Snake Oil and Gaslight How the Petroleum Industry Got in Touch with Nature

Abstract

This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. These oil and gas industry trade publications have served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. Still, it is important to highlight the contradictory tactics that trade industry publications effectively test-marketed in the 1960s and 1970s to nullify a perception of petroleum as hazardous to public health and the natural environment. Most paradoxical was how trade publications reinvented their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment. Unlike any other currently available source base, Big Oil’s trade publications offer insights into the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications reveal the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of electric vehicles, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car. This history represents an early and previously unexplored chapter in the evolution of what we have come to recognize as corporate “greenwashing.”