I just listened to a Drilled podcast – The Black Thread Pt 2: Petroganda, and you should to.
It’s a nice investigation of the way Statoil (since rebranded as Equinor) has a virtual death grip on Norwegian culture and “common sense.” Nobody says “Gramsci” or “hegemony”, but maybe they should. Nice interview with the Statoil Veep of Communications too.
Here’s a definition
The term “petroganda” was coined by journalist and Drilled founder Amy Westervelt to describe the fossil fuel industry’s approach to the information ecosystem, an approach that goes far beyond simply “disinformation,” which Westervelt describes as just the most visible symptom of this problem. In this context “petroganda” is defined as: The intentional warping of information ecosystems by corporate interests, such that everything from the basic building blocks of information—university research, surveys, white papers—to public-facing campaigns crafted by PR and advertising experts are driven by a profit or power motive as opposed to the desire to understand and communicate.
“Petroganda” is perhaps a little clumsy, and is hardly new (but then, they don’t claim it is). It’s simply the way that the oil companies (and in Australia it was/is the coal companies) go for full spectrum dominance – making sure they are in people’s minds and hearts from a very young age. The usual stuff – museums, sponsoring sports and cultural stuff, games for the kiddies etc etc. And it creates what one interviewee calls “oilsplaining” – whenever she raises Statoil’s carbon emissions she gets all the oily talking points, from people who don’t think they’ve been indoctrinated at all…
I quite like Emily Atkin’s
of oilsplaining, drawing on (of course) Rebecca Solnit’s “mansplaining.”
Oilsplaining,” our word for when some random dude who doesn’t fully understand climate change explains the benefits of fossil fuels to you .
See also
2023 academic article “The language of late fossil capital.”
And my piece about Shell and its corporate propaganda, from late 2015. On existentialism, guilt, Godard and … Shell’s corporate framing strategy
A Statoil guy talking about climate change in 1980.
March 21, 1980 – chair of Statoil board acknowledges the “social cost” of the “CO2 problem”