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.
How oil became the ‘American way’
Before highways, parking lots, and suburban sprawl took over the United States, people moved about very differently. Americans traveled between cities by railroad; towns bustled with horses, buses, bicycles, and trolleys. Then the automobile rolled in, and forests, meadows, and swampland became pavement, changing the scenery forever.
It wasn’t a sure bet that automobiles would run on gasoline. At the turn of the 20th century, electric vehicles were quieter and easier to drive, and they quickly became a popular choice, making up a third of vehicles on the road. But Henry Ford’s cheaper, mass-produced Model T, unveiled in 1908, was the vehicle that took off, powered by gasoline.
Up to that point, gasoline was basically a useless byproduct of kerosene, but the new automobile industry gave it a market. Automakers promoted their vehicles as superior to public transit, offering a step up in social status. In an advertisement that appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917, the Willys-Overland Company, an Ohio automaker, sold its automobiles as “chock full of healthy activity, wholesome fun, and lots of fresh air” — which would make for “a bigger life.” That was supposedly in contrast to the “wrong way,” where families were subjected to suffering through “long rides in hot trolley cars and listless conversation.”
It was a preview of a major shift in marketing leading up to the 1930s. Previously, advertisements for cars had touted their features: the “favorable” ratio of their light weight to their horsepower, their seats upholstered with “fine, long-grain French leather.” But companies began marketing the benefits of using their products instead, painting situations in which a car could improve your life and status. Selling the American Dream meant selling leisure, enjoyment, beauty, good taste, and popularity along with the “mundane product,” as Roland Marchand, a cultural historian, once wrote.
Most advertisers were aiming to reach Americans with means, and the everyday luxuries they depicted clashed with reality as the Great Depression set in. The photographer Margaret Bourke-White captured that sort of contrast after the Ohio River flood in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937. A billboard ad from the National Association of Manufacturers shows a white family smiling as they drive through the countryside, while Black people waited for Red Cross relief under a sign proclaiming “There’s no way like the American way.”
As the Great Depression began to recede, automakers saw an opportunity to pitch Americans on a brighter future — one that relied, of course, on cars. At the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York City, where the theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” General Motors had the most popular exhibit, seen by millions of people: the seven-acre “Highways and Horizons.” Its centerpiece, “Futurama,” was a sprawling diorama of a futuristic city in far-off 1960, covering 35,000 square feet, complete with skyscrapers and 14-lane highways. People looked down on the display from moving chairs on a conveyor-belt ride, as if they were viewing it from an airplane. It was the visual representation of a new American mindset — a Futurama booklet promised that highways would “set the pace for advancing civilization” and improve “welfare and happiness.” Afterward, visitors were handed pins saying, “I Have Seen the Future.”
From automobiles to oil, industry leaders grasped that appealing to a sense of national identity could legitimize their business. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the oil industry boomed, producing fuel for planes and explosives. The wider public had been deeply suspicious of big corporations ever since the Depression, but the oil industry had a new way to defend itself, painting itself as patriotic and essential to the success of the broader American project.
“The petroleum industry deserves a better public opinion,” James H. Tanham, an executive at the Texas Company (now known as Texaco), wrote to a member of the Petroleum Industry War Council in 1943. “If properly handled, there probably never was a better time to undertake this work. There is nothing inimical about the prosecution of this war and this job. Both have to do with protection of a way of life, wholly American, against enemies without and within the country.”
That same year, the Union Oil Company of California (later part of Chevron) launched an initiative specifically to “sell [the] public on [the] American way of life,” according to the trade journal National Petroleum News. Within five years, it was spending 30 percent of its advertising budget on the effort, promoting how a “free enterprise” economic system contributed to a higher standard of living. A Union Oil advertisement in Central Oregon’s Bend Bulletin in 1944 celebrated how American factory workers could afford more cigarettes and bread with an hour’s wages than those in Germany, Great Britain, or Russia. This success, the ad claimed, came down to “two fundamental principles: PROFIT and COMPETITION.” Provided that Americans didn’t tamper with these principles, it promised, a man might someday be “working only half as long to earn a radio, a house, a hat, a vacation, or anything else he needs.”
After the war ended, the “American way” increasingly required a car. Suburbanization started taking off in earnest after 1946, when the Levitt family began acquiring 4,000 acres of potato farms outside Long Island, 25 miles east of New York City. They leveled the land, had trucks drop building materials every 60 feet, and eventually built more than 17,000 cookie-cutter homes. Other “Levittowns” soon followed suit, built across the country as developers converted apple orchards, garbage dumps, and barren desert into neat subdivisions. They proved to be model neighborhoods for the entire country. From the end of World War II to 1954, some 9 million people settled into suburbs. As Americans moved far away from where they worked and ran errands, they became locked into a car-dependent lifestyle that consumed vast amounts of petroleum.
