‘Petro-masculinity’ is destroying the planet — Can ecomasculinity save it?

Climate humorist Andrew Boyd on how to be manly without fossil fuels

Dear friends,

It’s a wonderful day to wake up on the only habitable planet in the known universe! Happy Earth Day all. What a ferociously beautiful and singular home we all share.

It’s been a little while since I’ve put out a newsletter because of some major changes in my life. The biggest one is that I welcomed a baby at the start of the year and have been getting to know her while adjusting to a freshly transformed family rhythm. Long time readers will be familiar with the research I’ve done around questions of family planning-and-rearing in the polycrisis, where climate concerns loom large. I’ve noticed many new thoughts forming on these topics between my baby’s naps and tummy time exercises, in light of reckless wars, AI’s acceleration of a crisis of meaning, and the pile up of recent climate policy rollbacks (such as the stunningly stupid undoing of the endangerment finding in the US). I will be getting back to regular publishing here in just over a month, and am popping out in the meantime for an Earth Day post, done in collaboration with one of my favourite satirists and climate activists, Andrew Boyd. At a time when gas prices are making the veins in truck owners’ foreheads bulge, Boyd offers a fresh take on petromasculinity, what it is, and how to pop this cultural boil that’s on a path to boiling us.

See you soon,

Britt

Now over to Andrew.

‘Petro-masculinity’ is destroying the planet — Can ecomasculinity save it?

Feminist influencer Liz Plank opens her groundbreaking book For the Love of Men with a bold statement: “There is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.” She means it at several levels, from the most intimate: how male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US; to the most macro: how associating “eco-conscious behaviors with femininity and a repudiation of masculinity” is literally killing the planet. This Earth Day it is worth reflecting on why this is so and what can be done about it.

While it won’t come as news to most that, compared to women, men litter more, recycle less, and leave a bigger carbon footprint, there’s something more extreme than simple thoughtlessness causing young men, in a form of anti-environmental protest known as“rolling coal”, to modify the diesel engines on their pick-up trucks to deliberately belch large amounts of grey-black exhaust, and then run electric cars and bicyclists off the road.

Similarly, the emotional satisfaction of “owning the libs” or the tens of millions in campaign contributions Trump has received from the fossil fuel industry cannot fully explain the pure spite driving his administration to force money-losing coal plants in Michigan to continue operating or cancel perfectly good already-80%-complete offshore wind projects in Connecticut. Not to mention launching another war for oil in the Middle East cowboy-style with zero strategic forethought.

What connects the dots here is something more unhinged and tangled — a hyper-aggressive, oil-soaked version of toxic masculinity known as “Petro-masculinity.” And it’s crucial to understanding why we as a society are failing to rally behind a shared ecological vision.

Coined by political scientist Cara Daggett in a 2018 paper, “Petro-masculinity” describes a pernicious fusion between fossil fuel use, climate change denial, and defense of authoritarian white patriarchal masculinity. Noting how fossil fuel extraction and consumption are coded “masculine”, while environmentalism and green technology are coded soft, weak and “feminine”; it tracks how insecure men are increasingly leaning in to a petro-masculine identity in order to assert traditional masculine authority in the face of climate change, threats to traditional extractive industries, and changing social norms.

For most people, Petro-masculinity dramatically erupted into public view during the famous 2022 twitter showdown between manosphere bully Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” Tate tweeted at Greta, along with a photo of him pumping gas into one of them.

Picking up on the sexually boastful undertones of those “enormous emissions,” Greta slyly clapped-back: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

With 3.3M likes and 500K+ re-tweets, it became “the tweet heard around the world” and in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “a reminder of the intersection between machismo, misogyny, and hostility to climate action” propelled by “versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.”

As a long-time climate activist, I’d seen this gendering of the climate fight up close and personal. Whether it was FOX pundits spouting fact-free climate denial or dude-trolls calling you a “cuck” in the comments just for caring about the planet, it was impossible not to notice a certain type of man with certain type of attitude: usually white male and angry, fronting an aggressive — and noticeably dick-ish — defense of the fossil fuel status quo. It usually came with a strutting display of male prerogative and privilege, including the privilege of destroying the planet, if that’s what they felt like.

While Andrew Tate trolling a teenage girl with the equivalent of dick-pics of his 27 sports cars is unquestionably gross and pathetic, some of the aggressive defensiveness tangled up in Petro-masculinity is understandable. Imagine that digging coal is something that you and your forefathers did for generations, and it paid the rent and felt manly and heroic (in spite of its harms and dangers). And then some environmental do-gooder in a Prius comes along, saying you shouldn’t do that anymore. But they’re not offering you a viable alternative livelihood, certainly not one with dignity and that mysterious aura of “manliness” that digging coal had. Who wouldn’t be defensive? If accepting the reality of climate change logically leads to certain solutions that you perceive as threatening to your core identity and way of life, it makes sense you might dig your heels hard into climate denial. And then flip those self-righteous Prius drivers the bird with some “coal rolling.”

