Climate change and clean, renewable energy present themselves as a threat to fossil fuel capitalists. As defined by Cara Daggett, Petro-masculinity represents the overlapping between 1950’s America (and large parts of Europe and Asia), traditionalism, authoritarianism, fascism and the masculine stereotypes built around growthism.  Defending growthism as necessary for our society to function is a typical position for petro-masculinity. Downplaying the damage of fossil fuels for the sake of growth often is presented by petro-masculine males to comfort their fragilities. 

What is petro-masculinity?

Petro-masculinity is defined as an authoritarian movement in the West embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny.

63 per cent of conservative males in Norway do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to 36 per cent among the rest of the population who deny climate change and global warming. Overall, 29.6 per cent of conservative white males (CWMs) in the US believed that the effects of global warming “will never happen,” and just 7.4 per cent of all other adults shared that view. Similarly, 58.5 per cent of CWMs—but only 31.5 per cent of all other adults—denied that recent temperature increases are caused primarily by human activities.

From The Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Come, my friends!’ I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel – a guillotine knife – which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,’ I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!

From The accelerationist noise of petro-masculinity by Arnau Horta | CCCB LAB

Petro-masculinity and its practices perpetuate this machinist hyper-masculinity that gives man control over means of production and the administration of noise. At the wheel of a car or astride a motorcycle, man can maintain the hieratic attitude formerly assigned to him by sophrosyne by delegating the production of noise to a machine that acts as an appendage of his body and personality. The vehicle thereby becomes a kind of ventriloquist technology that gives the driver a “second voice” and allows him to roar without having to open his mouth or utter words.

According to Jacques Attali (Bruits. Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique, 1977), this roar is nothing but the sublimatory simulacrum of a violent and authoritarian action. “We must learn to judge a society by its sounds in order better to understand where the folly of men is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have”, wrote Attali. It is in this sense that the noise of petro-masculinity can be heard as the announcement of a disturbing acclamation of accelerationism and a dangerous sleight of hand that turns its back on the many challenges that society must urgently face in the fields of sustainability, equality and affectivity.

From Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire, Cara Daggett

Cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family, oriented around white male workers, formed a triumvirate that yoked the desires of Americans not only to wage labour, but to the continued supply of cheap energy that made the dream possible. These privatised consumer perks, along with New Deal infrastructure and policies that supported them, were intended to inoculate the American public against the twin threats of communism and fascism, both of which lurked in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. On the supply side, and especially prior to the 1970s’ oil crisis, the state helped to secure an artificial oil scarcity that ensured profits for oil companies. On the demand side, the state also helped to cultivate oil desires, such that fossil fuel consumption became necessary to achieve the American dream.

Petro-masculines feel threatened by climate change because it directly threatens their identity. What happens when you can’t dream of a private jet, a faster car or new machines?

Petro-masculinity overlaps with a traditionally masculine role of a man in western society; therefore, many men, to varying degrees, feel threatened by climate change itself. Growthism is tightly connected to fossil fuels and presents ideas of wealth, power and destruction; something to strive for.

From Men, Masculinity and Climate Change

The idea that men’s social dominance and oppression of women is linked to nature dominance and environmental exploitation originates in ecofeminism (Hultman & Pulé, 2018;

MacGregor, 2017). In The Death of Nature (1980) which is often considered the founding text of ecofeminism, Carolyn Merchant presents an analysis of how dominant conceptualizations of nature have been shaped historically and how these developed in tandem with white men’s dominance over women. She argues that “the rise of modern science, technology, and capitalism produced and relied on the death, domination, and exploitation of a nature gendered female, and that this reinforced and reflected the cultural subordination and exploitation of women” (Thompson & MacGregor, 2017, p. 43). Merchant explains how nature in Western culture was associated with femininity and the earth constructed as a living organism that nurtured humanity (think of Mother Nature).

While nature was feminized it was considered to have an intrinsic value, but during the scientific revolution and the rise of a commercialized economy, this changed. The perception of nature shifted “from reverence to domination” to legitimize the exploitation of natural resources that was required to industrialize society (Thompson & MacGregor, 2017, p. 44). Nature was increasingly constructed in mechanistic terms and its value reduced to the natural resources that humans could exploit. This development went hand in hand with increased control over women, for instance, through scientizing and controlling female reproduction and relegating care labor to the domestic sphere. According to Merchant, this period “was the beginning of a long process through which ‘scientific’ authority could be used to keep women in their place as intellectually inferior and economically dependent” (Thompson & MacGregor, 2017, p. 45).

