3. Fossil Gerontocracy, or What Sticks Us Where We Are

Gerontocracy is another concept with a long history. It arrived in 1828, just as steam-power was winning its struggle for the soul of industrial capitalism. Gerontocracy appeared in a political manifesto authored by James Fazy, a Swiss journalist and political activist of French Huguenot descent. A passionate liberal, Fazy was galled that the revolutionary spirit of France had degenerated during the Bourbon restoration into a “government of old men.”1 By this, he meant specifically those conservative, wealthy, and powerful parliamentarians who defended the debris of the ancien regime. Like other liberals of his era, Fazy was greatly enthused by American federalism and British industrialism and sought a renaissance of francophone democracy in their image. Some two decades later, as the political leader of Geneva, Fazy’s wish came true as he helped broker a new federal constitution for Switzerland.

But back in 1828, Fazy’s claim to fame was drawing attention to the generational character of political power. One might surmise that Fazy’s indictment of gerontocracy amounted to what we call ageism today. But in fact he argued for the value of elder wisdom so long as it was proportional to elders’ place in society. Youth, meanwhile, needed a proportional voice too because non-elders provided most of the labor of the nation and thus understood “the real needs of the body social.”2 The true object of Fazy’s criticism was the perpetual monopolistic rule of a single generation: “What genius for domination agitated this turbulent generation of 1789! She began by suppressing her fathers, she ends by disinheriting her children.”3

A more recent example of gerontocracy comes to mind. I started my academic career studying Soviet socialism in eastern Europe. From conception to collapse, most of these socialist states endured for approximately a single human lifespan. The possibility of eastern European state socialism began with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and ended with the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union between 1988 and 1993. So, it was somehow fitting that when one looked at the political leadership of eastern Europe in the 1980s, one found septuagenarians at every turn: Czechoslovakia’s Husák (b. 1913), East Germany’s Honecker (b. 1912), Romania’s Ceaușescu (b. 1918), and the USSR’s Brezhnev (b. 1906), Andropov (b. 1914), and Chernenko (b. 1911), all of whom had come of age in the communist and social-democratic movements of the 1930s and 1940s. This generation had grown up believing in the revolutionary promise of socialism; they had fought fascists before and during WWII and helped build new socialist states from the rubble of war. They embraced state socialism as a bulwark against fascism and the western capitalist states that they suspected were always on the verge of descending into fascism.

In the former German Democratic Republic, where my research focused, younger East Germans often spoke to me about the difference between those for whom the GDR was their life’s work—not only the true believers in the communist party-state, but also the dissidents who longed for a better socialism—and those who were simply hineingeboren (born into it) and generally felt alienated from the political messages and institutions provided by their elders. This generational split between those invested in the political culture of state socialism and those who increasingly saw it as pointless and oppressive helps explain the curious phenomenon that right up until the moment of its demise, many Eastern Europeans thought that state socialism would endure forever. Yet when the collapse finally came, a great many people also found themselves somehow unsurprised. As my friend Alexei Yurchak describes coming of age in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, “A peculiar paradox became apparent in those years: although the system’s collapse had been unimaginable before it began, it appeared unsurprising when it happened.”4

Yurchak coined his own term to describe what was happening to the political culture of late socialism: hypernormalization. Hypernormalization describes a feedback process through which the norms of political culture—particularly, political communication—recursively intensify. For example, let’s say that the political elite decides that elaborate technical descriptions and the heavy use of nouns make for the most authoritative political pronouncements. This was something that actually happened during the last decades of socialism since the political elite felt technical nouns projected a sense of scientific mastery over the world. The problem was that once that norm was established as an end in itself, political actors tried to outdo the norm by filling their political messages with ever more technical-sounding nouns until their statements made very little sense to anyone outside the elite. Yurchak offers further insight into why hypernormalization happened, “The uncoupling of form and meaning in this case was that while these figures were on the verge of dying as biological beings, they functioned as immortal authoritative forms.”5 In other words, as the state-socialist ruling class entered its final years—by the early 1980s there was a Soviet Politburo member dying on average once every six months—there was an increasing emphasis on maintaining precise political rituals, on routinizing political language, even to the point of absurdity. It was all part of a rather self-defeating effort to immortalize their political imagination. I say self-defeating because what hypernormalization actually achieved was making political language self-referential, formulaic, and nonsensical to many outside the elite. Fidelity to ideological fossils triumphed over the supposed point of politics: to manage and improve a dynamic social world.

