Speaker 1: Thank you very much for being here. We have largely
Speaker 1: an energy group today. We're looking to be very energy dominant.
Speaker 2: Unleash energy dominance.
Speaker 3: This is unleashed the National Energy Dominance Council.
Speaker 4: We are unleashing energy dominance, and.
Speaker 1: You're going to see this is basically energy dominance, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be environmentally clean, environmentally wonderful, and we're
Speaker 1: going to make more money than anybody's ever made with energy.
Speaker 1: We have more energy than anybody else. I call it
Speaker 1: liquid gold under our feet.
Speaker 5: Energy dominance. That is the Trump Administration's catchphrase when it
Speaker 5: comes to America's new energy policy, or should we see
Speaker 5: old energy policy? Always energy policy. In February of twenty
Speaker 5: twenty five, Trump established the National Council on Energy Dominance,
Speaker 5: whose aim is basically more oil, natural gas, and coal,
Speaker 5: with a smattering of geothermal and nuclear thrown into me
Speaker 5: AI demand. He's promising cheaper prices at the pump for
Speaker 5: consumers and no more of that pesky wind and solar.
Speaker 6: You just heard the voices of President Trump, his Press
Speaker 6: Secretary Carolyn Levitt, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgham, and
Speaker 6: EPA administrator Leez Eldon All repeating that same line energy, energy,
Speaker 6: energy dominance, like it's a magic spell. But what does
Speaker 6: energy dominance actually mean? Who or what is the Trump
Speaker 6: administration trying to dominate with it? Is it the energy itself?
Speaker 6: Those molecules of freedom as the Trump administration was calling
Speaker 6: it back in twenty nineteen, But they're trying to dominate.
Speaker 5: American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have always said America
Speaker 5: needs more energy. Also, why are they always.
Speaker 7: Unleashing it.
Speaker 6: Totally? In his first term, you may remember Barry President
Speaker 6: Braco was pitching the idea of energy independence, which was
Speaker 6: basically covered to justify lifting the export ban for the
Speaker 6: fracking guys.
Speaker 8: Hello, everybody, I'm speaking to you today from a UPS
Speaker 8: customer center in Landover, Maryland, where I came to talk
Speaker 8: about an issue that's affecting families and businesses just like
Speaker 8: this one, the rising price of gas and what we
Speaker 8: can do as a country to reduce our dependence on
Speaker 8: foreign ore. This week, I released a blueprint for a
Speaker 8: secure energy future. Part of the strategy involves increasing our
Speaker 8: oil exploration right here in America.
Speaker 5: And of course becoming a net exporter. Did the opposite
Speaker 5: of making the US energy independent, Instead it hogtied US
Speaker 5: to an energy commodity market that's been jerking prices around
Speaker 5: ever since. And despite all the industry's talk of Biden's
Speaker 5: environmental policy getting in the way of its growth, the
Speaker 5: US actually became the world's top oil and gas producer
Speaker 5: and exporter under Biden.
Speaker 9: Let's debunk some miss here. My administration has not stopped
Speaker 9: or slowed US oil production. Quite the opposite. We're producing
Speaker 9: twelve million barrels of oil per day, and by the
Speaker 9: end of this year, we will be producing one million
Speaker 9: barrels a day, more than the day in which I
Speaker 9: took office. In fact, we're on track for record oil
Speaker 9: production in twenty twenty three, and today the United States
Speaker 9: is the largest producer of oil and petroleum products in
Speaker 9: the world.
Speaker 6: So Obama and Biden basically had an all of the
Speaker 6: above energy strategy, boosting fossil fuel production along with solar,
Speaker 6: wind and other renewables, while Trump is really only interested
Speaker 6: in liquid gold.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Trump loves gold so much and he hates building renewables,
Speaker 5: even in places like Texas where they secretly make a
Speaker 5: bunch of Republicans a lot of money. He is, as
Speaker 5: we tape, actively trying to kill the clean energy industry
Speaker 5: a free markets.
Speaker 6: But I do think the crucial difference beyond just the
Speaker 6: policy is also the way Trump and his cronies think
Speaker 6: about energy and the way they talk about it. They
Speaker 6: keep hitting on that word dominance, and that's the keyword here.
Speaker 6: The Dems wanted market dominance for American energy, and they
Speaker 6: were fine getting there with wind or solar, but with
Speaker 6: Trump and MAGA, it's more than that. Whether or not
Speaker 6: they believe in climate change is almost beside the point.
Speaker 6: It's the idea that fossil fuels are at the center
Speaker 6: of the global economy and that power comes from controlling them.
Speaker 6: It's not about independence or security. It's about power, and
Speaker 6: not just on a geopolitical level of being able to
Speaker 6: bully other countries, but almost like on an individual one.
Speaker 5: It reminds me of that line from Doom.
Speaker 6: Yes, he who controls the spice, it drove the universe spice.
Speaker 6: And it's that word dominance, not spice, that we want
Speaker 6: to talk about in this episode of Carbon Brows, because
Speaker 6: the idea of trying to dominate through taking possession of
Speaker 6: natural resources goes back a lot further than Trump or
Speaker 6: even the fight over climate change.
