Contribution short abstract

The captive audience of public-school presents a perfect venue to maintain fossil fuel hegemony. Petro-pedagogy is an effective arm of the climate obstruction regime in the United States, my work documents how widespread and how effectively it adds inertia to efforts to address the climate crisis.

Contribution long abstract

Petro-pedagogy is the term used to describe strategies fossil fuel companies use to exert their influence and social legitimation via educational spaces. In the United States, this type of corporate interference in classrooms is widespread and stretches back to at least the 1940s. It presents a formidable challenge in building a sustainable future because it is an effective way to reinforce fossil fuel hegemony in a guaranteed large subset of the population -- the captive audience of school-aged children in mandatory public education.

Petro-pedagogy takes different forms, including direct funding to schools, industry directly influencing curricula, free teaching materials like books or activity booklets, paid teacher training sessions, or free field trips to refineries and other fossil fuel assets.

Common climate delay discourses are initially seeded here, and they are repeated in other forms of media and political spheres throughout our lives. Discourses include fossil fuel essentialism, false solutions, responsibility shifting, and biased both-sided analyses.

While it can be argued that petro-pedagogy is merely a way these companies engage in corporate social responsibility and provide financial support at a time when school budgets are increasingly strained, I argue these efforts are also a calculated form of systematic indoctrination. My work documents the widespread nature of petro-pedagogy across the United States. I detail how the fossil fuel industry engages in this form of obstruction under the guise of community outreach, and how these efforts fuel the prevailing akrasia and agnotology holding us back from meaningfully addressing the climate crisis.