And

So, what characteristics are men encouraged to adopt? As written, hegemonic masculinities are context-dependent, but in a modern, Western society they commonly build on whiteness heterosexuality, physical strength and dominance (Godfrey, 2016; Hultman & Pulé, 2018). Paul Kivel constructs the “Act like a man box” to summarize the stereotypes that boys and men face. A central message is not to be feminine. This means that men are not encouraged to express emotions and show feelings such as love, compassion, pain and sadness. Rather than being emotional, men are encouraged to be violent, tough, active, strong, successful, independent and in control. Men are expected to be competitive, take charge and dominate others. They are encouraged to valorize the “Rational Man”, praise logic and rationality and reject emotions and vulnerability (Hultman, 2017, p. 244). Men should not cooperate or ask for help, instead they should be leaders, winners, providers and protectors. The socialization encourages men to embrace social dominance and a belief in group-based hierarchy (Hultman & Pulé, 2018)

The result of pressures men have to face as performing the “Rational man” stereotype is found in suicide statistics. For UK women, the rate is a third of men’s: 4.9 suicides per 100,000. Men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women in Australia, 3.5 times more likely in the US and more than four times more likely in Russia and Argentina. WHO’s data show that nearly 40% of countries have more than 15 suicide deaths per 100,000 men; only 1.5% show a rate that high for women.

In the United States, men consume about 57% more meat than women. Since animal agriculture is one of the largest contributing sectors to greenhouse gas emissions, this is another result of Petro-masculinity.

Masculinity without eco-modernism

Eco-modernism tries to continue the “Rational Man” stereotype and just replace fossil fuels with renewables. The result is arguments for nuclear energy, geoengineering, fast electric cars and growthism under disguise. Most geoengineers are men, and many are associated with U.S. national laboratories engaged in military research (Russell, 2001; Fialka, 2020).  It does not limit growth which is one of the main drivers of climate change; there’s also no good evidence that you can have green growth. While eco-modernism seems to be an easy way to continue the current patriarchal rule in our society, it does not make us reach the Paris Agreement’s targets.

From Re-gendering Climate Change: Men and Masculinity in Climate Research, Policy, and Practice

Masculine interests and perspectives shape the agenda for climate science and policy which emphasize modeling of physical and biological systems and cataloging security concerns. As MacGregor (2010, p. 128) points out, “by ‘scientizing’ and ‘securitizing’ it, climate change is constructed as a problem that requires the kinds of solutions that are the traditional domain of men and hegemonic masculinity.” Politicians are motivated by powerful and wealthy interests who tend not to lobby for climate justice. Climate science mirrors climate politics in its disregard for climate justice, but for different reasons. The kinds of questions mostly male climate scientists ask tend to focus on the physical science, not the human dimensions of climate change (Masood, 2021). As a result, climate models grow ever more sophisticated and complex, leading Fleming (2017, p. 27) to refer to them as “fetishes.” Despite advances in climate modeling, scientific understandings of climate change’s effects on social inequalities or human physiology, psychology, and wellbeing remain relatively uncharted.

And 

The political and scientific affinity for things military contributes to climate change partly because the military is an energy-dependent institution. Its sheer size and budget make the U.S. military “one of the largest institutional climate actors in the world” (Belcher et al., 2019, p. 76). Grappling with climate change is increasing military spending since officials are trying to manage its effects on military installations and operations [e.g., rising sea levels inundating bases and heat exhaustion by troops on missions (Garcia, 2020)]. The DOD’s climate adaptation plans contain a laundry list of energy-saving and environmental adaptation initiatives that tend not to reduce, but only to slow growth of military energy demands. When security crises occur, both civilian and military programs to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption quickly can be derailed.

New masculinity without growthism

From The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Looked at this way, matriarchies are real enough. Kandiaronk himself arguably lived in one. In his day, Iroquoian-speaking groups such as the Wendat lived in towns that were made up of longhouses of five or six
families. Each longhouse was run by a council of women – the men who lived there did not have a parallel council of their own – whose members controlled all the key stockpiles of clothing, tools and food. The political sphere in which Kandiaronk himself moved was perhaps the only one in
Wendat society where women did not predominate, and even so there existed women’s councils which held veto power over any decision of the male councils. On this definition, the Pueblo nations such as Hopi and Zuñi might also qualify as matriarchies, while the Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra, describe themselves as matriarchal for exactly the same reasons.

True, such matriarchal arrangements are somewhat unusual – at least in the ethnographic record, which covers roughly the last 200 years. But once it’s clear that such arrangements can exist, we have no particular reason to exclude the possibility that they were more common in Neolithic times, or to assume that Gimbutas – by searching for them there – was doing something inherently fanciful or misguided. As with any hypothesis, it’s more a matter of weighing up the evidence.

Masculinity won’t disappear anytime soon in our western society. With the rise of Andrew Tate and other petro-masculine idols, more people voting for openly fascist parties, pursuing a transition to another masculine stereotype would be ideal. While the “Rational Man” stereotype should not define masculinity, we need to depart from that stereotype to create a new role for masculinity. In a degrowth society, there will be several roles where this transition can happen. There will be an increased need for the re-use, repair and repurposing of existing material. There will also be a need for an increased organisation of citizens and active participation in society. 

Several “scientist” areas will also need to be fulfilled, such as the exploration of new building methods, new ways of farming, and new ways of organising food production and distribution. These are just a few examples of what needs to be redefined. This will be a transition where you can also introduce new ways of cooperating (without domination and with emotions). However, removing the pressure of petro-masculinity and growthism from men will also lessen the pressure to perform the “rational man” stereotype.