Speaker 5: It's the story of how masculinity and extraction got linked
Speaker 5: in our collective imaginations, how we went from thinking of
Speaker 5: the earth of a living organism or mother even to
Speaker 5: something we can plunder and destroy and profit from as
Speaker 5: we as men see fit, And how the fight over
Speaker 5: climate change became bound up with the backlash against feminism,
Speaker 5: transgender rights, and the rights of anyone or anything that
Speaker 5: challenges the supremacy of men.
Speaker 6: Welcome back to Carbon Bros.
Speaker 5: I'm Daniel Penny and I'm Amy Westervelt.
Speaker 6: On today's episode, Good Energy Dominance.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of ways we could start this
Speaker 5: episode about the masculine urge to dominate nature.
Speaker 6: And it should be said right from the top that
Speaker 6: dominance and aggression are not innately masculine traits, nor do
Speaker 6: all men exhibit them hashtag not all men. But for
Speaker 6: the purposes of this combo, we're talking about hegemonic masculinity
Speaker 6: or toxic masculinity, the type that Trump, MAGA and the
Speaker 6: global far right view as the only proper way to
Speaker 6: be a man. Last year, I spoke with doctor Terry
Speaker 6: Cooper's who's one of the leading academic researchers that helped
Speaker 6: popularize the term toxic masculinity.
Speaker 4: Toxic masculinity is not synonymous with masculinity. We have to
Speaker 4: be clear about what we're talking about. There are multiple masculinities.
Speaker 4: There's a hegemonic masculinity which is being contested right now.
Speaker 6: What is hegemonic masculinity and what distinguishes that from toxic masculinity.
Speaker 4: There's a dominance hierarchy, and within that framework we can
Speaker 4: look at characteristics what we call in psychology traits like
Speaker 4: hyper competitiveness, like brutality towards those lower on the dominance hierarchy.
Speaker 4: Those things I believe are socially evil, They're not appropriate
Speaker 4: aims to strive for, and a group of those things
Speaker 4: I lump under toxic masculinity. At different points of time,
Speaker 4: different forms of masculinity emerge and become more or less powerful,
Speaker 4: dominant hedgebonic masculinity looks at that historical development with the
Speaker 4: question what kind of masculinity is dominant now or hegemonic?
Speaker 4: For instance, I believe in the United States we're having
Speaker 4: a cultural war about that. We have a president who
Speaker 4: explicitly advocates sexism, misogyny, homophobia, islamophobia, etc. All of which
Speaker 4: you're part of toxic masculinity.
Speaker 5: So to recap, just like there are many ways to
Speaker 5: be a woman based on cultural and historical context, masculinity
Speaker 5: is not all one thing, and it does not have
Speaker 5: to be agro, but hegemonic masculinity that's the kind of
Speaker 5: images and behaviors and social scripts we encounter every day
Speaker 5: does equate manliness with dominance.
Speaker 6: And this is important when we think about how these
Speaker 6: macho men treat the natural world.
Speaker 5: To understand how dominating nature got all tied up with masculinity,
Speaker 5: we have to talk about how ideas about nature became
Speaker 5: gendered in the first place. And for about as long
Speaker 5: as we have documentation of humans, there is this idea
Speaker 5: of Earth as a womb, as a maternal figure nurturing humans.
Speaker 5: It spans back for centuries across cultures and religions from
Speaker 5: Pacha Mama amongst the indigenous peoples of Peru.
Speaker 6: And of course the Greeks had Gaya and the Romans
Speaker 6: had Tera mater mother Earth. This familiar relationship between humans
Speaker 6: and the rest of the national world goes back to
Speaker 6: way before hippies were making bumper stickers about it, and
Speaker 6: it's remained a recurring theme in pop culture. I was
Speaker 6: actually just watching this clip that I found from a
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety Earth Day TV special with a lot of
Speaker 6: celebrities in it, including Robin Williams and Bette Midler playing
Speaker 6: Mother Earth. What are you worried about?
Speaker 3: Everyone's saying Mother Nature?
Speaker 8: Mother Earth?
Speaker 10: People said, we gotta respect Mother.
Speaker 11: Earth what we do. But she loves us.
Speaker 3: She's always there for us, isn't she. She's always got.
Speaker 7: One more tree upper sleeve, doesn't she.
Speaker 3: And she's the type of mom who could never say no.
Speaker 12: Stop praise He's I can't marry her another word.
Speaker 4: It's second.
Speaker 3: Enough of this drivel.
Speaker 13: What is this?
Speaker 3: Marny grown may see Thanksgiving day break?
Speaker 10: Come on, are you arigant?
Speaker 12: Little Homo sapiens?
Speaker 14: You don't know me?
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised.
Speaker 11: It's hard to recognize me anymore.
Speaker 13: Oh.
Speaker 6: Once I was so fresh, so green, my skies were
Speaker 6: so bloom.
Speaker 2: I was pristine, my Mother Earth.
Speaker 10: And I'm sick and it's all.
Speaker 14: Your fault to me?
Speaker 7: Why is it all it's mart fault?
Speaker 13: Yeah?
Speaker 5: The Mother Earth thing really cuts both waysy. On the
Speaker 5: one hand, it's presented as a reason to respect the planet,
Speaker 5: on the other as a reason to endlessly extract with impunity.
Speaker 5: It makes me wonder how nature even got coated as
Speaker 5: feminine in the first place.
