Never Let a War Go to Waste

Summary

Podcast Summary: Drilled – "Never Let a War Go to Waste"

Host: Amy Westervelt
Episode Date: April 14, 2026
Production: Pushkin Industries

Overview

This episode of Drilled explores the deep-rooted connections between war, nationalism, fossil fuel dependency, and the shaping of American identity—a phenomenon the show dubs “fossil fascism.” Amy Westervelt and guests trace how the fossil fuel industry and its powerful trade groups have repeatedly exploited geopolitical crises, from the Iraq War to the 2026 attacks on Iran, to reinforce fossil fuel dominance and stymie climate action. The episode offers a sweeping historical perspective, highlights modern propaganda efforts, and exposes industry-coordinated disinformation campaigns, connecting the dots between past and present.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Comparing Wars and Extracting Opportunity (01:59–04:05)

• Comparison with Prior Wars:
  Analysts point out similarities between the Iraq War and the 2026 Iran attacks—namely, the use of potentially dubious claims about weapons of mass destruction as pretexts.
• Differences Highlighted:
  Amy notes that unlike Iraq, Iran has not seen ground troops or congressional approval for the attacks. The key thread linking both episodes: fossil fuels and the manipulation of public perceptions for industry gain.
• The Core Thesis:
  “A unified arc towards fossil fascism”—where fossil fuels, nationalism, and American exceptionalism meld into a singular, powerful narrative.

2. Manufacturing American Energy Identity (04:05–09:38)

• Fossil Fuels as National Identity:
  API president Mike Summers paints American fossil fuel dominance as an intrinsic part of U.S. greatness and destiny.
  • Quote [API President Mike Summers, 04:35]:
    “It was a reminder then, as it is now, that the American energy leadership has never been accidental.”
  • Narratives tie innovation, prosperity, and patriotism to fossil fuels, portraying any challenge to this industry as an attack on the American way of life.
• Historical Perspective:
  Dr. Robert Bruhl (Brown University) explains that huge resources are spent not just on denial but on embedding fossil fuels with American identity.
  • Quote [Dr. Bruhl, 06:47]:
    “They're spending probably five or ten times more trying to influence the perceptions...tying their product to the American way of life and everything good about America, you know, apple pie, mom, you know, the flag.”

3. Fossil Fuels from World War I to Redrawing the World (09:38–13:06)

• Origins of American Petroleum Institute (API): The API emerged from wartime coordination among oil companies in WWI, drawing from formal war propaganda techniques.
  • Quote [Dr. Bruhl, 08:09]:
    “Out of that comes the American Petroleum Institute...the really the first modern, sophisticated, public relations oriented trade association in the world.”
• Carving Up the Middle East: The thirst for oil drove the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the creation of modern Iraq, entrenching a century of conflict and alliances founded on resource control.
• U.S. Oil Enters the Game:
  American companies leveraged their war support to demand stakes in Middle Eastern oil, entwining U.S. foreign policy with corporate interests.

4. Propaganda, Entitlement, and the API’s Expanding Power (20:50–25:10)

• Mid-20th Century Messaging:
  API-funded films (like their Jetsons-meet-Martians animation) showcase propaganda equating capitalism, American progress, and oil—painting any deviation as un-American.
• Climate Science Manipulation:
  Ben Franta (Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford) describes APA’s decades-long sponsorship of economic research downplaying climate risk—studies subsequently echoed by politicians.
  • Quote [Ben Franta, 23:37]:
    “...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.”
  • He links the “research” invoked by Trump to justify leaving the Paris Accord directly to long-standing API-funded academics.

5. Recent Disinformation and Political Leverage (25:10–28:38)

• Coordinated Industry Campaigns:
  During crises (e.g., pre-invasion of Ukraine), API and allies rapidly pushed anti-climate policy narratives to blame Democrats and regulators for supposed vulnerabilities.
• Behind the Scenes:
  Public relations expert Christina Rina confirms the high likelihood of pre-planned, industry-wide media campaigns.
  • Quote [Christina Rina, 26:21]:
    “This is an organized disinformation effort geared towards affecting policy in the short term...the communications pieces were put into place and ready to go prior to February 24 [of the invasion].”
• Narrative Over Facts:
  Despite empirical increases in U.S. oil/gas production, the story dominating news cycles was of leftist “minorities” endangering American strength.

