The Original Energy Propaganda

There is a children’s book called Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream.

That sounds like something a comedian would invent after two beers and a despair spiral, but no. The basic premise, as documented by Climate Town and the sources behind its episode on oil-industry influence in schools, is that a kid has a nightmare about fossil fuels disappearing and learns how terrible life would be without petroleum.

This is one of those facts that makes the whole room tilt a little.

Because you can spend years hearing that climate education is indoctrination, that “green energy” is propaganda, that environmentalists are trying to brainwash children into hating America, and then you look over and the oil industry has a little character walking into classrooms to tell children fossil fuels are basically the hidden friend inside every object they love.

It would be funnier if it were not so effective.

How Normal Gets Manufactured

The claim of this chapter is simple: oil and gas did not become “normal energy” by accident. The industry invested in making fossil fuels feel like common sense, prosperity, patriotism, and childhood education.

That does not mean every teacher who used a donated worksheet was part of a plot. Teachers are overloaded. Schools are underfunded. Free materials are tempting because the American public has a special talent for demanding miracles from classrooms while funding them like a bake sale.

That is exactly why the strategy works.

If an industry with a public-relations problem can walk into an under-resourced school system and offer polished materials, posters, activities, videos, websites, lesson plans, and cheerful characters, it does not need to kick down the door. It can arrive as help.

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a business model for influence.

The Classroom Door

Climate Town’s source trail points to a long history: the American Petroleum Institute’s mid-century “Destination Earth,” Exxon working with Disney in the 1980s, Exxon climate documents, the 1998 API communications plan, Oklahoma energy-education efforts, the Heartland Institute sending climate-denial materials to teachers, and state textbook politics where large markets can shape what publishers produce for everyone else.

You do not need to memorize every organization to understand the mechanism.

The mechanism is simple:

1. Fossil fuels are politically vulnerable because they pollute, contribute to climate change, and require a very friendly regulatory environment.
2. Children and schools are culturally powerful because they shape common sense early.
3. Schools need materials.
4. Industry supplies materials.
5. The material does not have to say “please support our lobby agenda.” It only has to make fossil fuels feel like civilization itself.

The goal is not merely to deny climate change. That is too narrow. The deeper goal is to make fossil fuels feel ontological, like they belong to the category of “how life works,” while alternatives feel like political interventions.

Once that happens, oil does not need to win every argument. It just needs every argument to start from the assumption that oil is the real world.

True Facts, Rigged Frames

If a child learns that petroleum is in toothbrushes, clothes, toys, phones, roads, medicine, transportation, food packaging, and basically every surface of modern life, that child learns a real thing. Petroleum products are everywhere. Modern life really was built around them.

But there are two ways to teach that fact.

One way is materialist. It says: here is how industrial society developed, here is what petroleum made possible, here are the benefits, and here are the costs - pollution, climate risk, geopolitical dependence, plastic waste. Here are the alternatives. Here are the tradeoffs.

The other way is moral theater. It says: without oil, civilization disappears. The industry becomes not a supplier but a guardian. The fuel becomes not a product but a savior.

That second version is propaganda not because every sentence is false, but because the frame is rigged. It gives the benefits a name and the costs a fog machine.

Propaganda Lives In The Therefore

This is the part Americans need to understand about propaganda. We tend to imagine it as a villain twirling a mustache and saying the sky is made of soup. Real propaganda is often much more boring and more effective. It does not always lie. It arranges truths in a way that protects power.

“Petroleum is in many products” can be true.

“Therefore the oil industry deserves political protection forever” is the move.

“Natural gas burns cleaner than coal at the smokestack” can be true.

“Therefore we should build decades of new gas infrastructure and call it climate progress” is the move.

“Solar has land-use impacts” can be true.

“Therefore the current fuel system is neutral” is the move.

Propaganda lives in the therefore.

The fossil fuel industry’s greatest achievement was not convincing Americans that pollution is good. Very few people believe that. Its greatest achievement was convincing Americans that fossil fuels are normal in a way that competing technologies are not.

Normal is a political accomplishment.

Once something becomes normal, it stops sounding like an agenda. A refinery is just there. A highway is just there. A gas station is just there. A pipeline right-of-way is just there. A school worksheet about petroleum is just education. A politician praising oil workers is just respect. A lobbyist protecting depletion allowances is just policy.