Speaker 15: A certain kind of European Christianity has been very influential
Speaker 15: in the United States in terms of kind of framing
Speaker 15: that men should have dominion over women and children, but
Speaker 15: also over the environment. That has been really foundational to
Speaker 15: the story of the United States.
Speaker 6: That's Sophie Burke James. She's a researcher at Vanderbilt focused
Speaker 6: on the intersection of gender, environment, and religion. Her work
Speaker 6: often looks at the connections between the anti abortion movement
Speaker 6: and other far right projects, including climate change.
Speaker 15: We can see a very clear through line across anti
Speaker 15: environmental movements that they generally are also anti feminist and
Speaker 15: opposing gender equality and supporting various kinds of male supremacy.
Speaker 15: That those are often very much linked, particularly in the
Speaker 15: United States, but elsewhere as well. It's a power relation,
Speaker 15: and I think that's what's really important in trying to
Speaker 15: understand why the anti feminist far right movements of today
Speaker 15: are also generally opposed to acknowledging there our current environmental reality,
Speaker 15: which is we need a different relationship to the natural.
Speaker 6: World, like this idea of dominion. It's not coming from nowhere.
Speaker 6: It's a specific interpretation of the Bible. This is Genesis, right.
Speaker 15: Let us make men in our after our likeness, and let.
Speaker 13: Them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and.
Speaker 15: Over the power of the air, and over the cattle,
Speaker 15: and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
Speaker 15: that creepeth upon the earth. Yeah, a specific interpretation of
Speaker 15: the Bible that really prioritizes this notion of power over others.
Speaker 15: There's many biblical scholars that say that the Bible is
Speaker 15: actually could be read as an environmental text, that there's
Speaker 15: many themes in the Bible that talk about not just
Speaker 15: dominion over and control over in nature, but can be
Speaker 15: actually read as a text about how to celebrate nature
Speaker 15: and live in harmony with nature. Protestantism is often very
Speaker 15: much in line with capitalist values around property and around
Speaker 15: viewing the natural world not as something that we rely
Speaker 15: on and that requires respect and care, but as something
Speaker 15: that can be parceled out into private property. And that's
Speaker 15: a very different kind of relationship.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 15: If it's your property, you can kind of do whatever
Speaker 15: you want with it. It's again about power and control
Speaker 15: and not about a kind of symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 6: What's the connection then, to the plight of women, because
Speaker 6: obviously today women aren't property, but they once were.
Speaker 15: There are some parts of the current Christian right that
Speaker 15: want not to turn women into property, but they are
Speaker 15: opposed to the Nineteenth Amendment, which allows women the vote.
Speaker 15: When I first started studying the Christian right in the
Speaker 15: United States over fifteen years ago, that was a really
Speaker 15: radical position that's becoming much more, not mainstream, but talked
Speaker 15: about more broadly, like that women should be should no
Speaker 15: longer have the right to vote. If we kind of
Speaker 15: step back and look at what these movements are about,
Speaker 15: they're about asserting relationships of power and control in the world,
Speaker 15: and that means men should have power and control over women.
Speaker 15: That feminism is a direct assault to this worldview, but
Speaker 15: also recognizing the reality of climate change is also a
Speaker 15: direct assault to that worldview, and that if you have
Speaker 15: to recognize that you, as a human being are ten
Speaker 15: on a much broader ecological system that you know is
Speaker 15: vulnerable to human impacts, then it's a very different relationship
Speaker 15: than one of power and control. And so I think
Speaker 15: that the power and control is the kind of foundation
Speaker 15: to both of those issues.
Speaker 6: But a certain version of Christianity that says man has
Speaker 6: dominion isn't the only thing driving a wedge between humans
Speaker 6: in the natural world. During this time, this Protestant theology
Speaker 6: was brought to the US by settlers. Where I live
Speaker 6: on the outer tip of Cape Cod is actually the
Speaker 6: first place the Pilgrims landed on their way to Plymouth.
Speaker 6: But I think they couldn't get much food here, and
Speaker 6: a lot of them starved to death. Anyway. The Pilgrims,
Speaker 6: like most Europeans during the so called Age of Discovery,
Speaker 6: believed this new world was promised to them by and
Speaker 6: whoever was first to lay claim to it was the
Speaker 6: rightful owner. This is known as the doctrine of Discovery.
Speaker 5: Exactly, and a really cool loophole to this approach was
Speaker 5: that if someone did make it there first, but they
Speaker 5: weren't a Christian, that didn't count.
Speaker 13: I hear I claimed this land and all literally tests
Speaker 13: in the name of His majestin kaing James the past,
Speaker 13: and to so name the settlement James Town.
Speaker 7: The Doctrine of Discovery is one of the original international
Speaker 7: law doctrines that was developed in the fourteen hundreds to
Speaker 7: control the actions of European Christian nations.
Speaker 5: This is Robert Miller. He's an expert in federal Indian
Speaker 5: law and an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.
Speaker 7: As Europeans began to sail outside the site of land,
Speaker 7: they began to be interested in acquiring empires in Africa
Speaker 7: and then into the Americas and into Asia. And this
Speaker 7: idea that the Church and the kings and queens of
Speaker 7: Europe could develop international law to control how they acquired empires.
