(Roughly) Daily

A number of entrenched interests have been playing a long game. There’s (all too appropriately) a good bit of attention trained on efforts like The Federalist Society‘s attempts to remake the legal and judicial landscape and The Heritage Foundation‘s “Project 2025” plan to reshape the federal government along right-wing lines. Both reflect the careful cultivation, over decades, first of sympathetic “scholarship” and opinion, then of political action.

But as Kate Yoder of Grist explains, there’s another– longer, deeper– program at work: from the family car to the dream kitchen, fossil fuel companies have sold a vision of prosperity that depended on their own products. Over a century of evidence shows how they have done it…

What does going on a date have to do with fossil fuels? Everything, according to the petroleum industry.

One advertisement from the pipeline company Energy Transfer follows two people getting ready for a date, the man primping with hair gel, the woman applying lipstick, before meeting at a bar. “That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the narrator says. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?”

The story rewinds to the beginning, except this time, the woman looks bewildered as her phone with the dating app evaporates in her hands. She gets lipstick all over her cheek when the car she’s riding in hits the pavement without its tires. As his hair gel disappears, the man looks into the mirror, baffled. When they sit down across from each other, makeup, hair dye, and glasses fade away. In the game playing on a TV in the bar, a football disintegrates a second before the kicker swings his leg at empty air.

The commercial, which has racked up 7.4 million views since it appeared four years ago, taps into the fact that fossil fuels have become embedded in American life (what’s more American than football?). Oil and gas not only influence how people get around town, but also where they live, how they dress, and how they cook food in their kitchens. This all feels so ordinary that most people don’t notice how pervasive petroleum is, powering our lives while hiding in plain sight. Though it might seem inevitable that we live this way, a Grist investigation found that this idea of what’s “normal” was shaped by decades of advertising, public relations propaganda, and broader efforts to sway American culture, from radio programs to Hollywood films.

“Our dependence on oil didn’t just happen,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.

This campaign started about a century ago, when companies began strategizing how to create long-term demand for fossil fuels and the products that ran on them. Billboards showcased happy families on the road in their cars, films showed stylish women cooking over the flame of a gas stove, and magazines featured men pushing their gas-powered mowers across soon-to-be perfectly manicured lawns. The message was often left unsaid: The American way of life runs on fossil fuels.

There’s a well-documented history showing that Exxon and other oil giants understood the dangers of global warming by the 1970s based on their own research and still spent decades publicly downplaying, or outright denying, the science. But the story of how oil and gas companies coaxed Americans into accepting — even desiring — a life built on fossil fuels has largely escaped attention, buried in the pages of obscure trade journals.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry spent millions of dollars a year on campaigns to “educate” the public about the wonders of petroleum and how it advanced the “American way.” The natural gas industry promoted all-gas “dream kitchens” and paraded them in front of the editors of Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They sold a vision of the American Dream that required their products — a cultural legacy that has been devastating for efforts to rein in climate change and shift to a cleaner future.

This history offers an explanation for why Americans have had such a strong reaction to the idea of banning polluting gas ranges (“they can pry it from my cold dead hands”) or requiring more sales of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars. Is this debate really just about technology, or about what the burning of fossil fuels represents — freedom and a sense of identity? President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda is deeply nostalgic for what oil once promised: economic might, a higher standard of living, the chance to rise above your station and maybe make a fortune. In his inauguration speech last year, Trump promised a return to these ideals. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.

As the world enters an “age of electricity” powered increasingly by solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources, the United States often appears to be stuck in the past. The Trump administration has prolonged the life of coal plants and opened up new areas to oil drilling, while paying companies billions of dollars to stop offshore wind projects. The explanation, when it’s offered, often returns to the same theme. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers summed up the sentiment this summer: “President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American Dream for future generations.”

The words echo what the oil industry has been telling Americans for a century: Without fossil fuels, there is no “good life,” only sacrifice…

Read on for the remarkable tale: “The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream,” from @grist.org.

See also: “How Big Oil Shaped America’s Parks.”

* Amory Lovins

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As we look behind the curtain, we might that it was on this date in 1895 that George Selden was granted the first patent for a gasoline-powered automobile. In the patent, which Seldon had filed several years earlier, on May 8, 1879 (eight years before the public introduction of the Benz Patent Motorwagen in Europe, built in 1886 and widely considered the first automobile), he described not only the engine but also a complete automobile incorporating such features as a clutch, compressed air self-starter, and steering system (No. 549,160). He maintained that it was the combination of these elements, together with his engine, made the road-engine patentable. Selden’s day job was as a patent attorney, so he knew to delay the issue of the patent by sending amendments and other communications every two years. Meanwhile, others did the hard work of developing the automobile, and his patent became more valuable. Years of legal wrangling for profits followed.

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