6. The Fossil Identity and Exclusion of Dissidents (28:38–30:48)

• Dominance Rhetoric:
  The industry’s strategy remains: frame fossil fuels as synonymous with patriotism, and label critics as out-of-touch elitists.
  • Quote [Mike Summers, 29:28]:
    “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.”
• Petro-Masculinity:
  The episode links fossil fuel boosterism and authoritarian “strongman” imagery—what academics label “petro masculinity”—to broader right-wing, anti-progressive agendas.
  • Quote [Academic/Expert, 30:15]:
    “I wanted to understand this connection in far right movements between misogyny, anti-feminist politics, anti-queer politics, and the support for fossil fuel and climate denial.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “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.” — Amy Westervelt [03:54]
• “Any attack on fossil fuels is an attack on our way of life. That's an extremely powerful argument that fossil fuel companies have been making for decades.” — Dr. Robert Bruhl [07:34]
• “It [API] was 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.” — Amy Westervelt [19:38]
• “What mattered was the story and being able to tell it first and loudest.” — Amy Westervelt [27:55]

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Timeline of Key Segments

• 01:59: Introduction—Comparing Iraq and Iran wars, introducing fossil fascism concept
• 04:05: API President’s State of American Energy speech (Mike Summers); fossil fuels and nationalism
• 06:47: Dr. Bruhl on industry perception-shaping, not just science denial
• 08:09: Origins of the American Petroleum Institute after WWI
• 13:06: Condensed history: oil industry’s role in Middle Eastern geopolitics
• 20:50: API propaganda films and narratives in the 1950s
• 22:40: Ben Franta on API's climate denial and economic influence
• 25:10: API’s rapid response/coordination to exploit international crises
• 26:21: Christina Rina, PR expert, on signs of orchestrated disinformation
• 28:38: LNG deals post-invasion; blame shifted to “woke activists”
• 29:28: API's exclusionary rhetoric—industry as the “real” America
• 30:15: Introduction of "petro-masculinity" and far-right alignment

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Closing Thoughts

With vivid historical detail and sharp investigative analysis, Amy Westervelt and her guests show the continuity between imperial resource grabs, Cold War propaganda, and today’s fossil fuel-driven politics. The fossil industry’s strategy is laid bare: seize moments of war or crisis to reassert and embed an identity narrative, cast climate action as “un-American,” and deploy coordinated disinformation to delay meaningful change. The episode ends hinting at deeper dives into petro-masculinity and the lasting effects of these narratives.

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Recommended for listeners interested in: climate politics, the intersection of industry and geopolitics, propaganda, true crime, and American history.

Transcript

[Amy Westervelt]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Narrator/Host]

Pushkin. Lots of people have been drawing comparisons between the U.S. 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 the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.

[Guest or Interviewee]

What she said I think they were

[Narrator/Host]

very close to having it.

[Guest or Interviewee]

I take the threat very seriously. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously and

[Narrator/Host]

the preemptive nature of these attacks.

[Paramount Plus Advertiser]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

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, 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 miniseries. 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.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

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. 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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. He connects directly back to American energy dominance today.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

It was a reminder then, as it is now, that the American energy leadership has never been accidental.

[Narrator/Host]

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 kind.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

But you also have that national identity and former glory LinkedIn inextricably to fossil fuels.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

Americans spent years being told that they should do less, build less, produce less and pay more. We're done with all of that. American energy is the future, and America is ready to lead.

[Narrator/Host]

And importantly, threatened by a small minority.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

A small fringe is stuck in the past. They oppose growth, expansion and new 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.

[Narrator/Host]

Listening to this talk earlier this year, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Brown University environmental sociologist Dr. Robert Bruhl a few years ago about how long the American Petroleum Institute has been connecting fossil fuels to American identity.

[Dr. Robert Bruhl]

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 you know, I'm not saying that that isn't important and doesn't count, but you know, they're spending probably five or ten times more trying to influence the perceptions of these corporations and the perceptions of, of their product and tying their product to the American way of life and everything good about America, you know, apple pie, mom, you know, the flag. Fossil fuels. And so by implication what they do is they basically say any attack on fossil fuels is an attack on our way of life. That's an extremely powerful argument that 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.

[Narrator/Host]

The APA 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.

[Dr. Robert Bruhl]

After the war ended, there was an interest in sort of coordinating an industry position for the petroleum industry to represent their interests to the public. 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 Mobil, to form the American Petroleum Institute in 1919. And so the American Petroleum Institute 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.