Speaker 7: We call this the doctrine of discovery. Because Europeans were
Speaker 7: discovering other cultures, other people's, other lands, and then wanted
Speaker 7: to be able to claim them and have those claims
Speaker 7: recognized under international law. It's finders keepers to the extent
Speaker 7: that they were finding lands that were truly vacant. They
Speaker 7: very rarely found lands that were truly vacant. They were
Speaker 7: claiming the lands of indigenous peoples in Africa, in the Americas,
Speaker 7: and in Asia.
Speaker 5: Robert really blew my mind when he pointed out that
Speaker 5: the doctrine of discovery is still alive and well today,
Speaker 5: though it doesn't just apply two Christian nations colonizing other
Speaker 5: parts of the world anymore, but it's still justifying what
Speaker 5: it did back then resource extraction.
Speaker 7: It is still the law today. Russia and China have
Speaker 7: planted their national flags on the bottom of the ocean
Speaker 7: bed under the North Pole in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 7: and in twenty ten China puty its flag on the
Speaker 7: bottom of the South China Sea. So nations are still
Speaker 7: using this idea that where they arrived first, they can
Speaker 7: acquire by claiming this area.
Speaker 6: So while the Virginia and East India companies were sailing
Speaker 6: around the world laying claim to new lands, the British
Speaker 6: upper classes were also busy at home kicking peasants off
Speaker 6: their land. This was a process called enclosure, which Karl
Speaker 6: Marx writes a lot about it. And this was this
Speaker 6: idea that in the feudal era you had lords who
Speaker 6: were given land by the king, but then there was
Speaker 6: also something called the commons, which was land that everyone
Speaker 6: got to make use of, and they could graze their
Speaker 6: animals there, and they could take firewood, etc. And at
Speaker 6: some point in the sixteen hundreds, Parliament got together and
Speaker 6: they started passing laws that allowed the wealthy to take
Speaker 6: that land entirely for themselves and kick the peasants off
Speaker 6: of it in the name of agricultural improvement.
Speaker 9: Who raised a hand against the king's men will be arrested.
Speaker 11: You'll have no right.
Speaker 7: They've signed it out.
Speaker 12: Well, now it belongs to the Earl of Manchester, by
Speaker 12: whose authority, by the authority of the king.
Speaker 11: Then I say that.
Speaker 4: King is a thing.
Speaker 11: You're under arrest. Take them away.
Speaker 6: And this is what, according to Marx, created the working
Speaker 6: class people without land, who had to sell their labor
Speaker 6: in order to survive.
Speaker 5: Living in twenty twenty five, when absolutely everything has been commodified,
Speaker 5: it's hard to remember that there was a before to
Speaker 5: the way we live now. But it was during this
Speaker 5: transition hundreds of years ago, when capitalism was just getting started,
Speaker 5: that a lot of our collective ideas about nature were
Speaker 5: starting to crystallize. One of the more important ones was
Speaker 5: that if you can't price something like the value of
Speaker 5: an impact ecosystem, for example, or clean drinking water, then
Speaker 5: it's worth nothing. We got to read a new book
Speaker 5: about all this, recently called Free Gifts, Capitalism and the
Speaker 5: Politics of Nature by Elisa Battistoni. Here she is explaining
Speaker 5: it in more detail.
Speaker 13: Western culture and Enlightenment, and there's this moment that comes
Speaker 13: about with Dick part and then other Enlightenment thinkers, that
Speaker 13: really institutes the separation between like the thinking, rational human
Speaker 13: being and the dumb matter of the world, Like that
Speaker 13: animals or machines and everything else in.
Speaker 6: The world is just kind of a solis nothing.
Speaker 16: To be used as we will and sort of put
Speaker 16: to human use.
Speaker 13: Major division between human beings and the rest of the world.
Speaker 13: Then the basic idea has really structured fundamentally a lot
Speaker 13: of Western development.
Speaker 2: The expropriation account.
Speaker 17: Looks at this violent process of expropriation of taking. You know,
Speaker 17: even John Locke would say God gave this orth command
Speaker 17: in common, and then what happens is like some people
Speaker 17: appropriate there's.
Speaker 13: And the privatization of that by this very violent process.
Speaker 13: I think that's the other sort of major story we.
Speaker 6: Have about what happens with capital.
Speaker 13: So the free gift is really built into sort of
Speaker 13: like the daily processes of capitalism in a way that's
Speaker 13: not necessarily about what we think or what we believe,
Speaker 13: because there's this sort of foundational reality.
Speaker 5: Apologies because I know you wrote able book about it,
Speaker 5: but if.
Speaker 14: You can define what you mean by a free gift, So.
Speaker 2: This term the free gift of nature.
Speaker 13: There's a term that I really get out of looking
Speaker 13: at a lot of classical political economy.
Speaker 18: So people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo and Jambetts,
Speaker 18: and a lot of the people writing and like the
Speaker 18: eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who are writing the early
Speaker 18: days of capitalism and the development of industrial capitalism, and
Speaker 18: they are describing the contributions that non human nature make
Speaker 18: to production. They talk about the organs of sheep that
Speaker 18: help produce full they talk about soil fertility that helps
Speaker 18: crops grow. There's a lot of different gifts of nature
Speaker 18: that give gratuitously to production. They're observing all of these
Speaker 18: wonderful gifts, but they're giving only to capital in the
Speaker 18: system where they're the.
Speaker 16: Ones who are benefiting from the free gifts of nature.