“Oil is basically the fuel that allows this dispersal of the population,” said Matthew Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.
Yet oil companies worried that the public still didn’t properly appreciate how the fuel had transformed their lives. In response to a survey finding an “opinion vacuum” on the oil business, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest lobbying group, formed the Oil Industry Information Committee in 1948, intending to fill the void. “There is a great vacuum represented by men’s minds,” George H. Freyermuth, who led the public relations department for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon), said at the time. “We can’t let others fill the vacuum. We have got to create the knowledge to fill people’s minds.”
It was much more than an advertising campaign: The group built the infrastructure for promoting petroleum through schools, community parades, and exhibits, carried out by local industry ambassadors who could give the effort a friendly face. The committee produced pamphlets, sponsored films, radio programming, and educational materials for classrooms, but its signature initiative was Oil Progress Week: a national ad blitz that encouraged local events celebrating how oil fueled innovation and everything people loved about modern life.
It was part of a trend toward what’s called institutional advertising — promoting industries and brands themselves, rather than products. Fortune magazine surveyed this growing field in 1950 and found that the oil industry was pouring $10 million a year into these programs — roughly $142 million in today’s dollars. Executives insisted that such messaging was just telling the facts to the American public. But Fortune pushed back. Not since wartime ads, the magazine wrote, “have we been insulted with such noxious interpretations of the American Dream.”
As much as Americans were already driving, they could be driving more. Automakers and oil companies had been working together to promote highway construction for decades. In the 1950s, advertisements urged families to see the U.S. by car, framing the road trip as a matter of national pride. In the iconic jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” the TV star Dinah Shore urges viewers to get on the road to take in everything America has to offer, from the “fields of golden wheat” to the “Rockies way out West.” Anyone who isn’t doing so is missing out, the lyrics imply: “Life is complete-r in a Chevy,” Shore sings.
After the success of freeways in Los Angeles and a “miracle turnpike” in New Jersey that became the busiest toll road in the country, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, calling for a 41,000-mile superhighway system across the country. Futurama was becoming reality, roughly on schedule.
The Oil Industry Information Committee, meanwhile, had been busy making sponsored films glorifying oil’s contributions to American prosperity. The films were shown all over the country, from small-town Michigan to the heart of Texas oil country, at Rotary Club luncheons, at meetings of religious organizations, in high school classrooms, and eventually on TV. The committee claimed that its films had been screened 92,500 times and seen by more than 12 million people in 1955 alone — about 7 percent of the U.S. population.
Its 1956 film, Destination Earth, follows a cartoon Martian who visits the United States and is amazed by how powerful and efficient cars are. After doing research in the local library, he concludes that “the big secret is, of course, oil!” and that this miracle substance has provided “a whole galaxy of things to make a better life on Earth.” The result, the film’s narrator declares: “a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet.”
During the postwar boom, profits from 14 big petroleum companies tracked by the Federal Reserve more than tripled during the postwar boom, rising from $269 million in 1946 to $917 million in 1956. All that money brought scrutiny. Critics in Congress and the media wondered if the Oil Industry Information Committee’s so-called “education” efforts, especially the pamphlets distributed to schoolchildren, should be considered propaganda, or even indoctrination. Henry Stewart McKenzie Burns, president of Shell Oil Company, admitted there was “a little ulterior motive” to the committee’s work when a congressman grilled him about it in 1956.
“I have had a good deal of experience in public relations,” Burns said during questioning, “and you never can stop telling people that you are good. They might forget.”
But oil companies had done more than simply tell people they were good. They had helped define what kind of life was good, steeping the American Dream in oil.
‘A Word to the Wives’: Fossil fuels invade the home
An unusual performance took place on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in 1923, during an American Gas Association convention in New Jersey. The wives and sisters of the assembled industry delegates settled in to watch “Progress,” a play that pitted an old-fashioned kitchen against a modern one, starring “Miss Polly Old Time” and “Miss Mary Modern Way.” As charming as the old ways were, there was no doubt whose vision would win.
Miss Mary was played by Ada Bessie Swann, home services director for the Public Service Electric & Gas Company of New Jersey. She led the industry’s push to introduce women to appliances powered by manufactured gas, the predecessor to natural gas. In the early 20th century, most women weren’t familiar with all the expensive stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines that had come onto the market. They were used to cooking on wood or coal stoves and doing laundry by hand. So gas and electric utilities performed a “service,” as they called it: extensive efforts, led by women, to show homemakers how these appliances worked and convince them of their benefits. For years, Swann had been running the New Jersey utility’s experiment to foster “‘better, happier homes’ with the help of gas,” according to an industry publication. (It openly called the effort propaganda.) She was soon heralded as “an apostle of home service,” spreading the mission of gas appliances far and wide.