Sounds familiar, no? Contemporary petropolitics has similarly given itself over to endlessly repetitive formulas. Whatever the question, more fossil fuels are the answer. Grid failure in Texas? We should probably become even more reliant on natural gas. War in Ukraine creates a global energy shock? We should be expanding oil production to overcome it. Petropolitics has entered its senescence: regardless of changing circumstances and advancing environmental degradation, it drones on with the same talking points. The petropolitical imagination is paralyzed, completely unable to comprehend a world beyond the glories of its youth. Just like Soviet-style socialism in the 1980s, petroculture today is a gerontocracy hallucinating that the splendor of the mid-twentieth century can be preserved forever. Of course, in the thick of it as we are, it still seems impossible for many to imagine a world after oil. Yet when the oil economy finally collapses, as with the end of Soviet socialism, I suspect the majority of us will simply shrug at how obvious it was that petroculture could never last.

Part of the impasse facing us today is indeed the one that irritated James Fazy so many years ago. The United States Senate is currently the oldest it has ever been, featuring five octogenarians, twenty-one septuagenarians and only one senator under 40. The Boomer generation that suppressed their fathers during the late 1960s now disinherit their children (and grandchildren) in the 2020s. But the age of politicians is not the real story here. Aging may inevitably involve some degree of fossilization as Hegel diagnosed, but let us not forget the wild wise elders, the Noam Chomskys, Ursula LeGuins, and Cornell Wests of the world. They too came of age in the heyday of petroculture. Do we doubt their thirst for radical change?

Although there are many good reasons to bring more young people into politics, fossil gerontocracy is not simply a problem of aging humans. Most younger humans actively reproduce petroculture too. Fossil gerontocracy is ultimately a problem of infrastructure, specifically the persistence of certain kinds of infrastructural fossils, the very ones we excavated in the first part of this book. Some of these fossils are material infrastructures—pumpjacks, highways, pipelines, and refineries—that in their totality represent an enormous capital investment with tremendous inertial force and a desire not to be rendered obsolete. But we also have less material kinds of infrastructure to contend with, like fossilized forms of behavior and thought. True, we suffer under a class of political leaders steeped in antiquated ideas and accustomed to ecocidal habits. But where did their ideas and habits come from? And what makes them still seem reasonable and even desirable to wide swathes of the population? Fossil gerontocracy!

To simplify for narrative purposes, fossil gerontocracy consists of three layers of muddy infrastructure that together constitute the deep and sticky ooze that mires us: petrostate, petrohabits, and petroknowledge. These layers mutually support one another, and their combined forces vastly exceed the influence of any political figure, political movement, political party, or political generation.

The first infrastructural domain that needs unmaking is the dense murk and muck of petrostate. “Petrostate” is a concept that leaked into the world rather spontaneously. Interestingly, no one claims to have to coined the term; after some searching you can trace the first published instance to a passing reference in a 1975 Forbes magazine feature.6 The Forbes feature doesn’t even offer a definition, as though it were already completely obvious what a petrostate was. At the same time, petrostate enjoys a certain conceptual invisibility. Though the word circulates widely today, it hasn’t yet graced the hallowed halls of the Oxford English Dictionary. But a technical definition has coalesced all the same: petrostates are those countries that earn a considerable portion of their revenues from sales of oil and gas. What counts as considerable depends on whom you ask. According to some experts, oil sales need to account for 60 percent or more of GDP, which restricts the petrostate designation to an elite group of large oil producing nations including Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. For others, the threshold is more like 40 percent, enough to make Russia a petrostate, or even only 10 percent, where Norway gets to join the club.

