From Oil Culture Wars to Appliance Wars and Back: Fossil Fuels, Identity, and the Politics of Combustion On and Off Social Media Today

Résumé analytique

This essay argues that the "appliance wars" over gas stoves, electric vehicles, and heat pumps are not a strange new front in the culture wars, as reporter Oliver Milman suggested, but the default extension of what the author calls the oil culture wars: the cultural and representational battles over oil that run alongside the broader culture wars. Household appliances have always been politicized objects because fossil fuels so pervasively shape everyday life and social reproduction in neoliberal North America. Resistance to energy transition, from fifteen-minute cities to Canada's mandate for all new light-duty vehicle sales to be zero-emission by 2035, is construed as a single target and provokes reactionary dissent.

The author traces how this politics of combustion is enacted through meme warfare and trolling, from US figures like Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis to the Fort McMurray pro-oil group Oil Sands Strong, which asks its 304,000 Facebook followers to resist a "green" economy. Drawing on concepts of "fossil fascism" and "petro-masculinity," it links online petro-trolling to offline combustive action such as rolling coal and the 2019 United We Roll and 2022 Freedom Convoy occupations.

The essay concludes that when the right to burn is cast as an inalienable identity, threat to that identity becomes the primary affect blocking just transition. The winners of both an unjust net-zero transition and a percolating fossil fascism will be extractive capital and politicians on X; everybody else loses. The oil culture wars should be taken seriously, but not engaged through unproductive debate.