Speaker 14: I'm curious what you think about the sort of way
Speaker 14: that nature has been gendered throughout most of history in general,
Speaker 14: and like weather call it Mother Earth or referring to
Speaker 14: the planet, and all of these sort of like feminine terms,
Speaker 14: has contributed to the idea that it should be free.
Speaker 16: Yeah, I think we should be a more circumspect about
Speaker 16: embracing the Mother Earth's language, because I think it can't
Speaker 16: suggest this rationalization in a way of on the one hand,
Speaker 16: that mothers are also supposed to give freely and generously
Speaker 16: and selflessly and so on, and so we should treat
Speaker 16: that labors if it's just kind of like available for
Speaker 16: the taking, you know, it seems like the earth.
Speaker 11: Is just giving them to us of its own free religion.
Speaker 2: I think is rarely the case.
Speaker 16: I think it's maybe more of like a thing where
Speaker 16: it kind of ends up justifying that rather than causing it.
Speaker 6: Okay, we've got man's dominion over nature and women, the
Speaker 6: doctrine of discovery to justify grabbing foreign land, rich landlords
Speaker 6: using violence to get rid of the commoners and take
Speaker 6: it for themselves, and to keep all of this humming.
Speaker 6: You've got the free gifts from mother nature. This stuff
Speaker 6: may sound abstract, but it's still shaping so much conservative
Speaker 6: opposition to environmental rules and the fight to stop climate change.
Speaker 5: Yes, this is a super important point. The importance of
Speaker 5: private property is at the core of American conservatism today.
Speaker 5: The rights of property owners get invoked every time environmental
Speaker 5: regulations threaten to limit how people use their land by
Speaker 5: not allowing them to dump chemicals into rivers, for example,
Speaker 5: or pollute the air with plumes of CO two.
Speaker 6: And while there are many people who helped promote this concept,
Speaker 6: there's one guy who did more than most, John Locke.
Speaker 5: Maybe father liberalism or a father anyway. Right wing groups
Speaker 5: like the Federalist Society and the Fraser Institute are always
Speaker 5: putting out youtubes about luck, though if you actually read
Speaker 5: his work you realize how much they get wrong.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the number of misleading YouTube explainers these guys put
Speaker 6: out is crazy. I actually had to wade through quite
Speaker 6: a few of them preparing for this episode, But I
Speaker 6: think my favorite comes from Cato Institute, which is a
Speaker 6: conservative libertarian think tank set up by oil billionaire Charles Koch.
Speaker 6: Shout out Koch Brothers, the original Carbon Bros. All the
Speaker 6: way back in the nineteen nineties, they were putting out
Speaker 6: cassette tapes to try to win the hearts and minds
Speaker 6: of young conservatives, and they dedicated a whole self study
Speaker 6: tape on John Locke's Two Treatises of Government.
Speaker 10: Welcome to Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, a
Speaker 10: presentation of the Cato University, a project of the Cato Institute.
Speaker 10: The notion that property was originally owned in common had
Speaker 10: been defended by Christian thinkers for many centuries. Therefore, philosophers
Speaker 10: had to explain how private ownership arose from communal ownership
Speaker 10: and why this transition was morally justified. This was the
Speaker 10: task undertaken by John Locke.
Speaker 6: I love this intro. We need to find a way
Speaker 6: to defend kicking people off their common land, And thankfully
Speaker 6: here's John Locke.
Speaker 19: God, who hath given the world to men in common,
Speaker 19: hath also given them reason to make use of it
Speaker 19: to the best advantage of life and convenience. The earth
Speaker 19: and all that is therein is given to men for
Speaker 19: the support and comfort of their being. Yet being given
Speaker 19: for the use of men, there must of necessity be
Speaker 19: a means to appropriate them some way or other before
Speaker 19: they can be of any use or at all beneficial
Speaker 19: to any particular man.
Speaker 5: Okay, man has dominion over the earth, that's from Genesis,
Speaker 5: Adam and Eve, and man is supposed to use his
Speaker 5: reason to decide what to do with that. But these
Speaker 5: days there's more than one man. So how do you
Speaker 5: decide who gets what?
Speaker 10: Beginning with self ownership, Locke develops an ngous defense of
Speaker 10: private property.
Speaker 19: The labor of a man's body and the work of
Speaker 19: his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then
Speaker 19: he removes out of the state that nature hath provided
Speaker 19: and left it in. He hath mixed his labor with
Speaker 19: and joined to it something that is his own, and
Speaker 19: thereby makes it his property.
Speaker 10: When a man gathers acorns in the wild, he mixes
Speaker 10: his labor with the acorns and thereby becomes their owner.
Speaker 6: This is the classic finders keeper's defense. But Locke goes
Speaker 6: beyond the doctrine of discovery. He's proposing that if I
Speaker 6: use my reason to find and gather those acorns, then
Speaker 6: I've mixed my labor with them, and they become my
Speaker 6: private property. So sorry, Amy, no acorns for you. That
Speaker 6: doesn't seem fair.
Speaker 5: But Locke proposed that a value from some resource on
Speaker 5: your land was derived as a result of your labor or.
Speaker 6: Or the labor of a worker you paid.
Speaker 5: Then that value should be yours. And this had a
Speaker 5: huge influence on the Founding followers. Here's Robert Miller again.