The same experts argue that nearly all petrostates suffer from having so much wealth derived from a single mineral complex. Petroleum tends to inflate governmental ambitions to the point of delusion. As political scientist Terry Lynn Karl explains,

“The abrupt flow of petrodollars into national treasuries, combined with decisions to increase government spending, had a profound impact on the state. Oil money was power, if only because it enhanced the financial base of the public sector. In fact, it did much more . . . windfall rents expanded the jurisdiction of the state, which then grew even more as a result of conscious government policy. The public sector’s economic role was transformed in the process. In addition to deepening its involvement in a number of traditional activities, the state shifted into new arenas of industrial production, often for the first time . . . [and] almost all exporting states demonstrated a strong bias toward macroprojects in heavy industry.”7

To cut to the chase of a series of consequences often glossed as “the oil curse,” governments binge on massive oil revenues spending profligately, obsessively even, wasting resources in massive prestige industrial projects that frequently fail to improve living standards among their populations. On the contrary, rapid industrial growth tends to overwhelm existing infrastructure, increasing dependency upon imports and causing inflation to surge. And this is not even to mention the tendency of petrodollars to fatten the offshore bank accounts of autocrats and oligarchs.

Yet what I mean by “petrostate” is actually more expansive than the conventional usage of the term. Economists tend to see petrostates as deformations of normal national economies. But what if we began with the opposite assumption that there is nothing more normal in politics and economy today than a petrostate condition? Defining petrostates by oil sales misses the many forms of sympoietic tangling between oil and political power that afflict all governments. One aspect of tangle is how energy supplies and prices frequently become flashpoints of political attention and mobilization. As is too often the case, elite resistance to a just and equitable energy transition deploys petropopulism to combat the specter of a Tesla-owning lunatic environmentalist fringe that cares nothing for the jobs and well-being of the working classes. The 2018 yellow vest protests in France against new fuel taxes are a good example. The cynicism of petropopulist elites aside, such protests express the social truth that fossil energy dependency creates an unsettling existential precarity. According to economists, the social demand for energy is inelastic because energy is both necessary for a wide range of daily activities and difficult to substitute. Thus, when energy prices rise dramatically, the entire population feels the rise intimately, and those with the least financial reserves often find themselves in desperate circumstances. There is evidence, for example, that the trigger for the wave of U.S. subprime mortgage defaults that brought about the 2008 global economic crash was a doubling in fuel costs that forced cash-strapped homeowners to choose between keeping gas in their cars and making mortgage payments. Up against the wall, they chose the former because they needed to drive to keep their jobs.8

Another pillar of the petrostate complex are corporations whose sole reason for existence relates to the provision of fossil fuels. Upstream, midstream, and downstream oil and gas companies blend tightly into the political structures of the state in any country with an oil industry. Ditto large-scale infrastructural projects related to the management and/or consumption of fossil fuels. Pipeline systems and petrochemical industrial complexes are self-explanatory in this regard. There are less obvious petrostate infrastructures too. Consider, for example, how the built environment of cities incentivizes constant fossil fuel use. Walkable, bikeable density was eschewed in the twentieth century in favor of sprawl that required machines to navigate. At the same time, energy–efficient public transportation was suppressed in favor of inefficient private transportation. Think of how perfectly functional streetcar networks were decommissioned and torn out of the ground in favor of expanded automobility in the United States between the 1920s and the 1950s. Cities were, in effect, redesigned to burn more oil. This dovetailed with the beginning of a global surge in building long-distance highway systems that expanded intercity automobility, challenging rail networks as systems for the movement of goods and people. Infrastructures of automobility became essential petrostate features.