By 1925, these kinds of industry-sponsored lectures, demonstrations, and classes were reaching thousands of women every day. In Connecticut, New Haven Gas Light Company’s domestic experts visited nearly 13,400 homes that year to instruct residents on the “proper use” of gas ranges. A daily radio show from the Laclede Gas Light Company in St. Louis aided the “home manager” with recipes and cooking advice; the company also held free cooking classes every day to show off its model gas-powered kitchen.
It was a clever strategy to speed up adoption and lock in future demand for gas — a parallel track to how selling cars as a cornerstone of American life led to increasing gasoline consumption. “Teaching [women] the art of home management as it has become today, is a duty of the gas company,” Swann wrote in a trade journal, pondering the industry’s future in 1925, “because by so doing it must reap for itself the profit of such service — Profits in goodwill. Profits in increased gas consumption. Profits in increased sales of gas heating equipment.” The industry also had to convince people to install the lines to deliver gas. In California, workers would track local building permits and talk homeowners and contractors into connecting gas lines to new construction.
It wasn’t inevitable that so many Americans would switch to gas appliances. Electric competitors were selling their “flameless fuel” as superior, and gas companies saw this competition as an existential threat. By 1930, gas executives were aggressively promoting their stoves, the core of their business. “The public mind has been inculcated with the gas cooking idea, but just as no business is secure, no idea is secure nowadays,” Rodger K. Tenney of Chicago’s North Shore Gas Company wrote in American Gas Journal that year. “Constant pressure brought to bear on the public mind will make that mind thoroughly gas cooking conscious,” he concluded.
To do so, gas companies embarked on a decades-long campaign to influence the influential. In 1934, Swann’s utility in New Jersey recruited newspaper staff and heads of home economics departments of colleges to advertise the modern gas kitchen. The industry also worked to get favorable coverage in The Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, The American Home, and other women’s magazines; Swann soon got a job working for Woman’s Home Companion.
Gas executives also sought to bring gas propaganda to the radio and Hollywood films. When the phrase “now you’re cooking with gas” started taking off on radio routines in 1939, the industry quickly capitalized on the free advertising, recruiting radio stars such as Jack Benny and Fred Allen to use the phrase. C. E. “Deke” Houlgate, a representative of the American Gas Association, also launched an effort to establish gas appliances as standard props in Hollywood films. By 1941, motion pictures had featured 202 all-gas kitchens, along with 360 gas ranges and 238 gas-powered refrigerators, according to Houlgate. “Today, Hollywood uses gas appliances 100 percent in its outstanding pictures,” he told the audience at a gas appliance and equipment convention in Los Angeles.
Ladies’ Home Journal
As World War II came to a close, the gas industry latched onto the patriotic mood and promised to take the “‘irk’ out of work” with its “New Freedom Gas Kitchen” campaign. Freedom, that is, from the drudgery of cooking. The actual model kitchens varied, but they had streamlined, step-saving layouts built around gas-powered ranges, fridges, and automatic water heaters that could “speed up clean-up” by providing endless hot water.
It was the perfect time to market new gadgets, because mass consumption had rapidly taken hold of American culture. Economic growth after the Great Depression and World War II relied on an expanding middle class buying more, more, and more: A Bride’s Magazine handbook from the postwar era urged newlyweds to keep an eye out for brand names when buying “dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before,” for the purpose of “greater security” for the country’s industries. “[W]hat you buy and how you buy it is very vital for your new life — and to our whole American way of living,” it read.
A Word to the Wives, a short film sponsored by the American Gas Association in 1955, showcased a modern home equipped with gas appliances, such as refrigerators and dryers. When a busy homemaker, Jane, visits her friend Alice’s home filled with this technology, she has to decline Alice’s offer of a shopping trip because she’s too busy with chores at home. “Remember, I haven’t got your dream kitchen to make things easier. Mine’s strictly the nightmare type,” Jane says, sighing. Alice sells her on how gas appliances can provide “freedom from unnecessary drudgery,” and they plot to leave Jane’s husband to suffer through chores without her for the weekend, so that he’ll want to buy a “dream kitchen,” too.
The battle over what would power American homes — gas or electricity — would continue to play out over decades. But petroleum had quietly found a way into households, too. In 1957, the Shell Oil Company celebrated women’s work as part of an ad campaign, “From A to Z: An Alphabet of Good Things about Petroleum.” M was for Mother: “Housewife, cook, chauffeur, hostess, teacher, glamor girl — she does dozens of jobs well … who’s responsible for so many of these new time-saving products? Mother’s little helper — Oil,” the advertisement says.
