Refined Language

Let’s start with a thought experiment. It’s 6 a.m. in the dead of winter on the Canadian prairies. There’s no wind, and everything is frozen. The rivers have turned to ice, and the sun won’t be up for a few hours. Without wind, water, or solar energy, how can we imagine a just transition away from fossil fuels?

While Jordan B. Kinder’s Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media doesn’t outline what such a transition might look like, it does explain how right-wing media birthed the ultimate marketing campaign to maintain support for the fossil fuel industry: what he calls “petroturfing.” Kinder explains how petroturfing avoids critiquing our dependence on carbon-based energy by relying on hypothetical instances, like the story above, of how renewable resources might fail. Kinder, a scholar of environmental humanities at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, is interested in the way this rhetoric has seeped into discourses about climate, gender, the economy, and national identity.

What’s at stake is how our relationship to Canadian resources is narrated in public discourse, through both the traditional media and new social media platforms. “Petroturfing describes the actions of often well-connected organizations, groups, and campaigns that disingenuously or suspiciously claim grassroots origins or character to promote oil and other fossil fuels,” Kinder explains, “by producing and circulating claims that the oil industry, its workers, and its supporters are unfairly targeted by allegedly dominant liberal, environmentalist voices.” He then tracks the way these players market their ideologies and influence the general public’s understanding of oil and its larger impact on the environment.

Kinder traces the petroturfing phenomenon back to two publications: Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands, from 2008, and Ezra Levant’s Ethical Oil, “which can be read as a response” two years later to that earlier book. A lawyer by training and a media personality who “lit the fuse that ignited the oil culture wars,” Levant used a figurative sort of refining to turn the idea of “dirty oil” into “ethical oil” by greenwashing the Alberta oilsands against a xenophobic backdrop of Middle Eastern production. Debunking the impossible economic and environmental claims that stemmed from Ethical Oil, Kinder asks, “Whose future, precisely, is being secured by the reproduction and expansion of Canada’s fossil economy?” His response: petroleum sector executives and very few others.

This careful investigation reveals exactly how empty promises — what Kinder calls “oil executive epistemologies”— began and continue “to shape the discourse regarding the collective benefits” of extractive projects. This means that

for the everyday Canadian who serves as petroturfing’s imagined audience, the assumption that what is good for the fossil economy is good for Canadians is neither a straightforward nor immediately sympathetic position. This position requires careful messaging that channels existing, deeply engrained national mythologies of settler colonial frontierism and resource extraction to establish a unified positioning that frames extraction as both a national and an individual good.

In looking at the changing media landscape from the 2010s and into the early 2020s, Kinder begins with a portrait of Bernard the Roughneck, “an out-of-work oilsands laborer who became a right-wing media darling” and mouthpiece for Canadian oil production. He goes on to discuss the way resource companies and their political advocates co‑opt nationalism, how failures of land-use reclamation are obfuscated, and the significant growth of oil-fuelled ideologies. Kinder describes the turn toward increasingly violent rhetoric that relies on “more aggressively right-wing tenets” as “the fossil fascist creep.” In the early 2020s, this manifested as Rally 4 Resources, United We Roll!, and the Freedom Convoy. Kinder argues that these disingenuous demonstrations should be more controversial than they are, because they masquerade as grassroots movements modelled after Indigenous-led activism, such as the Idle No More protests.

Ultimately, Kinder argues, we don’t need to collectively conceive of oil as “ethical” or “good” because it already dominates our lives, whether our dependence on it is positive or negative. The support the fossil fuel sector receives from politicians and federal subsidies reinforces extraction as essential to the idea of Canada’s future.

Kinder concludes by wondering where we go from here. “How might we exit the deep trenches of the oil culture wars?” Petroturfing doesn’t offer a simple solution to combat the insidiousness of profit-motivated marketing, but it does help make sense of the political and media climate that produced what are now familiar right-wing arguments for often indefensible extraction and pipeline expansion.

Petroturfing is a rich but demanding book that can help readers envision and contribute to “the necessary political struggles and technological innovations that will make a transition to more equitable fuel sources and ways of life possible.” If we can comprehend how oil and gas propaganda dominates our political, social, and personal imaginations, maybe we can begin to “generate and nurture new ways of living with and relating to oil and its infrastructures.”