Perhaps the most consequential example of petrostate sympoiesis is the interdependency of petroleum and military power. Sociologist Max Weber famously defined the state as that which “(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”9 Since the early decades of the twentieth century, the exercise of physical force, legitimate and not, has entwined with petroleum in increasingly fundamental ways. During the 1940s, a mutually reinforcing nexus of oil, armament industry, war machines, and state power evolved whose supply chains and institutional logistics spanned the globe.10 Strictly speaking, the American and Soviet empires dominated this nexus through their combination in various Cold War hotspots. But this imperial petrostate also clearly exceeded, and continues to exceed, national defense concerns, operating according to its own interests, epitomized by shadowy multinational corporations like Halliburton that provide both upstream oil services and defense contracts across the world. Like the early locomotives that burned coal to haul more coal to burn, the series of U.S. military interventions in the Middle East since the 1990s have burned an enormous amount of oil, chiefly in order to secure more oil to burn. Brown University’s Watson Institute recently calculated that U.S. military emissions since the “Global War on Terror” began in 2011 have amounted to 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, more than double the annual emissions of all the passenger cars operating in the United States. The U.S. military alone already has a carbon footprint larger than the national economies of Morocco, Peru, and Sweden.11 Military operations account for 80 percent of the U.S. government’s total energy use, the equivalent of 121 million barrels of oil annually.12

While it is true that no other nation-state today exercises the global military operations and ambitions of the United States, nearly every government operates a military or security force that depends fundamentally on petroleum for its defensive and offensive operations. And even those countries that do not maintain militaries tend to be pressured into accepting the standardization of fossil fuels, so as to be able to maintain smooth economic relations with their neighbors. Iceland, for example, supports no military and has been remarkably successful in decarbonizing its heating system through a shift to geothermal energy. Yet the gerontocratic-path dependencies of global transportation being what they are, full decarbonization has eluded Iceland. It continues to consume substantial quantities of oil products to sustain automobility and service the aviation and shipping industries that connect Iceland with the rest of the world.

Meanwhile for most countries, the consequences of the sympoiesis of petroleum and military power are that the interests of government and oil industry tend to coalesce outside the domain of political debate. Governance simply assumes that the interests of the oil industry align with the interests of society as a whole. Even now that the intimacy of oil and political power is coming under more scrutiny because of climate change, we find a vigorous defense of the status quo that has led more often to political impasse than to genuine progress on decarbonization in most countries. Sometimes arguments for the necessity of maintaining an oil-based economy focus on national security, sometimes on jobs, sometimes on technological reliability, and sometimes they express the quiet fatalism of inertia. The oil industry possesses not only exceptional wealth but also exceptional political influence. Leaders in the industry know that they enable every aspect of modernity and aren’t afraid to warn feckless politicians of the dangers of disturbing a mutually lucrative arrangement. Leaving nothing to chance, the oil industry also engages actively in devious disinformation campaigns and behind-the-scenes lobbying to make sure that any legislation or policy that could potentially harm fossil fuel interests will be stalled, defanged, or, at worst, diluted.

Things are beginning to change, very slowly; the petrostate condition is neither absolute nor invulnerable. But we must recognize petrostate as the deepest and most recalcitrant level of muck, the deadly ooze at the foundation of fossil gerontocracy. Petrostate is the most effective guarantor of petroculture’s perpetuation regardless of its ecocidal consequences. It takes dogged attention and deliberate action to escape its suction. For the same reason, petrostate decomposition must be our primary political objective moving forward.

In the intense political resistance to dismantling the petrostate condition, we encounter reinforcements drawn from the second infrastructural layer of fossil gerontocracy, petrohabits. This layer is perhaps the most ubiquitous of the three, touching nearly all human life on the planet in some way. Yet it is also less dense and more fluid and thus more directly accommodating of efforts to transform it than petrostate is. By habits, I mean more than repeated individual behaviors. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued, habits are always social and political. Habits of thought and action inherit and express specific social environments and specific class positions. Certain tastes in food or art or music, for example, suggest something about where one has come from. A child of doctors develops a certain “feel for the game” of medical professional life through saturation in that social world from a young age. That feel is a social advantage that can later help that child to reproduce their parents’ life trajectory; meanwhile, different feels exist for the children of actors or accountants or construction workers. Social advantage is not a perfectly reproductive system. It is more like a probability that acquired habits of action and thought will allow inherited legacies to become future opportunities. Bourdieu felt that habits—or as he put it, “habitus”—are passed on in almost unconscious ways, often naturalized as “just the way things are.” Merit judgments express class sentiments. So, if a working-class child doesn’t perform well in an academic institution that expects and rewards a different kind of habitus, then that institution will say that the child wasn’t very intellectually gifted in the first place (or that they are sadly being held back by their home environment). And in that child’s family, it will reciprocally be said that academia is a waste of time anyway, better suited to idiots who don’t know how to work with their hands. “Any successful socialization tends to persuade agents to collaborate with their own destiny.”13