Soon, it seemed like almost everything in the American dream house was made from petrochemicals, which some oil executives had predicted would be “the most dramatic future field of development.” As chemists experimented with petroleum derivatives, plastics began taking off, and Tupperware containers, polyester clothes, and synthetic carpets arrived in households. Shell’s alphabetical ad campaign pointed out that “oil research helps with quick-drying paints, no-polish floor tiles, durable plastic table tops, weather-defying asphalt-shingled roofs.”
“In many ways,” the ad says, “your home is a house that oil built.”
‘The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation’
As the years passed, people forgot where this version of the fossil-fueled American Dream had come from. Like most successful propaganda, it simply became taken for granted. The country’s growing reliance on petroleum was seen as a sign of progress for much of the 20th century, an article of faith in the American project.
In the 1960s, however, the pollution from fossil fuels and all the products companies were pumping out was increasingly visible. Smog blanketed Los Angeles on more days than not; an oil spill off the California coast washed sludge onto beaches; the polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire, again. The decade saw the federal government’s first serious effort to crack down on pollution, starting with the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, followed by the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act in 1965. The environmental movement was born on Earth Day in April 1970, when an estimated 10 percent of the country’s population joined in demonstrations demanding that political leaders do more to clean up the environment.
Then, the cheap, plentiful fuel that had enabled the American “way of life” was suddenly no longer cheap and plentiful. In 1973, oil-producing Arab countries stopped exporting petroleum to the United States because of its support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and oil prices nearly quadrupled. President Richard Nixon instituted a rationing program, and gas stations started running out of fuel.
The oil crisis threatened the car-powered American way of life that people had come to rely on, and as if on cue, “freedom” became a hot talking point. “For many the ‘energy crisis’ was seen as a contrived threat to justify more government control of everyday life,” Matthew Huber writes in Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. One advertisement from the New Car and Truck Dealers of America in 1979 asked readers to “Help us protect your freedom to drive.” From whom? The people who cared about the environment. “There are people in government, and others, whose only answer to our environmental and energy problems is to restrict the use of the automobile.” Businesses that relied on fossil fuels were now on the defensive.
Another challenge for the oil and gas industry arrived when the American public grew concerned over global warming. During an unusually hot summer in 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the time, warned Congress that the greenhouse effect had already been detected. Global warming became front-page news around the country, climate bills proliferated in Congress, and the United Nations created the building blocks for global climate policy. President George H.W. Bush went into office declaring himself “the environmental president” and promising to counter the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House effect,” but as soon as it became clear that doing something about climate change meant curbing the use of fossil fuels, his administration reversed course. By 1992, when countries met to sign a global climate treaty at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Bush refused to commit to targets for emissions reductions. U.S. delegates insisted over and over that “the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.”
The idea that addressing climate change required a sacrifice of American values — and the lifestyles and products that supported them — came up whenever the country was seriously considering limits on fossil fuels. In 1997, President Bill Clinton stood prepared to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which required countries to cut carbon emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But the oil company Mobil responded with alarm: “Committing to binding targets and timetables now will alter today’s lifestyles and tomorrow’s living standards,” it warned in an ad in The New York Times. “Flexibility will be constrained. Carpooling in; sport utility vehicles out. High fuel and electric bills. Factory closures. Job displacement.”
A pattern was established: Oil companies ramped up their PR campaigns whenever there was a push for climate action in Congress, helping to thwart efforts to limit emissions or negotiate binding treaties. They poured money into political campaigns and lobbying, played up doubts about the science of global warming, and commissioned studies showing that climate policies would hurt the economy. They also argued that cutting fossil fuels would threaten the American way of life — the one they had spent so many decades championing.
But as fossil fuel emissions continued to rise, and hurricanes and wildfires grew more severe, Americans became increasingly worried about climate change. In the late 2010s, progressives channeled their energy into proposals for a Green New Deal, calling for bold investment in a clean economy that would tackle climate change and inequality at the same time. By tapping into nostalgia for the New Deal, one of the most ambitious political projects in U.S. history, they were articulating a competing vision of the “good life,” divorced from fossil fuels.
The ascendant right wing of the Republican Party had a ready-made response: The Green New Deal was an attack on freedom. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office released a fact sheet that mentioned the difficulty of eliminating emissions from “farting cows and airplanes” in 2019, critics seized on it as evidence of climate activists trying to control their choices. At the Conservative Political Action Conference that year, Sebastian Gorka, a Trump administration official, said, “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers.”
