{"id":411952,"date":"2026-04-22T15:35:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T15:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/411952\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T15:35:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T15:35:18","slug":"petro-masculinity-is-destroying-the-planet-can-eco-masculinity-help-save-it-andrew-boyd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/411952\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Petro-masculinity\u2019 is destroying the planet. Can eco-masculinity help save it? | Andrew Boyd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feminist influencer Liz Plank<\/a> opens her groundbreaking book For the Love of Men with a bold statement: \u201cThere is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.\u201d She means it at several levels, from the most intimate: how male partners are the leading<\/a> cause of death for pregnant women in the US; to the most macro: how associating \u201ceco-conscious behaviors with femininity and a repudiation of masculinity\u201d is literally killing the planet. This Earth Day, it\u2019s worth reflecting on why this is so and what can be done about it.<\/p>\n

While it won\u2019t come as news to most that, compared with women, men litter more<\/a>, recycle less<\/a>, and leave a bigger carbon footprint<\/a> There\u2019s something more extreme than simple thoughtlessness causing young men, in a form of anti-environmental protest known as \u201crolling coal<\/a>\u201d, to modify the diesel engines on their pickup trucks to deliberately belch large amounts of grey-black exhaust, and then run Priuses and bicyclists off the road<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the emotional satisfaction of \u201cowning the libs\u201d or the tens of millions in campaign contributions Trump has received<\/a> from the fossil fuel industry cannot fully explain the pure spite driving his administration to force<\/a> money-losing coal plants in Michigan to continue operating or cancel<\/a> perfectly good already \u2013 80% \u2013 complete offshore wind projects in Connecticut. Not to mention launching another war for oil in the Middle East cowboy-style with zero strategic forethought.<\/p>\n

What connects the dots here is something more unhinged and tangled: a hyper-aggressive, oil-soaked version of toxic masculinity known as \u201cpetro-masculinity\u201d. And it\u2019s crucial to understanding why we as a society are failing to rally behind a shared ecological vision.<\/p>\n

Coined by political scientist Cara Daggett in a 2018 paper<\/a>, \u201cpetro-masculinity\u201d describes a pernicious fusion between fossil fuel use, climate change denial, and defense of authoritarian white patriarchal masculinity. Noting how fossil fuel extraction and consumption are coded \u201cmasculine\u201d, while environmentalism and green technology are coded soft, weak and \u201cfeminine\u201d; it tracks how insecure men are increasingly leaning in to a petro-masculine identity in order to assert traditional masculine authority in the face of climate change, threats to traditional extractive industries, and changing social norms.<\/p>\n

For most people, petro-masculinity dramatically erupted into public view during the 2022 Twitter\/X showdown<\/a> between manosphere bully Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,\u201d Tate tweeted at Greta, along with a photo of him pumping gas into one of them.<\/p>\n

Picking up on the sexually boastful undertones of those \u201cenormous emissions\u201d, Greta slyly clapped back: \u201cyes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.\u201d<\/p>\n

With 3.3m likes and 500,000+ retweets, it became \u201cthe tweet heard around the world\u201d and in the words<\/a> of Rebecca Solnit, \u201ca reminder of the intersection between machismo, misogyny, and hostility to climate action\u201d propelled by \u201cversions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference \u2013 individualism taken to its extremes \u2013 are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis\u201d.<\/p>\n

As a longtime climate activist, I\u2019d seen this gendering of the climate fight up close and personal. Whether it was Fox pundits factlessly spouting climate denial or dude-trolls calling you a \u201ccuck\u201d in the comments just for caring about the planet, it was impossible not to notice a certain type of man with certain type of attitude: usually white male and angry, fronting an aggressive \u2013 and noticeably dick-ish \u2013 defense of the fossil fuel status quo. It usually came with a strutting display of male prerogative and privilege, including the privilege of destroying the planet, if that\u2019s what they felt like.<\/p>\n

While Andrew Tate<\/a> trolling a teenage girl with the equivalent of dick pics of his 27 sports cars is unquestionably gross and pathetic, some of the aggressive defensiveness tangled up in petro-masculinity is understandable.<\/p>\n

Imagine that digging coal is something that you and your forefathers did for generations, and it paid the rent and felt manly and heroic (in spite of its harms and dangers). And then some environmental do-gooder in a Prius comes along, saying you shouldn\u2019t do that any more. But they\u2019re not offering you a viable alternative livelihood, certainly not one with dignity and that mysterious aura of \u201cmanliness\u201d that digging coal had. Who wouldn\u2019t be defensive?<\/p>\n

If accepting the reality of climate change logically leads to certain solutions that you perceive as threatening to your core identity and way of life, it makes sense you might dig your heels hard into climate denial. And then flip those self-righteous Prius drivers the bird with some \u201ccoal rolling\u201d.<\/p>\n