Speaker 7: John Locke's theory was to put land to its best
Speaker 7: and highest use, and in American society that seems to
Speaker 7: be make the most money off it as you can
Speaker 7: plunder it for its resources. If there's water, use it,
Speaker 7: use it, even if you use it up or defolid
Speaker 7: If there's oil or trees or minerals, it's strip mined
Speaker 7: until you have it all and then leave it and
Speaker 7: walk away.
Speaker 6: So, really early on, right at the founding of the US,
Speaker 6: you're getting this fundamental shift in our relationship to land,
Speaker 6: where the natural world is fully abstracted as property with
Speaker 6: economic value, what Marks would call a commodity property that
Speaker 6: only white men can own.
Speaker 7: I drink your milkshake.
Speaker 19: I drink it up.
Speaker 6: It's a pretty straight shot to this.
Speaker 1: It's called drill, baby, drill.
Speaker 6: We'll be drilling down more on that after the break.
Speaker 11: American culture is a culture premised on cheap, blowing oil,
Speaker 11: and automobility is a pillar of petra cultures in the
Speaker 11: United States. It's also that it's very difficult to even
Speaker 11: imagine how life could be otherwise because everything is cemented
Speaker 11: around us. As long as there's power and profit to
Speaker 11: be had from fossil fuels, we will continue to see
Speaker 11: some form of petro masculinity.
Speaker 6: This is Kara dagget A Virginia tech political scientist who
Speaker 6: coined the term petromasculinity in twenty eighteen with a groundbreaking
Speaker 6: study titled Petromasculinity, Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire and It,
Speaker 6: Daggett lays out the case for fossil fuels being about
Speaker 6: more than just profit and energy and digs into the
Speaker 6: ways our social and political lives have been shaped by
Speaker 6: an attachment to oil, gas and coal. You poined this
Speaker 6: term in twenty eighteen in an academic article. This was
Speaker 6: during Trump's first term. What exactly did you mean by
Speaker 6: that term and what were you seeing or reading at
Speaker 6: the time that led you to this insight with that term.
Speaker 11: I think it took on a life of its own,
Speaker 11: which was a total surprise to me because.
Speaker 7: It can be.
Speaker 11: Understood in this deep, structural and historic which is really
Speaker 11: where I wanted to go with it in the article.
Speaker 11: And at the same time, it's so visibly present that
Speaker 11: I think just saying the word people can understand or
Speaker 11: think of examples that they see out on the road
Speaker 11: and in their everyday life. When I wrote about this,
Speaker 11: that was during the first Trump administration, and what I
Speaker 11: wanted to do was understand this connection and far right
Speaker 11: movements between misogyny, anti feminist politics, anti queer politics, and
Speaker 11: the support for fossil fuel and climate denial.
Speaker 6: One of the most visible aspects of this relationship between
Speaker 6: masculinity and fossil fuels is the obsession that how many
Speaker 6: men have with their cars. A twenty twenty three study
Speaker 6: from the University College London found that when men were
Speaker 6: manipulated into believing that their penises were smaller an average,
Speaker 6: they were actually more likely to want to buy a
Speaker 6: sports car or rate a sports car as important and
Speaker 6: conferring status. For anybody who's ever seen a pair of
Speaker 6: truck nuts dangling off the rear bumper of a pickup,
Speaker 6: the relationship between driving a powerful vehicle and the masculinity
Speaker 6: is pretty obvious.
Speaker 3: Can you name the truck with pool wheel drime, smells
Speaker 3: like a steak and seats thirty bad rule?
Speaker 5: Can we know from past drilled seasons that Sigmund Freud's
Speaker 5: nephew Edward Berneze actually introduced this idea of cars being
Speaker 5: an extension of manhood. Here's an example from a car
Speaker 5: ad he was involved with back in the fifties.
Speaker 7: Taking so much longer than nast year it is really
Speaker 7: is longer than some levels.
Speaker 6: Oh that is obscene.
Speaker 2: It's really something.
Speaker 11: It's not subtle.
Speaker 6: I can't believe that that past advertising standards of the time.
Speaker 6: I know, because yeah, so much of American life is
Speaker 6: built around driving, and for the past few years, motor
Speaker 6: vehicles accounted for around thirty percent of total USCO two emissions.
Speaker 5: And this stuff is baked into our lives in the
Speaker 5: most intimate ways. Just think of all the little boys
Speaker 5: playing with hot wheels, or the teenage boys dreaming of
Speaker 5: picking up their prom dates with their own set of wheels,
Speaker 5: prepping for their first job interview in the front seat,
Speaker 5: putting those just married cans on the back.
Speaker 6: Does anybody still do that thing with the cans on
Speaker 6: the bumper of their car?
Speaker 5: Okay, fair, I have not seen that in a while,
Speaker 5: but the point still stands. Cards are integral to the
Speaker 5: American way of life, and most Americans cannot imagine their
Speaker 5: lives without them. But women drive too, right, There's nothing
Speaker 5: innatly masculine about cars. So how did men become so
Speaker 5: enamored with driving that we wound up with petro masculine the.
Speaker 6: Car and the infrastructure and economy that we've built around.
Speaker 6: It represents, for Daggett, a fantasy of freedom, one that
Speaker 6: is deeply at odds with the reality of climate change.