Petrohabits represent a successful socialization by the dominant petropolitics, a reproduction of the feel for the game of petroculture. As we discovered in the previous section the habitual basis of petroculture is multiple. Yet it reproduces a specific set of orientations crucial for petropolitics: constant motion without purpose, constant consumption without satisfaction, constant energy expenditure without conscience or exhaustion. Mobility, consumption, and expenditure are all undertaken habitually as ends in themselves. Sometimes, of course, petrohabits justify themselves additionally by appeals toward abstract principles like “freedom” or “nation.”

Since the fossilization of petroculture is widespread, especially in the global North, it might seem that it would be easier to identify what is not a petrohabit than what is. There is some truth to this. Looking at the astounding range of petroplastic artifacts documented in the last section; chances are that your day today will be spent navigating their world. Writing with a plastic pen is a petrohabit of a certain kind. So is eating food that has been trucked in from some other part of the country. So is leaving your air conditioning or heating running full blast while you aren’t home.

While many petrohabits are now ubiquitously distributed, the relative impacts of petrohabits vary dramatically according to place and social circumstances. It’s hard, for example, to find locations where fossil-fueled automobiles don’t exist. But practices of private automobile ownership and usage differ widely across the world. The United States has 200 times as many automobiles per capita as does Bangladesh, for example. Mobility, consumption, and expenditure patterns diverge dramatically in the global South and global North, a phenomenon that a recent research report calls “global carbon inequality.”14 Part of this inequality is reflected in national emissions differentials; most countries in the global South currently have sustainable carbon footprints (e.g., less than 3 to 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per capita per year), with many African countries having only a fiftieth the per capita emissions of countries like the United States.

Yet the story involves not only national differences but global class differences as well. In the United States, which unsurprisingly features one of the highest per capita rates of greenhouse gas emissions in the world (21 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per person per year),15 there is a stratum of frequent-flying, high-consumption elites that are responsible for hundreds of times the per capita emissions of the average U.S. citizen.16 The richest 10 percent of global citizens were responsible for almost half of human carbon emissions in 2021, compared with only .2 percent emissions stemming from the poorest 10 percent.17 Only somewhere between 2 and 4 percent of the world’s population flew internationally before the pandemic. And just 1 percent of global citizens are responsible for half of the total emissions resulting from commercial aviation.18 “Affluent individuals can emit several ten thousand times the amount of greenhouse gases attributed to the global poor.”19

So, while petrohabits may be ubiquitous, they are not all created equal. Through their class culture, a highly wealthy and mobile global elite luxuriates in massive emissions many times greater than even the most energy profligate nations on earth. Compounding the negative consequences of their own activities, the same elite dangles their luxury emissions over the rest of the world’s population, encouraging them to follow suit in the name of upward mobility and influence. In a sense this is not a new story. Ever since the era of British “coalonialism,” European imperial powers have asserted that the path to development and prosperity be paved in high carbon emissions that bring financial windfalls and energopolitical leverage back to the global North. The situation with oil today is little different; since the mid-twentieth century, the whole world has paid rent in petrodollars in order that an imperious petrostate continues to sustain itself.