So, what is to be done? First, as the just transition movement has known<\/a> from the jump, we need to offer a real-world economic alternative. Liberal scold mode isn\u2019t gonna work here, and is in fact part of a larger problem of Dems losing<\/a> men and elections (think Marc Maron\u2019s joke\/insight<\/a> that the left \u201cannoyed people into fascism\u201d in 2024). Instead we need to offer a real alternative such as a Green New Deal<\/a> that actually delivers on the promise of \u201cmillions of good, well-paying jobs\u201d, as Bernie and AOC and the Sunrise Movement (and to a lesser degree Biden via his IRA) have been trying to do.<\/p>\n

For those of us desperately trying to build a public consensus to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, petro-masculinity suggests that fighting climate change is not just a technological or economic or political challenge, but also a cultural and psychic struggle against an entrenched and very gendered \u201cpetroculture\u201d.<\/p>\n

The call is coming from inside the house. Patriarchy goes deep. Overcoming it is a multitrack, generations-long effort. Involving both a restructuring of power (with knock-on benefits for the planet, as report after report shows<\/a> that the greater the gender equity in a society the stronger its climate policies); as well as men undertaking a profound internal healing journey to undo harmful conditioning and find our way to a new kind of ecological masculinity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that men don\u2019t care about the environment,\u201d argues Liz Plank. \u201cThey\u2019re just taught to care about threats to their masculinity more.\u201d To help men flip the salience of those priorities, environmental advocates have been taking three basic approaches: decode, recode and he-code.<\/p>\n

Through media literacy, social critique, hand-to-hand ideological battles on the internet, and clever culture-jamming and lampooning<\/a>, climate and other activists are working to decode petro-masculinity. They\u2019re pointing out how ridiculous and \u201cconstructed\u201d and self-defeating petro-masculinity is for men, their communities, and the planet itself, and hoping, over time, this will help unravel the thick association between fossil fuels and aggrieved masculine identity. Thunberg\u2019s take down of Andrew Tate is one example; this article, I suppose, is another.<\/p>\n

A second approach is to recode \u2013 or as Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer likes to say \u201cre-story\u201d \u2013 the choice between fossil fuels and renewables. A good current example of such an approach is the Energy from Heaven \u2013 Not from Hell<\/a> effort that interfaith creation-care network GreenFaith (along with \u2013 full disclosure \u2013 some help from me) is currently advancing.<\/p>\n

Using a range of approaches from Earth Day sermons to religious pamphlet-style comic books, the effort suggests that \u201cGod made it obvious where He wants us to get our energy from\u201d: not from the poisonous hell-fire below, but from the sun and wind in the heavenly skies above. Once seen, this allegory is hard to unsee. And if moral and cosmological alignment with God now has more pull than some perceived threat to their masculinity from \u201cfeminine\u201d renewables, then some men might shift.<\/p>\n

Finally, by painting green tech in a more traditionally masculine and \u201cvirile\u201d way, advocates are trying to he-code climate solutions. Ford\u2019s 2023 launch<\/a> of its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck is one example. Meanwhile, more than a few renewable energy PR teams have deployed scenes of men strapping on a tool belt and climbing rung by rung 300ft into the sky to fix a wind turbine, to convince manly men that they have a place in America\u2019s brave Green future.<\/p>\n

The overall message here: you can be manly without fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

Look at me, I am probably the least petro-masculine person I know. Which hasn\u2019t made me any less masculine, thank you very much, just less petro. I don\u2019t own a car; instead I get my testosterone high by riding my bike a little too aggressively through the streets of New York City. I don\u2019t have a sports car to rev up, but accelerating from 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds in my friend\u2019s boosted Tesla Model 3 (bought secondhand before Elon took his fascist turn) was a g-force thrill ride I\u2019ll do anytime.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t flip the bird at mild-mannered enviros by \u201ccoal loading\u201d my souped-up truck, but I have flipped the bird at the most powerful corporation in the world by co-producing an ad called \u201cExxon Hates Your Children<\/a>\u201d, highlighting the tens of thousands of respiratory deaths the company\u2019s core product has caused, and placing it on the airwaves right in Exxon\u2019s backyard in Irving, Texas. I\u2019ve dedicated the last decade of my life to moving our civilization off of fossil fuels and on to cleaner, greener, more peaceable energy sources, and never did it make me feel less manly \u2013 quite the opposite, in fact.<\/p>\n

A good man is supposed to take responsibility, not shy away from it. It saddens me that the response of so many men to the ecological peril we are in is to renounce responsibility, get defensive, act out. When trouble comes to town, a good man is supposed to protect his home and his loved ones.<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s clear this Earth Day, as it has been every Earth Day, that whether it\u2019s global heating or biodiversity loss or environmental racism, our one and only home is in deep trouble. So men, this Earth Day, let\u2019s commit to untangling ourselves from petro-masculinity, and stepping in to our eco-masculinity. Let\u2019s mobilize our ingenuity and gather our courage \u2013 and feel our grief, if we need to \u2013 so we can remember how much we actually care about this beautiful, miraculous planet we all live on together. And then let\u2019s step up to protect it. After all, what\u2019s more \u201cprotector masculinity\u201d than protecting the Earth?<\/p>\n