The oil supplies still underground have kept increasing steadily. 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 is willing to risk, it can drill for oil,

 The American Petroleum Institute has only increased its power since then. It commissioned one of the industry's first reports on global warming in the late 1960s, and was [00:17:00] integral in shaping the economic argument against acting on climate change.

 I was interested in the American Petroleum Institute and so 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 1980s. 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 Petroleum 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 of fossil fuels. So you shouldn't do anything about this problem.

 that's Ben Franta, who heads up the climate litigation lab at Oxford University and uncovered a lot of early [00:18:00] 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, then the early two thousands.

Like, wow, these are, these are the go to guys for the American Petroleum 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, what really got my attention was back in 2017, I think. And Donald Trump, , had announced that he was going to pull the U S out of the Paris climate agreement. And in a speech he gave to justify doing that, he cited some economist and said that, the Paris agreement was going to be economically devastating for the U. S. If the U. S. stayed in it. And I thought [00:19:00] 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 Petroleum Institute for decades. And it was the exact same situation. It was a study funded by industry, published by a think tank or a consulting firm.

And then it's quoted as being reliable and being rigorous research.

 In late 2021 before Putin invaded Ukraine, the American Petroleum 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 [00:20:00] 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 to limit production in the United States, uh, 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 up PR expert, Christine Arena to ask what 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 [00:21:00] 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 24th 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 policy grab.

 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. [00:22:00] Or that it was Obama and Biden who had led the charge to lift the export ban in 2015, 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 activists 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, and it worked within a month, the Biden administration had lifted any delays or restrictions on liquified natural gas terminals and inked deal with Europe that locked them into purchasing large volumes of American gas for years to come.

 We're gonna work to ensure an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquified natural gas [00:23:00] LNG for Europe this year. We'll also work to ensure additional EU market demand for 50 billion cubic meters of LNG from the United States annually by 2030.

 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 and 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 2026 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 cling to scarcity and stagnation will be left behind.

 He hammered on energy dominance too. A theme repeated [00:24:00] often by Trump and his administration.

 We're looking to be very energy dominant and we will be in a very short order.

 this is unleashed, the National Energy Dominance Council

 that taps into another key marker of fascism. The strong man leader, the guy who's gonna 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, it was during the first Trump administration. And what I wanted to do was understand this connection in 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 [00:25:00] coincidentally inhabiting the same movement.

Transcription

Lots of people are talking about the similarities between Iraq and Iran, but in this episode we place the two in the context of another war—World War I—and the historical arc of fossil fascism.


Never Let a War Go to Waste

Drilled A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts .

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

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Drilled

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Never Let a War Go to Waste

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