Carbon Bros: Podcast Takes on Fossil Fuel’s Small Penis Complex

I interviewed Amy Westerfeldt a few years ago following up on her masterful “Drilled” podcast – indispensable to understand the psychological roots of climate denial.
We talked at the time about the weird confluence of insecure masculinity and climate denial.
She’s gone ahead and explored the topic in another very engaging series, “Carbon Bros“, of which I’ve listened to three of the four episodes.
All is not well with America’s men, most evidenced by the fact that so many idolize Donald Trump as a paragon of masculinity. The fossil fuel industry has been working to link burning, blasting, and drilling with “real” manhood for decades, and could be at the root of the American men’s pathetic insecurities.

Probably no coincidence that the most psychotically pro Fossil Fuel President in history was the first one to make Penis size a campaign issue in 2016.

Carbon Bros:

Amy Westervelt: But how did these dudes who just love martial arts and comedy before become mouthpieces for misogyny and climate denial?

Daniel Penny: So there are really a few different species of these dudes.

Amy Westervelt: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Penny: Some of these guys started as legacy media conservative darlings, like former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has endorsed the idea that wind turbines kill whales and that sunning your scrotum increases sperm quality. And then you’ve got guys like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, or Dennis Prager of the conservative edutainment company, Prager U and Ben Shapiro, who started The Daily Wire– which hosts Jordan Peterson’s show, by the way.

These guys represent the next generation of right wing [00:13:00] voices with deep connections to fossil fuel donors like the Texas fracking billionaire is Ferris and Dan Wilkes.

Amy, I know you’re very familiar with the Wilkes Brothers.

Amy Westervelt: Yes, there’s been a few really great pieces of reporting on these guys over the years. Um, the one I always think of is this, this article that Geoff Dembicki wrote for Vice News a while ago where he talked about how the Wilkes Brothers, have really tied this into kind of evangelical Christianity as well. So, for example, at his church, Dan Wilkes requires women to quote, “keep silence”, and has told his congregates that climate change is God’s will. Here’s a quote from a 2013 sermon he delivered, just to give you a flavor. He said “if He wants the polar caps to remain in place, then He will leave them there.”

Daniel Penny: And conservatives have been doing this for a long time, building networks of talent to [00:14:00] get out their message. Here’s Kayla

Kayla Gogarty: Conservatives and conservative donors, they put money into building these networks, and they have been doing that for years. We saw them dominate, you know, right wing talk radio, for instance, back in the, the nineties and early two thousands, you know, the Rush Limbaughs and the, the Glen Beck.
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my Westervelt: Hearing your conversation with Alec, I was actually reminded of something we did on Drilled all the way back in season one. It was a story about a group of fossil fuel executives who wanted to change the narrative about climate change and discovered something very interesting about how masculinity relates to climate change messaging.

Daniel Penny: Tell me more.

Amy Westervelt: Okay, so the group was called ICE, not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the new bad ICE but the Information Council for the Environment. This is early 1991. The summer of 1988, just a couple years before, had seen Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress that climate change was now visible.

We had a burning planet on the cover of Time Magazine. A little bit after this, the Rio Earth Summit is coming in 1992. So climate change is on everyone’s mind, and there’s growing consensus [00:24:00] that governments need to do something about it.

Daniel Penny: I’m guessing the fossil fuel industry didn’t like that.

Amy Westervelt: No, they did not.

Fred Palmer: It was a nationwide heat wave. Um, remember it specifically because it ruined the vacation we were gonna have on the Eastern shore, on the Chesapeake Bay. All the, the well waters all went dry, right?

Amy Westervelt: This is Fred Palmer, a coal lobbyist who worked on the ICE campaign, talking to Guardian reporter Graham Redfern.

Fred Palmer: Jim Hansen, who, who never was muzzled in any circumstances by anybody. Uh, came in front of that subcommittee and announced this was the leading edge, catastrophic global warming with his loaded dice and hit the internet and domestic international the next morning. And we’ve been arguing about it ever since.

Well, you know, at the time I don’t think people really understood the import of it. Hmm. But I did understand the import of it, and I engaged immediately, but ICE was not my idea. The PR program was [00:25:00] not my idea. I’ve always been about education, but I did bring professionals in and we did it.

Daniel Penny: Palmer says he eventually got disillusioned with ICE and decided to focus more on science and education, but what exactly did he mean when he said we did it? What did ICE do?

Amy Westervelt: So ICE was part of a really successful campaign. They figured out specific audiences to target with climate denial talking points, and it really moved the needle from the majority of Americans accepting the science and being concerned to more or less the mess we have now. Here’s Kurt Davies, a longtime Greenpeace researcher who’s now at the Center for Climate Integrity, telling us all about their campaign back on season one of Drilled.

Kert Davies: Data indicates 89% say they have heard of global warming. 82% claim some familiarity with global warming. 80% [00:26:00] claim the problem is somewhat serious, while 45% claim it is very serious and 39% back federal legislation without any quantification of cost, and only 22% of those consider themselves green consumers.

Amy Westervelt: So this thing that he’s talking about is really important. It’s. Again, 1991, governments are starting to get behind the idea of not just national policy, but actually global agreements to tackle emissions. And it’s not just environmentalists who know and care about this, it’s breaking through.

Kert Davies: So it’s penetrated. A vast majority have heard of the issue, think it’s serious. And the campaign is to reverse that, is to change that the strategies, quote unquote, include repositioning global warming as a theory, parentheses not fact. They talk about specifically the target audiences of this test round that they’re gonna do, uh, to see if their theory works, that they can move people. And [00:27:00] it says, people who respond favorably to such statements are older, less educated males from larger households who are not typically active information seekers and are not likely to be green consumers.

Daniel Penny: Let’s put that in plain English. They figured out that old white dudes without college degrees were susceptible to climate disinformation.