Jun 19, 2022 Hot Take

The Fossil Fuel Industry's Big Jobs Lie

The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Big Lie

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

It’s hard to look at the world’s relationship with fossil fuels and not see a classic abusive relationship. And one of the things all abusers do is try to convince their victims that they cannot live without them. The fossil fuel industry does this in a few key ways, but one of its most pervasive tactics is to tout itself as a key job creator and employer. They want us to think that the world would literally collapse without them, even as it’s in freefall with them.

On this week’s episode of Hot Take, we decided to kick the tires on that myth with one of the reporters who’s done some serious work on what kinds of jobs the fossil fuel industry actually creates and what kinds of lives the workers actually live: Sara Sneath. Sara’s done some fantastic—and enraging— reporting —on the fossil fuel industry’s undermining of labor rights and even basic human dignity. (Plus, she has a fascinating depth of knowledge about alligators.)

As the midterms kick into high gear, we are bound to get a heavy dose of the “fossil fuels=jobs” hogwash (Sara is also a pig wrassler), so it’s important to know how to spot this lie and how to push back on it. I highly recommend listening to this conversation, but the bottom line: they don’t create that many jobs and the ones they do create…kinda suck.

P.S. after you listen to the episode, go read some of Sara’s work:

Oil Workers On Foreign-Flagged Ships Are At The Mercy of Corporations | HuffPost Impact

The oil and gas industry is pushing misinformation about its impact on climate, coastal restoration. Louisiana politicians are repeating it. – Southerly

Offshore oil and gas worker fatalities are underreported by federal safety agency – Southerly

A decade after BP spill, Gulf of Mexico has rebounded, but wounds still visible

Offshore oil and gas accidents, deaths spike amid regulatory rollbacks | Environment | nola.com

Plastic bottles you recycle at Jazz Fest won't curb coastal erosion, contractor says | Environment | nola.com

After three workers died in oil explosion, government struggles to hold offshore contractors accountable | Environment | nola.com

The Reproductive Justice Hole in the Climate v Kids Debate

By Amy Westervelt

Oh yay, we’re doing yet another round of “is it moral to have children in a climate crisis?” As we discussed recently on the podcast, this latest discourse was kicked off by Ezra Klein who grappled with it in The New York Times in a way I can only describe as tailored to elite white people. It reminded me of the time I interviewed an editor at a prestigious New York publication. When the recording had ended and we got to chatting about life, I asked if he was worried about his own children’s future given the climate crisis. He looked at me like the question had never occurred to him, and then mused about all the wonderful ways his children would adapt to a climate-ravaged world, puttering around in boats in Miami like some sort of climate-apocalypse version of The Jetsons.

Klein, who only spoke to highly educated white people for his column, made a similar bid for “your” kids, “our” kids being alright, for not worrying too much about climate change. After all, hey, you might just give birth to the next Greta Thunberg. White feminist Jill Filopovic had a different take with her click-baity title “Having Kids Is Bad for the Planet,” [I’m not linking to it, Google it if you must]. She argued in her newsletter that people shouldn’t shy away from messy conversations about the morality of having kids who will not only have to live through the climate crisis, but also will (if they are like most kids in the U.S.) greatly contribute to the crisis as well. For all her “what about” arguments, Filopovic did exactly what she criticized Klein for doing: spoke only to and about well-off white people, universalized the experience of white women, and ignored other populations almost entirely, save a throwaway line about how the global poor will suffer most from the climate crisis.

I agree that we should be able to have messy, complicated conversations about this subject, but neither of these pieces actually did that. I’m a white-presenting woman with one non-white parent who has absolutely benefited from that identity, and definitely spent a good number of years being ignorant as hell about the realities non-white women face when it comes to reproductive choices. As such, I feel okay saying: White people, we can probably shut the fuck up about this subject for a while. I really encourage folks to read the work of scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and writers Cherríe Moraga, Louise Erdrich and, more recently, Angela Garbes, on intersectional approaches to mothering and reproductive choice. Man, it pains me to think how much better Klein’s column, or podcast episode on the same subject, would have been had he asked Garbes (who has a fantastic new book out!) to ponder this question.

