President Donald Trump says,National Energy Emergency“A few hours after taking office, something prominent was missing from his definition of energy. It consisted of a list of petroleum products that nodded to nuclear, biofuel, geothermal heat and hydroelectric power. There was no mention of wind or solar power; The fastest growing energy source in the United States.
If we consider Trump’s pitch to “make America great again,” omission makes sense. His inaugural speech on January 20th revealed that Trump was full of nostalgia in a bygone era. “The United States will once again become a manufacturing country,” he said. “We will once again become a rich country. What helps us do that is the liquid gold under our feet.”
Trump’s speech exploited veins just as deep in American culture as the coal mines that helped drive the country’s industrial rise. And perhaps the way he talks about energy, not coincident with another person Presidential Order On an inauguration day, which aims to “unleash the control of energy,” it sounds very macho. In fact, this kind of breastfeeding response to the decline of this kind of industry and climate change has the name “.Petromasquiritivity. ”
“This is part of this nostalgic vision of the past when America was full of oil and men were in charge, and patriarchy wasn’t as challenging as it is today,” Davis, California. Trump and Vice President JD Vance are bristled on how America has changed – Wind turbine, “Childless cat woman” In the position of power, “Diversity, equity, inclusion” Program – and responded to a call to go back to an idealized version of how things were going.
The phrase “energy domination” created a puzzle for those trying to understand it as a realistic policy goal. “There’s no clear definition, so that’s the problem right away,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre, a foreign think tank. The United States is already the world’s largest oil producer, Production reaches record highs Last year, under former President Joe Biden. The Gulf of Mexico has so much supply that hundreds of oil leases are not used.
“I strongly doubt that what Trump people think when they say “energy domination” is that American energy wants to be in a position to direct the global market and other countries,” Ashford said. I said. As an example, she pointed to an end of Biden’s suspension to grant permission to export liquefied natural gas and his recent threat of placing tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
The emphasis on leverage is consistent with the definition proposed by Energy Security Expert Joseph Majekt“To ensure domestic energy needs and increase influence in global markets, we will use high value energy resources strategically to maintain strong economic and geopolitical hands “Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University, had a serious definition like Majkut’s, but the phrase “energy domination” has so many cultural associations, and the simple definition has been I thought I couldn’t capture it. “I came back believing this was the real atmosphere,” Kaufman said.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post by Getty Images
Trump has begun talking about “energy domination.” During the 2016 presidential electionAlong with a hopeful promise to bring back coal. “The language has this bravery and machismo that is important to his movement,” said Kara Daggett, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech. “This is about strength performance in a world that feels increasingly out of control,” Duggett first identified Trump’s relationship with anti-feminist and pro-oil rhetoric in 2018. . “Petromasquirity” In part, we explain how authoritarian movements can evoke fossil fuels and appeal to men who feel left behind.
If anything, these fears have only become more obvious since then, with Miller saying, “All of these billionaires like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg echoing Trump about gender and energy I started to defeat myself to do so.” In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg lamented that the company’s culture is separate from “masculine energy.” Joe Rogan’s podcastsaying it would be good to have a “culture that celebrates aggression a little more.”
Fossil fuels are tied to romantic ideas about sweaty, intense work, at least since the Industrial Revolution. It was in many states Prohibition against women working underground in minesMiller said that he modelled on British law since 1842 and gave the profession a “very gender quality” distinctive to the work of other industries. When I observed a coal miner at work in 1937, author George Orwell I wrote that it was impossible Compare workers with “iron statues of iron hammers” to see them “without the pain of vy hope for their toughness.”
It starts with the discovery of Geyser that led to the Texas oil boom In 1901, fossil fuels acquired a different meaning. “It brings not only profits, but also freedom and the world’s passionate creativity,” said Stephanie Lemenager, an English professor at the University of Oregon. Book on the cultural resonance of oil. But it relates to the sense of optimism that influenced cheap oil – Freedom to drive Around the car – it began to collapse in 1969, Lemenager said. That year, a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara left beaches strewn with thousands of dead and crude birds, revealing the damage caused by oil extraction. Soon after that, the 1973 oil crisis was sent. Once a stable gasoline price climbs.
Lemenager uses words “Petro Melanschlia” Explaining his sadness over the dream of what oil promised. “I think Trump is good at exploiting the cultural unconscious of at least some Americans,” she said. “And in my sense, “energy domination” is a deliberately ambiguous term, intended to evoke clusters of emotions. ”
upi / bettmann archive / getty image
There is also a lingering sense that the US did not have enough domestic fuel during the 1973 crisis when Opec countries banned oil exports to the US to support Israel in the Israeli war. Maybe. Gas price is quadrupledand people waited for the car to fill with lines wrapped around the block.
“Everyone has been talking about ‘energy independence’ since perhaps Jimmy Carter’s time,” said Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The term now comes with the sense of isolation it supported, he said. “Energy domination” conveys a message to Fisher. “We don’t just try to supply ourselves. We should supply the world.”
Daggett responded to climate change to its right, rebelliously – a more realistic grasp of what fossil fuels entailed than many on the left would be happy to consider. I claim it reflects.
“If you really understand the magnitude of the climate crisis, it’s a threat to one version of America’s dreams: suburbs, dependence on cars, and lifestyles that characterize mass consumerism,” Duggett said. “To respond is that we have to develop new ways of living, new ways of organizing ourselves. And, in a sense, rights recognize the existential nature of the climate crisis, so the response is It’s really strong. The response is, “No, I refuse to do that. I refuse to change this way of life. I want this way of life, and I’m going to protect it.”
Even if Americans aren’t approaching giving up on cars, Lemenagher has seen hints that people can embrace new possibilities rather than falling into a trap of petromasquirit. Last year, she drove electric cars across the country and met people on the way at charging stations. One man said to her, “We live in these amazing times.” She waited to see what he meant, and he continued, “We seem to be at the dawn of the 20th century, and we see the energy transition.”
For Lemenager, it was a sign that people could be excited to move forward.