Today’s global capitalism inherits and reproduces these fossil legacies. It also reproduces the extractivist inequalities of European colonial plantations and resource frontiers. The philosopher André Gorz argued back in the 1970s that the class structure of capitalist society was sustained by a phenomenon he termed the “poverty of affluence.” What he meant is that capitalism utilizes scarcity as a means for reproducing social inequality and preserving class hierarchy. New technological achievements and luxuries are enjoyed first only by the elite, which displays them as status symbols to attract the desires of the masses toward them. As the masses gain access to old luxuries, new unattainable luxuries develop to replace them. This treadmill of luxury means that no universal “good life” will ever be enjoyed in a capitalist society.20 Unfortunately, green capitalism reproduces this trend, emphasizing the invention of new luxury eco-artifacts like $100K Tesla automobiles and solar roof tiles for mansions over investment in low carbon public goods like public transportation networks and public housing projects that would have a much more significant, efficient, and equitable decarbonization impact over time.

Capitalism is not exactly the same thing as petrohabitus, in part because capitalism incorporates sucrohabitus and carbohabitus too. Yet, for most intents and purposes, capitalist culture and petroculture are functionally equivalent today. Truisms like “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of xyz” work equally well for both capitalism and oil, revealing how sympoietically entangled capital and fuel, petroculture and capitalist society have become. It is difficult to imagine a future that is not the ongoing collaboration of capitalist petroculture, which is part of the reason why some feel that the dusk of petroculture augurs the dawn of a post-capitalist world order (or vice versa). Fittingly, Naomi Klein describes this as a war of the world against the self-interest of an ecocidal minority elite: “we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”21

The identification of major media as a key epistemic support infrastructure for the reproduction and extension of both petrostate and petrohabits brings us to the third layer of fossil gerontocracy: petroknowledge. Petroknowledge is the most fluid layer of muck that ensnarls us. It offers flow and swirls and spectacle; tracking news cycles and events, things are always happening in the domain of petroknowledge. For the most part, of course, petroknowledge affirms the convictions and habits of petroculture. But its strategies are many, including distraction, diversion, and even seeming acceptance of the need for change. Even in the grips of a dominant petroculture, it’s not difficult to find media messages maligning petroculture. There is indeed so much very sincere anti-petro messaging out there that if you inhabit certain media echochambers you could be forgiven for thinking that the hold of petroculture is weaker than it actually is.

One can distinguish between a less supple, unconscious dimension of understanding, which is an aspect of petrohabitus, and the domain of fast-moving discourse and conversation to which petroknowledge belongs. To paraphrase Freud, the unconscious indicates the domain of knowledge that is largely invisible to rational attention, yet which at the same time structures many aspects of belief and worldview. This domain, which is also sometimes described as ideology,22 sets conditions of possibility for knowledge and debate, for example the widespread conviction that economic growth is always good. Bedrock certainties of petrohabitus operate in the shadows of consciousness, so to speak; they are difficult to identify and examine critically and are thus quite consequential for how people engage and interpret the events of their lives. Expressions of petroknowledge, in contrast, may be forceful but they are also more ephemeral. Petroknowledge surges and whirls in reaction to the kaleidoscopic churn of the wider world. Petroknowledge can be straightforward and literal, offering triumphal assertions of the necessity of the petrocultural world order. But, in the deepening shadow of the Anthropocene, petroknowledge is increasingly wily, opting to make its case more circuitously. Contemporary petroknowledge frequently twists logic and revels in misdirection, creating surreal, knotted narratives that often scarcely conceal outright contradictions. Petroknowledge is the original post-truth.

Examples of petroknowledge are literally multitudinous, so let me offer just two cases—one more literal and the other knottier—harvested from the mediascape of my adoptive petropolis, Houston. Houston is an excellent place to encounter petroknowledge, indeed to study fossil gerontocracy in its totality. Houston features the largest conglomeration of fossil fuel and petrochemical infrastructure in the western hemisphere and is home to some 5,000 energy companies, most of which work diligently to make the insanity of ongoing fossil fuel use seem not only reasonable and widely beneficial but also inevitable. Given this intimacy, Houston exudes petroknowledge with a special vitality. Many key talking points and narrative strategies originate here.