So, what is to be done? First, as the just transition movement has known from jump, we need to offer a real-world economic alternative. Liberal scold mode isn’t gonna work here, and is in fact part of a larger problem of Dems losing men and elections (think Marc Maron’s joke/insight that the Left “annoyed people into fascism” in 2024). Instead we need to offer a real alternative such as a Green New Deal that actually delivers on the promise of “millions of good, well-paying jobs,” as Bernie and AOC and the Sunrise Movement (and to a lesser degree Biden via his IRA) have been trying to do.

For those of us desperately trying to build a public consensus to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, Petro-masculinity suggests that fighting climate change is not just a technological or economic or political challenge, but also a cultural and psychic struggle against an entrenched and very gendered “petroculture”.

The call is coming from inside the house. Patriarchy goes deep. Overcoming it is a multi-track, generations-long effort. Involving both a restructuring of power (with knock-on benefits for the planet, as report after report shows that the greater the gender equity in a society the stronger its climate policies). As well as men undertaking a profound internal healing journey to undo harmful conditioning and find our way to a new kind of ecological masculinity.

“It’s not that men don’t care about the environment,” argues Liz Plank. “They’re just taught to care about threats to their masculinity more.” To help men flip the salience of those priorities, environmental advocates have been taking three basic approaches: decode, recode, and he-code.

Through media literacy, social critique, hand-to-hand ideological battles on the Internet, and clever culture-jamming and lampooning, climate and other activists are working to decode Petro-masculinity. They’re pointing out how ridiculous and “constructed” and self-defeating Petro-masculinity is for men, their communities, and the planet itself, and hoping, over time, this will help unravel the thick association between fossil fuels and aggrieved masculine identity. Greta’s take down of Andrew Tate is one example; this article, I suppose, is another

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A second approach is to recode — or as Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer likes to say “re-story” — the choice between fossil fuels and renewables. A good current example of such an approach is the Energy From Heaven—Not From Hell effort that interfaith creation-care network GreenFaith (along with - full disclosure - some help from me) is currently advancing. Using a range of approaches from Earth Day sermons to religious pamphlet-style comic books, the effort suggests that “God made it obvious where He wants us to get our energy from”: not from the poisonous hell-fire below, but from the sun and wind in the heavenly skies above. Once seen, this allegory is hard to unsee. And if moral and cosmological alignment with God now has more pull than some perceived threat to their masculinity from “feminine” renewables, then some men might shift.

Finally, by painting green tech in a more traditionally masculine and “virile” way, advocates are trying to he-code climate solutions. In spite of later backsliding, Ford’s 2023 testosterone-amped launch of its all-electric F-150 Lightning pick-up truck is one example. Meanwhile, more than a few renewable energy PR teams have deployed scenes of men strapping on a tool belt and climbing rung by rung 300 feet into the sky to fix a wind turbine, to convince manly men that they have a place in America’s brave Green future.

The overall message here: you can be manly without fossil fuels.

Look at me, I am probably the least petro-masculine person I know. Which hasn’t made me any less masculine, thank you very much, just less petro. I don’t own a car; instead I get my testosterone high by riding my bike a little too aggressively through the streets of New York City. I don’t have a sports car to rev up, but accelerating from 0 to 60 in 3.7s in my friend’s boosted Tesla Model 3 (bought second-hand before Elon took his fascist turn) was a g-force thrill ride I’ll do anytime. I don’t flip the bird at mild-mannered enviros by “coal loading” my souped-up truck, but I have flipped the bird at the most powerful corporation in the world by co-producing an ad called “Exxon Hates Your Children”, highlighting the tens of thousands of respiratory deaths the company’s core product has caused, and placing it on the airwaves right in Exxon’s backyard in Irving, TX. I’ve dedicated the last decade of my life to moving our civilization off of fossil fuels and on to cleaner, greener, more peaceable energy sources — and never did it make me feel less manly, quite the opposite, in fact.

A good man is supposed to take responsibility, not shy away from it. It saddens me that the response of so many men to the ecological peril we are in is to renounce responsibility, get defensive, act out. When trouble comes to town, a good man is supposed to protect his home and his loved ones. Well, it’s clear this Earth Day, as it has been every Earth Day, that whether it’s global heating or biodiversity loss or environmental racism, our one and only home is in deep trouble. So men, this Earth Day, let’s commit to untangling ourselves from Petro-masculinity, and stepping into our ecomasculinity. Let’s mobilize our ingenuity and gather our courage — and feel our grief, if we need to — so we can remember how much we actually care about this beautiful, miraculous planet we all live on together. And then let’s step up to protect it. After all, what’s more “protector masculinity,” than protecting the Earth?

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This piece also appears in the Guardian’s opinion section today.

Andrew Boyd is an author, humorist, and climate activist. His latest book, I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope and Gallows Humor came out from New Society Press in 2023. He is CEO (Chief Existential Officer) of the Climate Clock, a global campaign he co-founded that melds art, science, technology, and grassroots organizing to get the world to #ActInTime. He is currently at work on a book about alternatives to toxic masculinity.