[Narrator/Host]

But it's not just the American Petroleum Institute that emerges out of World War I. There's also a newly delineated 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.

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[Cal Penn]

I'm the host of Irsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

[Ray Porter]

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like okay, yo yo yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like no. At this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that that deeply, emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah dude, me too.

[Cal Penn]

Listen to Irsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator/Host]

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 hundred year history is covered in great detail in a whole bunch of really good books that I'm going to link to in the show notes, but will 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 Tsar opens up the Baku region of Azerbaijan. Private oil prospectors by 1890, Russian 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 reserv. Why? Well, because it's mostly controlled by the Ottoman Empire, the so called sick man of Europe, which is in economic freefall 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 Australia gold miner, William Darcy begins exploring for oil nearby in Persia 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 in 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. 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, Georges Picot of France and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov. Known collectively as the Sykes Picot 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 split between Russia and Britain. Anglo Persian is not happy about this. They do not like the idea of getting Mosul to the French and immediately begin working behind the scenes to undermine this arrangement. 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 talks in 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 and in the region. For our purposes, I'm going to 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. That's right, it's the US and particularly Standard Oil of New Jersey, the company known today as Exxon Mobil. 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 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. U.S. oil executives begin agitating for a weigh in to Iraq's oil fields. They start releasing all these white papers and pamphlets and memos and talking to the press 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, 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, Kalust Sarkis Gulbenkian, 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, BP today Royal Dutch Shell Company Francaise Des Petrolles, Total Energies today, and a consortium of US companies called the Near East Development Corporation, led by Standard Oil of New Jersey, later Exxon and Saucony 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 a rock 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 actually negotiating foreign policy on behalf of the US. 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.

[Guest or Interviewee]

Not only smooth and efficient, but powerful as well. I watched them for hours. Great, Ganymede, they were superb. I just couldn't help comparing them with ours. If you call that a comparison, surely these vehicles must be the property of the highest of the officials. I was wrong. It seems that almost everybody in this country has one of those. They call them automobiles.

[Narrator/Host]

This is a clip from an American Petroleum Institute propaganda film that came out in the 50s. 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 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.

[Guest or Interviewee]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

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 integral in shaping the economic argument against acting on climate change.

[Ben Franta]

I was interested in the American Petroleum Institute and 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 90s, 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 we shouldn't do anything about this problem.

[Narrator/Host]

That's Ben Franta, who heads up the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University and uncovered a lot of early API documents on climate change.

[Ben Franta]

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 90s, then the early 2000s, like, wow, 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 really got my attention was back in 2017, I think, and Donald Trump had announced that he was going to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. And in a speech he gave to justify doing that, he cited some economists and said that the Paris Agreement was going to be economically devastating for the US if the US Stayed in it. And I thought 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 consulting firm, and then it's quoted as being reliable and being rigorous research.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

There is 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, American oil and gas companies are cutting back on production.

[Narrator/Host]

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 Christina Rina to ask what she thought.

[Amy Westervelt]

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 ad that is on television, that could take two months plus in a tight timeline. This was just too coordinated, given the time frame 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. And I do personally believe that the communications pieces were put into place and ready to go prior to February 24, 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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, 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

[Amy Westervelt]

the notion that its activists and woke up 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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 liquefied natural gas terminals and inked a deal with Europe that locked them into purchasing large volumes of American gas for years to come. We're going to work to ensure an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied

[Bobcat Sponsor Announcer]

natural gas, LNG, for Europe this year.

[Narrator/Host]

We'll also work to ensure additional EU market demand for 50 billion cubic meters

[Bobcat Sponsor Announcer]

of LNG from the United States annually by 2020 30.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Mike Summers (API President)]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

He hammered on energy dominance, too, a theme repeated often by Trump and his administration. We're looking to be very energy dominant and we will be, in a very short order, unleash energy dominance. This is unleashed the National Energy Dominance Council. We are unleashing energy dominance that taps into another key marker of fascism, the strongman leader guy who's going to 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.

[Academic or Expert Commentator]

When I wrote about this, 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, 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 coincidentally inhabiting the same movement.

[Narrator/Host]

That's our story next time. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Ostwick. He also composed original music for this episode. Matt Fleming created the series artwork. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton. The show was reported and written by me, Amy Westervelt.

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[Martha Stewart]

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[Narrator/Host]

This is an Iheart podcast.

[Amy Westervelt]

Guaranteed human.