The Purity Test

But a solar farm? Suddenly we become philosophers of land.

Suddenly every acre matters.

Suddenly every bird matters.

Suddenly every mineral matters.

Suddenly the supply chain must be morally pure, the developer must be locally beloved, the panel must last forever, the recycling system must already be perfect, the grid upgrade must cost nothing, and the whole project must fit the emotional architecture of a Norman Rockwell painting.

I am not saying those concerns are fake. Land matters. Wildlife matters. Mining matters. Community consent matters. Recycling matters. The point is not that solar deserves less scrutiny.

The point is that fossil fuels deserve the same amount.

The propaganda chapter matters because it explains why they usually do not get it.

If people are taught from childhood that fossil fuels are the hidden foundation of modern life, then questioning fossil fuel dependence can feel like questioning modern life itself. It can feel like ingratitude. It can feel like weakness. It can feel like someone is trying to take away the world and replace it with a lecture.

That emotional move is incredibly useful to incumbents.

It means every alternative begins as a threat, not a proposal.

The Moral Drama

This is where the energy fight turns material questions into moral drama. The material question is: what technologies, costs, supply chains, land uses, and risks should we choose now? The moral-drama question is: who is attacking the good world we remember?

If solar is translated into that moral drama, it stops being cheap power and becomes an accusation. The panel says, “Your truck is bad. Your town is bad. Your job is bad. Your father was bad. Your whole way of life is obsolete.” No wonder people get angry. I would get angry too if I thought that was the message.

But the panel did not say that.

People did.

Industries did.

Media did.

Politics did.

The panel is just making electricity.

One reason industry school materials are so revealing is that they show how early the symbolism starts. Before a person is old enough to understand tax policy, they can learn which machines feel friendly. Before they can evaluate a methane leak study, they can learn which fuels sound like home. Before they can ask why a company is donating curriculum, they can learn that the company is part of the good world.

That is not the teacher’s fault. That is not the child’s fault. That is a system using underfunded public institutions as a distribution network for its preferred common sense.

Honest Energy Education

And again, the answer is not to replace oil propaganda with solar propaganda.

Children do not need a cartoon called Sunny Sam’s Big Beautiful Electron Dream where a brave little panel defeats the evil pipeline and everyone claps in a net-zero amphitheater. Please no.

They need honest energy education.

They need to learn that energy systems are tradeoffs. Fossil fuels made parts of modern life possible and created enormous costs. Solar and wind reduce some costs and create different challenges. Nuclear has huge benefits and real risks. Hydro is powerful and ecologically complicated. Batteries are useful and material-intensive. Efficiency is boring and underrated. Transmission is necessary and politically difficult. No source is a religion. No source is a devil. The grid is a machine made of choices.

That kind of education would make people harder to manipulate.

Which is probably why it is not the version lobbyists tend to fund.

The Streaming Version

And if you think this stopped with old schoolbooks and cartoon worksheets, look at your streaming apps.

In 2024, Paramount+‘s Landman aired a scene where Billy Bob Thornton’s oilman character explains why even wind turbines depend on oil and why renewables are not really clean. The clip went viral because it sounds like exactly the kind of thing a lot of people want to hear: a tough realist cutting through green nonsense while a naive outsider learns how the world really works.

If you have not seen it, this is the place to pause. Watch the roles before the fact-checking begins.

This is not a condemnation of everyone who liked Landman. It is good television: movie stars, danger, swagger, workplace competence, and the particular Taylor Sheridan pleasure of watching someone explain the brutal facts of life in a cigarette voice with no patience for nonsense.

Enjoying that does not make a person duped. But good television can still teach a worldview. Propaganda does not care whether the first writer had bad intent. If the final object makes the incumbent system feel like reality and the alternative feel like fantasy, it has done the job.

So the question is not, “Which cartoon villain ordered this scene?”

The question is: what system made this story available, attractive, profitable, shareable, and useful?

Start with the source material. Landman was adapted from Boomtown, an 11-part podcast from Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment, hosted and written by Christian Wallace, about the Permian Basin oil boom. The podcast was rooted in reporting. It was not born as an oil commercial. It is about a real place with real workers, real danger, real money, real environmental stakes, and real dependence.

That matters. A fake story is easy to reject. A reality-rooted story is much more powerful because it can say: look, this is how the world actually is.