Speaker 6: It starts with the idea of dependency. Here's Daggett.
Speaker 11: My sense is that this notion of freedom is really important,
Speaker 11: and underlying it is a desire to escape relations of
Speaker 11: dependency of all sorts, so to escape the fact of dependency,
Speaker 11: which is really a fact of life.
Speaker 2: It's most obvious when.
Speaker 11: You're a kid, or when you're an old older person,
Speaker 11: or if you have some sort of illness and you
Speaker 11: need care. But really every minute of our life where
Speaker 11: dependent on not just other people, but most obviously.
Speaker 2: On our ecologies. And so it's not only the car.
Speaker 11: It's also a broader notion of the way technology becomes
Speaker 11: a source of escaping dependency. And that's masculinized because often
Speaker 11: dependency is feminized.
Speaker 6: A lot of the issues that men are grappling with
Speaker 6: are real. Wages have stagnated, University tuition is ridiculously expensive,
Speaker 6: jobs have been lost to offshoring and automation. This is
Speaker 6: all a major challenge to the idea of bread winner masculinity,
Speaker 6: which is this concept that being a man means providing
Speaker 6: for your family, and when you can't do that, you
Speaker 6: lose a piece of your manhood. But when the bosses
Speaker 6: decide you're no longer useful, the right is able to
Speaker 6: blame women for taking your jobs, or environmentalists for weakening
Speaker 6: the economy with their stupid.
Speaker 3: Rules, moving ahead full steam to try to switch many
Speaker 3: of our everyday appliances from gas to electric cars and
Speaker 3: stoves to water heaters and air conditioners. Doing us now
Speaker 3: were public and gonger'smen. Bill Johnson, I've always heard, Congressman,
Speaker 3: that electric energy is the least efficient way, for instance,
Speaker 3: to heat your household water. Why is the administration so
Speaker 3: hell bent on making.
Speaker 6: Americans do it that way?
Speaker 20: Well, let's be clear about something, john This is not
Speaker 20: about carbon it's not about climate change.
Speaker 10: This is about control.
Speaker 6: On the one hand, these environmentalists want to ruin all
Speaker 6: the nice things about being an American man and a
Speaker 6: feminists are going to come and take away your masculinity.
Speaker 6: But in addition to this fear, there's also a kind
Speaker 6: of pleasure in the destruction of those enemies, which is
Speaker 6: where things get really twisted, you know, like blowing a thick,
Speaker 6: black plume of smoke onto a cyclist or driving through
Speaker 6: a crowd of climate protesters.
Speaker 12: Angry mogorists have clashed with climate protesters who blokuded Melbourne's
Speaker 12: busiest road during the morning peak. Drivers and even pedestrians
Speaker 12: got involved in the fiery confrontation, with police nowhere to
Speaker 12: be seen.
Speaker 3: Frustration boils over on Punt Road.
Speaker 11: In this fantasy of petromasculinity and the violence that goes
Speaker 11: along with it, in some ways is an expression of
Speaker 11: an acknowledgment, albeit on an unconscious level, of the existential
Speaker 11: crisis that we are actually facing in terms of climate change.
Speaker 2: And the fantasy element.
Speaker 11: Is I think the fact that all of us who
Speaker 11: live in very energy intensive cultures are every day living
Speaker 11: on top of violence, living through violence. But there's a
Speaker 11: lot of work that's done to hide that. There's a
Speaker 11: lot of hypocrisy, there's a lot of suppressed and repressed
Speaker 11: shame and violence that comes with this way of life.
Speaker 11: For those of us like you, I'm sure and me
Speaker 11: and others who study and work on climate, it's heavy.
Speaker 11: People talk about climate anxiety, climate grief. This fantasy is
Speaker 11: another psychological position to respond to the acknowledgment of this
Speaker 11: violence in the world. And it is to refuse to
Speaker 11: feel shame and to say I embrace this, and this
Speaker 11: actually is righteous, and I'm going to somehow fold this
Speaker 11: into a story that supports me in my sense of goodness,
Speaker 11: and that therefore feels very pleasurable and very good. And
Speaker 11: so in some ways it's a fantasy, because of course
Speaker 11: it is denying a whole of real problems. But on
Speaker 11: the other hand, I think we need to understand the
Speaker 11: fantasy and kind of denial that is happening in what
Speaker 11: you might think of as the centrist liberal space. Sometimes
Speaker 11: I think that this reactionary politics feels.
Speaker 2: More deeply the crisis.
Speaker 11: Of climate than sometimes some liberal politicians do.
Speaker 6: It. You argue that petro masculinity is a form of
Speaker 6: climate refusal that's not just kind of ignoring climate change,
Speaker 6: but it's actively asserting a retrograde, anti democratic vision of
Speaker 6: life in order to prevent society from engaging with climate reality.
Speaker 11: We can look at the example of coal and see
Speaker 11: how it could play out, and this is one of
Speaker 11: my colleagues and co authors named Shannon Bell, did this
Speaker 11: research into Friends of Coal, which was an AstroTurf advocacy
Speaker 11: campaign for the coal industry that when there were a
Speaker 11: lot of jobs lost over the years in the coal industry,
Speaker 11: and there was concern on the part of the industry
Speaker 11: exactly like you're saying, that there would be a less
Speaker 11: public support, especially because some of the ways that coal
Speaker 11: was using less labors, things like mountaintop removal, where they're
Speaker 11: just exploding mountains leading to a lot of environmental damage,
Speaker 11: and communities. Friends of coal started attaching coal to masculine
Speaker 11: symbols like NASCAR, hunting, the military and making it into
Speaker 11: this like, instead of being attached to your union, which
Speaker 11: was usually maybe how your strongest emotional attachment would be
Speaker 11: as a coal miner, you become attached to coal itself
Speaker 11: as in this symbolic territory as power.