My first example is an opinion piece published several years ago in the Houston Chronicle, the local newspaper of record. The author is Kathleen Hartnett-White, a veteran Republican political operative and former member of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The piece lauds the positive, indeed emancipatory, role fossil fuels have played in human history. Here is an excerpt:

When mankind first accessed fossil fuels, not so historically long ago, human living conditions began dramatic and sustained improvements. First harnessed in the Industrial Revolution a mere 200 years ago, fossil fuels have made modern living standards possible and have released whole populations from backbreaking labor and abject poverty.

Before this game-changing energy revolution, the total energy available for human use was circumscribed by the limited flow of solar energy regularly captured in plants through photosynthesis. Fuel for heat was derived almost entirely from trees and woody plants. Food, clothing, shelter and materials depended on plant growth—and on animals also dependent on plant growth. Natural disasters and political upheaval regularly shrank the energy supplied by living nature. Physical conditions across societies and eras throughout history, of course, differed, but there was no sustained upward trend until the concentrated energy in hydrocarbons—a form of ancient nature—was tapped.23

Although Hartnett-White has been lately described as a fringe thinker and conspiracy theorist, her discourse is a completely mainstream and cogent expression of petroknowledge. Even if fossil fuels have an environmental downside—a point which Hartnett-White, to be clear, also vigorously contests—oil’s fundamental contribution to humanity’s “sustained upward trend” means that it has been, and will continue to be, on balance a positive force in human history. For petroculture celebrants like Hartnett-White, the category of “humanity” clearly only includes and values the white, northern humans, who indeed have benefited massively from petroculture. Such petroknowledge intertwines today with authoritarian political movements in a way that issues a stark reminder that petrostate has never had any particular affinity for democracy, indeed quite the contrary. As the decorative flesh of petroliberalism rots away, the skeletal petrostate left behind is increasingly naked in its intention to ditch democratic institutions and practices in the name of maintaining a petrocultural world order by fiat.

My second example is more elusive, and better expresses the various Trojan horses that petroknowledge has begun scattering around to advertise itself as being open to change while in fact resisting any significant shift in petropolitics. The example comes courtesy of Bobby Tudor, a highly influential Houston energy financier, civic leader, and philanthropist, who, among other things, played a key role in financing the fracking boom in West Texas. In a January 2020 speech that quickly became legendary among Houston’s elite, addressing the Greater Houston Partnership chamber of commerce, Tudor appeared to break ranks with his fellow petrostate agents by arguing that it was time for Houston to commit to decarbonization. Specifically, on a red, white, and blue slide, Tudor laid out “four key thoughts”:

1. The Energy Industry has been very, very good to Houston.
2. Oil and Gas production and consumption are not disappearing anytime soon; but . . .
3. The traditional Oil and Gas business is not likely to be the same engine for growth in Houston for the next 25 years, that it’s been in the past 25 years. And . . .
4. As Houston business leaders, we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to lead the transition to a cleaner, more efficient and more sustainable, low-carbon world.

That this rather modest intervention caused such local shockwaves says more about the depth and tenacity of Houston’s petrostate than it does about Tudor’s capacity for a revolutionary vision. Yet Tudor clarified in subsequent interviews that his thoughts were meant as a direct challenge to Houston’s “business as usual.”24 He described the idea that Houston had meaningfully diversified its economy beyond oil and gas as a “myth,” given that “in greater Houston, in our region, approximately 40 percent of our jobs are either direct or induced energy industry jobs. That’s a very, very high percentage by any measure, even if you compare it to entertainment in Los Angeles, or automobiles in Detroit, or finance in New York City.”