Folks who are interested in exploring the messy intersection between reproduction and climate change should also bone up on the history of forced sterilization and eugenics in this country, on who gets to even have reproductive choice, who gets praised or vilified for those choices and why. It’s only been a few decades, but a lotta folks seem to have already forgotten that one of the original rifts in feminism grew out of the abortion debate and white women ignoring the fact that many non-white women had had abortion and sterilization forced upon them. If that’s your reality, you might be quite keen to have a mandatory waiting period for abortion, for example, a very different perspective from a woman who might feel that the waiting period is an obstacle to her choice. These differing experiences were largely ignored by Second Wave white feminists, and they’re still often ignored today.

Second Wave feminism has impacted this conversation in another way too. Despite many decades of “women’s liberation,” people with uteruses are still expected to put those things to work growing the human race. Should they choose not to, they will almost assuredly be asked to justify that decision. Never mind that for many many people it’s not a straightforward choice anyway (from fertility issues to lack of a partner, there are way more factors at play than one person’s desires). For the past 20 years or so, climate change has been a handy answer for those who feel they need one. If society deems it “selfish” not to have children, we must make the argument that well actually it’s selfish *to* have children if you think about it in terms of planetary resources. Instead of, I don’t know, just rejecting the whole framing of selfish/selfless entirely when it comes to this issue?

I’ve written about kids and climate change a lot over the years, and I’ve seen a pretty marked shift in people’s thinking, from “I’m worried my kid would contribute to the climate crisis” to “I don’t feel morally okay about condemning a child to climate chaos.” That shift feels pretty meaningful, and tracks with the fact that lots of things are getting measurably worse for humans on this planet and in this country and it makes sense that anyone aware of that might think twice about the world they’d be bringing a new human into. But reproductive choice has always been influenced by myriad factors that are intensely personal, ranging from the relationship one had with their own parents to the culture one grew up in, religion, financial stability, and on and on.

You cannot have a conversation about reproduction and climate focused solely on white people without sounding, at best, like a hopelessly out-of-touch elitist—and, at worst, like a eugenicist. But perhaps more importantly, devoid of context and a variety of viewpoints, or any discussion of the systemic drivers of the climate crisis, conversations about the morality of having kids amidst the climate crisis are meaningless, unproductive, and a distraction from the task at hand.

Southern Politicians Are Missing a Key Point in their Platforms

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Back in 2006, then-Mississippi governor Haley Barbour launched his “Let’s Go Walkin,’ Mississippi” campaign as a response to the state’s ongoing health crisis, with out-of-control rates of diseases like diabetes and heart disease, many of which would be mitigated by more active lifestyles. This was the year I graduated from college, and one year after the state had been ravaged by Katrina. By the time the campaign had kicked into high-gear in 2007, I was already one of many Southern transplants in New York City. I remember seeing the commercials on TV when I went home to visit my family and thinking: “walk on WHAT, governor??”

Subscribe now to read about Mary's big question: where are the Southern candidates who are willing to run on one of the biggest issues plaguing the region: the lack of transit?

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Climate Action Has Always Been a Target in the “Culture War”

By Amy Westervelt

A new report out last week from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue provides an updated look at the narrative frameworks, strategies, and key messengers of climate obstructionism. As with last month's InfluenceMap report, researchers found that "culture war" messaging is emerging as a dominant trend in climate disinformation, particularly the idea that climate policy is the realm of liberal elites, not "real" Americans, and the tendency to lump climate concerns under the umbrella of "identity politics."

There are those in the climate space—many of them climate scientists—who have argued for years that muddying the waters of climate with social justice is a losing strategy. They might imagine themselves vindicated by this report. They are not.

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