Speaker 2: So that's a possibility. I think.
Speaker 11: Also the problem with oil that we've been talking about
Speaker 11: is it's not just on the producer side, it's on
Speaker 11: the culture and consumer side. People understand that oil is
Speaker 11: part of their everyday life, and there's a lot of
Speaker 11: fear in what that means in terms of how ways
Speaker 11: of life need to change.
Speaker 6: So even if we get rid of gas cars, we've
Speaker 6: got to roll back an entire lifestyle predicated on fossil fuels.
Speaker 2: I think there's a problem of petrochemicals.
Speaker 11: So even as we might decrease some oil use for
Speaker 11: motive force, the oil industry is expanding their petrochemical production,
Speaker 11: and they're using the same tactics, like they bring these
Speaker 11: facilities into communities that maybe have lost a lot of
Speaker 11: industry and say, these are communities that had maybe strong
Speaker 11: grassroots environmental movements against former extractive industry, but they say, well,
Speaker 11: you know, but we're going to give you jobs. And
Speaker 11: this really is deeply existential. On the one hand, there
Speaker 11: are fossil fuel elites who are villains. We should point
Speaker 11: to them on a broader sense. Public interest should not
Speaker 11: be in oil, but detangling the ways that oil has
Speaker 11: sort of entered every facet of our lives is going
Speaker 11: to take a transformation.
Speaker 2: It's not as simple as just switching a fuel.
Speaker 5: Wow, that was a really interesting conversation to listen in on.
Speaker 5: On that last point, I've been seeing for more than
Speaker 5: a decade that solving the climate problem requires moving beyond
Speaker 5: looking at the energy source and really interrogating the power structure.
Speaker 5: I think maybe people are finally starting to see that
Speaker 5: it's really hard to look back at the whole history
Speaker 5: of patriarchy and colonization and capitalism and the way fossil
Speaker 5: fuels and climate denial are woven in there and not
Speaker 5: see that. But I think so much of the climate
Speaker 5: conversation has been about communicating the truth. If people just
Speaker 5: understood the science, then we could all agree and finally
Speaker 5: do something. But Dagett really gets at how deep our
Speaker 5: attachment to fossil fuels actually runs, and how irrational it
Speaker 5: can be, but how it meets these needs for security
Speaker 5: and status and identity, or.
Speaker 6: More darkly, give them a sense of power through violence.
Speaker 6: That was one of the more eye opening moments in
Speaker 6: our conversation, the idea that climate denial at least offers
Speaker 6: a psychological medicine powerful enough to take on the pain
Speaker 6: and uncertainty of the climate crisis, and even offers a
Speaker 6: kind of sick benefit, whereas the neoliberal policy talk and
Speaker 6: technocratic language of abundance just doesn't quite hit.
Speaker 5: And that's what would be talking about in our next episode,
Speaker 5: the way that technology and science have taken on their
Speaker 5: own Thorkier shade of expert masculinity, and the way climate
Speaker 5: activists from Rachel Carson to Greta Tunberg have been dismissed
Speaker 5: as hysterical because they just don't understand the science of
Speaker 5: carbon credits and blue hydrogen.
Speaker 6: Because there are a lot of dudes in the climate
Speaker 6: space too. They just often happen to be in favor
Speaker 6: of very tech heavy approaches like carbon capture, geoengineering or
Speaker 6: nuclear energy solutions that ignore the social dimensions of climate
Speaker 6: change and often don't even add up.
Speaker 5: And they do not like it when cranky lesbians, Swedish
Speaker 5: doom goblins, and blue haired weirdos question their calculations.
Speaker 20: The Antichrist is like some evil tech genius evil scientists
Speaker 20: who invents this machine to take over the world. People
Speaker 20: are way too scared for that. In our world, it's
Speaker 20: far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
Speaker 6: That was Peter Teo. You may know him from such
Speaker 6: companies as PayPal and Pallenteer, and also from his political
Speaker 6: work as the chief backer of JD Vance. Teel and
Speaker 6: many of his minions are a big part of what
Speaker 6: we'll be talking about next time on carbon Brose. Join
Speaker 6: us for boy math solutions.
Speaker 5: Carbon Brose is an original series from Drilled and Non Toxic,
Speaker 5: written by me Amy.
Speaker 6: Westervelt and by me Daniel Penny.
Speaker 5: Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoldzbostwick. He
Speaker 5: also composed our theme song.
Speaker 6: Check his stuff out.
Speaker 5: Our engineer is Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilpa Jindia.
Speaker 6: Original artwork by Matthew Fleming.
Speaker 5: Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First
Speaker 5: Amendment Project. Marketing by Maggie Taylor. Check out the Non
Speaker 5: Toxic Podcast for more on the Mannos here, and good
Speaker 5: to Drill Dot Media for more climate reporting and to
Speaker 5: support artwork