But real material still passes through ownership, selection, packaging, distribution, and advertising.

Texas Monthly is the magazine behind Boomtown. It had been bought in 2019 by Randa Duncan Williams, whose family fortune comes from Enterprise Products, a major pipeline and energy infrastructure company. That does not turn Christian Wallace into a propagandist, and it does not prove the podcast was corrupted. It shows something more ordinary: in Texas, oil money is not outside the culture. It is part of the room where culture gets funded.

Then the story moved into the Taylor Sheridan machine and onto Paramount+, dropped into the blast radius of the Yellowstone audience. If you chase the ownership stack hoping for a clean oil-baron answer, the trail mostly does not give you one. It gives you something more annoying: a normal media system looking for hits, taking an audience trained to trust one kind of American realism and routing it into the next show.

Then the lobby recognized the cultural terrain.

The American Petroleum Institute did not have to create Landman for Landman to become useful. Once the show existed, API publicly treated it as a cultural moment worth attaching itself to: a press release tied to the show’s return, real landmen spotlighted, language about a broader shift toward “energy realism,” and a sign-up to become an “Energy Citizen.”

That is not a smoking gun. It is not supposed to be. It is how the system works when no cartoon villain is required. Reported reality becomes prestige drama. Prestige drama becomes a viral clip. A viral clip becomes “finally someone said it.” The lobby does not need to write the script. It waits for a useful one to appear, then helps teach the audience what it means. The audience receives the whole thing not as a lobby message, but as common sense with good lighting.

And API is only the group that attached itself in public. Behind it sits a whole network of trade associations - refiners, gas utilities, producers, pipelines, coal, the U.S. Chamber - whose shared job is to keep old energy sounding like neutral reality. That is the right scale of the concern. Not one ad buy. Not one show. A durable network of institutions working to make old dependency sound like adulthood.

None of which makes the show’s raw material false. The oil patch is dangerous. The work is skilled. The people are not cartoon villains. Wind turbines really are manufactured inside an industrial world that still runs on fossil fuels. A serious argument admits all of that.

The problem is the conflation. The viral speech takes a true point - clean-energy machines are built inside the existing industrial world - and turns it into a permanent permission slip for the old fuel system. It conflates “made with industrial materials” with “therefore not meaningfully different.” It conflates “not pure” with “not useful.” It conflates “oil is still embedded in the present” with “oil must remain the adult in the future.”

A Midland Reporter-Telegram fact check found the viral wind-turbine claims did not hold up as stated. Climate Town’s breakdown makes the larger point: the scene is not persuasive because it is careful. It is persuasive because it casts oil as realism and alternatives as naivete.

Tommy Norris’s strongest point is the grid point, and it is true: you cannot electrify a country by yelling “switch” into the sky. You need transmission lines, substations, storage, permitting, factories, electricians, and years of boring work.

That is also why the scene works. It takes a real bottleneck and turns it into a shrug - it makes the hard part sound like proof the new system is childish, instead of proof the hard part should have been built earlier. That question gets its own chapter later. The short version is ugly enough: some countries treat cheap electricity, transmission, and manufacturing as industrial strategy, while America keeps letting the same grid objection become a reason to quit.

So if your skepticism turns on when a solar company runs an ad, it should also turn on when the oil lobby attaches itself to a prestige show where the oilman gets framed as the adult in the room. Otherwise your skepticism has been trained.

Common Sense With Good Lighting

The propaganda is not always a children’s book. Sometimes it is a hit show telling you what sounds like common sense.

The school-propaganda story should also make us humble about what we think we know. A lot of our “common sense” is inherited messaging that got old enough to feel like memory. Nobody likes hearing that. We prefer to imagine our opinions arrived directly from our own rugged brains, perhaps after a brief hike. But all of us are shaped by school, work, family, media, and the industries that profit from our assumptions.

No shame required. Inspection is enough.

If someone shaped your assumptions, you are allowed to inspect them. If an industry spent decades making itself feel like civilization, you are allowed to ask whether that story still serves you. If a label like “green energy” makes a practical machine feel like a moral costume, you are allowed to take the costume off.

Oil became normal because people worked very hard to make it normal.

Solar became “green” because the culture war found a useful target.

The next fuel story shows how subtle that branding can get. You do not even need a children’s book. Sometimes all you need is one word.

Natural.