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...