Subsequent discussion revealed that Tudor’s keynote was not intended as a genuine challenge to either petrostate or petrohabits, however. For one thing, by justifying the whole intervention through the need to maintain economic growth, he already signals his desire to stay the petropolitical course. And the pathway that Tudor imagines to a “more sustainable, low-carbon world” is one that is heavily freighted with petrocultural assumptions. When asked, for example, how he imagined Houston ought to participate in sustainable decarbonization he cited “all things carbon-capture-use-and-storage [CCUS] related, and all things hydrogen related.” CCUS and hydrogen have lately become standard “alternative energy” talking points within the fossil fuel industry because their imagined futures maintain the relevance of oil and gas expertise, the value of fossil fuel assets, and the integrity of legacy infrastructural systems. Yet, CCUS and hydrogen have thus far proven to be expensive experimental boondoggles that are likely decades away from being able to offer any meaningful assistance to climate action.25 They represent overtures for new public-funded research subsidies more than genuine transition strategies. A decade ago, advanced biofuels played a similarly phantasmatic role for the fossil fuel industry. Oil and gas industry experts and allies present these technologies to the public in a paternalistic way to assure them that legacy energy industries care about a sustainable future. In truth, they are delay tactics, serving as a political pressure release valve to stave off calls for a more rapid and fundamental energy transition of the kind that Tudor himself waves away as being economically “prohibitive.”

Then, in the final act comes the reveal. Tudor explains,

One of the things I worry about is something we’ve just actually recently experienced, which is that underinvestment in the incumbent oil and gas world can lead to humongous disruptions that I believe ultimately will actually slow progress toward the transition. Because what happens when the consumers of energy face enormous price shocks is they get very, very focused on what they’re paying for their energy, and they get unhappy, if you will. And we need a transition that is orderly. We need a transition that continues to supply reliable and affordable energy to the consumers of it, and we need to be producing enough free cash flow that energy players can use it to invest in new parts of the business. And so you roll all that together, and the volatility that we’ve recently had with prices is, in my mind, actually not helpful to the energy transition.26

Yes, you read that correctly. Tudor is arguing that we need more investment in oil and gas to achieve the energy transition. This kind of subterfuge is increasingly the norm for petroknowledge. Recognizing that an environmentally destabilizing world no longer supports narratives of oil-fueled prosperity, petroknowledge resorts to elaborate circuitous and fatalistic reasoning to make the perpetuation of the petro status quo seem reasonable. The kicker, in Tudor’s case, is that he is by all accounts quite sincere in his belief that he is helping the progress of decarbonization. In this way, he repeats the delusional thinking of the aging generation of Soviet socialists; the world they built is dying, but rather than accept its necessary decomposition they focus on preserving current norms and forms, while spinning fabulist tales of renaissance and redemption.

More than petrohabits and petrostate, petroknowledge is experientially familiar. We see it coming and recognize many of its persuasion tactics as it arrives. But familiarity can be deceptive; petroknowledge has proven itself extremely adept at conjuring reasonableness from lies and half-truths. I like to think of petroknowledge as akin to the watery layer of a clear lake that has a muddy bottom. From a distance everything looks quite transparent and easy to traverse. But the moment you start walking into the lake to appreciate its clarity, the lower layers start to churn up and pretty soon there is a chaos of sediments.

Though I have focused on specific instances of petroknowledge, I fully acknowledge the enabling power of institutional infrastructures of petro-media, petro-education, and so on. Without secure channels and platforms disseminating its messages, petroknowledge would be far less effective than it is. Petroknowledge has many media allies. The advertising industry, for example, creates myriad spectacles of high–emissions commodities and experiences and tethers narratives of happiness and “the good life” to them. Meanwhile, petrostates spare no expense to fill schools and textbooks and educators’ heads with the inevitability of petroculture and the existential dangers of its demise. Although the campus fossil fuel divestment movement has achieved some high-profile successes in recent years, only around sixty of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States have actually made a divestment pledge (about 1.5 percent).27 Fewer institutions still have undertaken an honest and thorough accounting of their entanglement with fossil fuels.

This is by no means to diminish those who utilize media and education to call for the end of petroculture. These acts, however humble, are heroic under today’s conditions. They contribute to the wriggling free of the many layers of fossil gerontocracy’s muck. Understanding what gerontocracy is and how it operates also helps illuminate the necessity of political change, even under the triply miresome conditions of petrostate, petrohabits, and petroknowledge. Let’s talk more about that change, about the distant shores toward which we are paddling, and what might help us in our journey. Let’s talk about the importance of creating revolutionary infrastructure and insurrection against fossils.