In 2022, the Government of Canada announced its plans to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2035. In 2023, studies in Canada and the US found that children who grew up in homes with natural gas stoves faced higher rates of asthma (Gruenwald et al. 2022; Bédard et al. 2023). Alongside this health issue, scientists found that annual carbon emissions from gas stoves in the US compare to the annual emissions of 500,000 cars (Lebel et al. 2023). In response to findings such as these, New York became the first state to ban natural gas stoves and heaters in some new buildings. As restrictive policy attempts largely geared towards helping influence personal and environmental well-being in a time of climate catastrophe, these interventions and the studies that informed them generated widespread attention across the Internet, becoming a kind of meme, particularly in right-wing media contexts.

This paper sets its sights on this moment, examining reactions from Canadian pro-oil groups on social media that, since 2011, I have been following closely and argue have initiated a kind of oil culture wars. Beginning with an analysis of pro-oil social media content that engages with the fossil-fuelled appliances and vehicles, I then explore the consequences of combustion becoming a central dimension to right-wing political identities and notions of freedom. From here, I address how just energy transition is construed as a threat to these identities, seeking to answer the following question: what prospects for just transition remain when the right to burn is increasingly understood as inalienable?