After years of failed climate proposals, politicians knew that mandates and regulations would be politically tricky. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, promising to tackle climate change, the energy behind the Green New Deal was whittled down into a less ambitious, more politically palatable project. In 2022, Congress passed the only comprehensive climate law in American history, the Inflation Reduction Act, full of tax credits and incentives to switch to clean energy and green technologies. The Biden administration instituted many regulations that mandated more efficient technology, including for household appliances, and conservatives keyed in on the upfront costs. In 2023, The Alliance for Consumers, a conservative advocacy group, posted a visual of “Biden’s Dream House,” purporting to reveal how the Biden administration’s policies would force Americans to pay for costly remodeling jobs.
“Welcome to Biden’s Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive …” Alliance for Consumers posted on X in 2023. The campaign focused on the cost of upgraded appliances and the idea that the government was trying to control household decisions. “If you like your living room and kitchen, you can keep your living room and kitchen … just with a few additional ‘upgrades’ to comply with Progressive Lifestyle Choices™.”
Welcome to Biden's Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive…
— Alliance For Consumers (@for_consumers) October 26, 2023
Join us on a tour and see the green "upgrades" that the Biden Administration wants to bring (by mandate) to a home near you, very soon. pic.twitter.com/7cg7yMRCXZ
The clear message was that “elitist climate liberals” wanted to force people “to have a worse life and sacrifice to solve this,” said Huber, the author of Lifeblood.
As Republicans geared up for Trump’s presidential run in 2024, they leaned into this narrative. That September, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the far-right policy playbook Project 2025, told the audience at a New York Times climate event: “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.”
Another way of looking at it, though, is that climate change itself is threatening the American Dream. Global warming pushes up the cost of food and energy, causing spikes in home insurance rates that can price people out of owning a home, and destroys homes with floods and fires. Fossil fuels, long sold as the key to achieving comfort and prosperity, have now begun pushing those goals further out of reach.
Can a ‘petroculture’ dream up something new?
The idea that sinister, left-wing climate killjoys want to get rid of hamburgers, pickup trucks, and other iconic American standbys is often dismissed as culture war nonsense. But it begins to make sense if you see it as the result of a century-long campaign tying fossil fuels to the “good life.”
From the cars we drive to the plastics that surround us, oil has become part of daily life. Brulle, the sociologist at Brown, says the MAGA movement that has captured the Republican Party taps into a “cultural belief in the rightness of petroleum” in the American imagination more broadly.
The rise of MAGA Republicans has coincided with a sharp shift among members of the party toward embracing fossil fuels. In 2020, 65 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. prioritizing wind and solar development over oil, coal, and gas, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Today, that picture has completely flipped, with 71 percent preferring fossil fuels. Across party lines, the idea of moving on from oil and gas has lost some of its appeal. Less than half of Democrats polled by Pew in 2024 said the U.S. should completely phase fossil fuels out of the energy supply. Scholars call the United States a “petroculture” — an “oil society through and through.”
It can be difficult to peer beyond the rumbling of an engine, even when stuck in stop-and-go traffic, to a different way of life. In the U.S., our lives are so saturated with oil, it’s hard to know where to begin untangling our connection with petroleum, said Stephanie LeMenager, an English professor at the University of Oregon who wrote a book about oil’s cultural resonance. “There’s a sense of despair, paralysis, and also just not really being able to clearly see a path forward, because of how embedded oil is in everything that we do,” LeMenager said.
So how does a country begin to rid itself of a century’s worth of oil and gas propaganda? It might start with understanding that none of this was predestined, as much as it might feel like it. The early 20th century began with electric cars and electric stoves; things might have stayed that way, with a push or pull one way or the other, and the same sort of PR campaign that put petroleum at the center of American life.
From the Green New Deal to the more recent focus on “abundance,” parts of the left have tried to move past the narrative that tackling global warming requires sacrifice. But it will take more than catchy slogans to convince people that a comfortable life is possible without fossil fuels. Oil helped deliver a higher standard of living — the stretch was that people needed to consume ever more of it to live their best lives. The fossil fuel industry spent decades reaching ordinary Americans with that message, broadcasting it over the airwaves and across movie screens, and carrying it into towns around the country through schools and public events. Now, there are cleaner, safer options to power the world.
Petroleum runs so deep in American culture that building another, cleaner version of the good life will take time — and probably a lot of money. “Crafting the American Dream is the thing that advertisers have been doing for decades,” said Duncan Meisel, the former executive director of Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients.
The American Dream was invented, so maybe we can invent it again.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream on Oct 22, 2026.