Youth Divestment Movements and Petro-fied Climate Education Policy
In this blogpost, which is part of NORRAG’s blog series on Provocations for Education from Youth Climate Activism, Carrie Karsgaard and Lynette Shultz showcase the persistent naturalization of oil-based culture within education policy and argue for a vision for education beyond fossil fuels, which respects planetary boundaries by promoting degrowth.
Youth are demanding action and education on climate. In countries economically reliant on oil and coal industries, young people are taking to the streets to protest the environmental racism of oil developments, draft cease-and-desist letters to the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, and occupy the offices of insurers (Karsgaard & Shultz, 2022), critiquing political leaders for being “fossil fools” and admonishing them to “keep it in the ground.” Divestment, anti-pipeline, and youth climate movements like Fridays For Future all act according to the science that states rapid and deep reductions to carbon emissions are necessary to stop the heating of the Earth. Litigation grounded in children’s rights is beginning to follow suit, as in the US state of Montana, where young people successfully held the state accountable for allowing fossil fuel developments in the face of intensifying climate impacts. Youth anti-fossil-fuel activism targets not only states but also education institutions, and students are beginning to move the needle on university fossil fuel investments (Maina et al., 2020).
While the education sector has embraced youth climate activism through a proliferation of research publications and nods to youth climate activists in policy documents, it flies in the face of “global boiling” by responding to the climate crisis by “greening” learning without addressing fossil fuels. This “greening” impetus reflects what we explore here as the power of “petroculture” in education – a persistent naturalization of oil-based culture within education policy, which undermines education’s efficacy to address the climate crisis and instead turns climate education into a mere branding exercise. To draw attention to the functioning of petroculture in education policy, we will work here with UNESCO’s 2024 Global Education Monitoring Report on Education and Climate Change which, while accurately diagnosing the problem of fossil fuels, proposes petrocultural recommendations for education. By contrast, we will conclude with a vision for education beyond fossil fuels, which respects planetary boundaries by promoting degrowth through a culture of repair.
Petroculture in Education
Petroculture is inherent to modern social and cultural life, which is grounded in an unending supply of cheap and accessible energy. While fossil fuels are essential to modern consumer products, expectations of mobility, and now our AI-driven digital landscape, oil is hidden in plain sight. Naturalized to the point of invisibility, oil resists any efforts for its elimination – whether through divestment movements or calls for degrowth. Profound toxicity at extractive sites and harmful climate impacts remain beyond the view of the mainstream; as a result, climate-harming practices abound almost without notice.
Of course, not all benefit from fossil fuel cultures. Those living proximal to fossil fuel extraction and infrastructures experience health-harming and ecocidal toxicity, while the most intense climate impacts are experienced by those for whom fossil fuelled modernity is not an option. In this sense, petroculture is inherently necropolitical (Mbembe, 2019), exposing certain people to deadly dangers and risks, according to patriarchal, colonial, and racial logics. By contrast, “privileged subjectivities are oil-soaked and coal-dusted,” benefiting from oil profits and consumer lifestyles. Feminist scholar, Cara Daggett, highlights how oil is inherent to subjectivity and political identities, pointing out how it is “no coincidence that White, conservative American men – regardless of class – appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers, as well as leading fossil fuel proponents in the West.” Any unpacking of petroculture in education therefore warrants examination of the “reigning myths” of modernity, including its inherent patriarchy and white supremacy.
Petroculture is alive and well in education systems. In schools, teaching practices and resources reflect what some scholars call “petro-pedagogy,” centering and legitimizing the interests of fossil fuel even in climate and environmental education, including through neoliberal and individualized notions of climate action (Eaton & Day, 2018). At the level of governance, states with petro-power dismiss the scientific evidence necessitating urgent action to address the climate crisis and instead put education in the service of the oil industry, through intensifying neoliberalization that constrains education’s democratic impetus (Adkin, 2023). But what about cases where education is most actively seeking to address the climate crisis in ways that respect planetary boundaries? To what extent does climate education policy reflect or counter petroculture?
Petroculture in the GEM Report
As a way into these questions, we spent some time unpacking UNESCO’s recent Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report on Education and climate change: Learning to act for people and planet (2024). We are not here to critique the GEM Report, per se, but to work with it as a way into the insidiousness of petroculture in education policy.
In its preamble, the report accurately diagnoses the problem of petroculture in education by naming the “positive association between education attainment and unsustainable consumption levels.” Attending to current scholarship, the report names how higher education institutions, despite their climate commitments, lack methodologies for reducing or offsetting greenhouse gas emissions beyond decarbonizing infrastructure (p. 19). We see in their critique how “greening” functions petroculturally as a brand management strategy, utilized for university networking and ranking rather than substantive emissions reductions. The report importantly responds to petroculture in education by emphasizing a need for education “to extend beyond individual to collective and system-wide responses to the climate change challenge… to extend beyond teaching and learning to whole-institution approaches that also reduce the education system footprint” (p. 30).
Despite naming the problem of emissions in education, petroculture is evident in the GEM report through the persistence of neoliberal, as well as gendered and necropolitical climate responses. To begin, the notion of “greening” education focuses on individual learning towards a green economy. While the report does mention system-wide change, the emphasis – in both the Short Summary and conclusion – is on layering social-emotional and action-oriented learning with cognitive learning. Neoliberal petro-pedagogies thus infuse the report, which reorients around individual learners rather than the education system as a whole, much less the petrocultural values and ways of being that are upheld by political and economic systems. The individual, while holistically conceived, remains the primary site for change.
Naming emissions as the primary driver of climate change in keeping with the leading climate science, the report places responsibility on individuals in “rich countries” for unsustainable consumption and production (p. 8), pointing out the challenge of addressing resistance by white men in the United States to climate learning (p. 12, citing Ballew et al., 2020) – a reality that is arguably similar in other places where white men have wealth and power. By extension, we expected to see the report engaging with the patriarchal and capitalist elements of education in its recommendations.
Instead, the report points to fertility education for women in the Global South, proposing “another powerful way education can help mitigate climate change is through increasing girls’ educational attainment, which increases their autonomy over fertility-related decisions and reduces population growth” (p. 1). Rather than naming degrowth as a necessary response by “rich countries,” the report vilifies women who contribute least to climate change. In this gendered response – which, at the very least, refuses to recognize the necessity of fertility education to address men – we can see the petromasculinity and white supremacy of petroculture, which has necropolitical effects in the Global South while maintaining fossil fuelled-expectations of the good life for privileged groups in the Global North. By contrast, we wonder: what kind of education do we need to produce a different subject from the climate action-resistant white man?
Responding to Divestment Movements Through Climate Change Education Beyond Petroculture
If education is to respond to youth divestment movements, excavate its petrocultural roots, and move from individualist and necropolitical responses towards just and reparative climate action, new educational foundations are necessary. In place of sustainable development, which maintains our current trajectory of climate-harming emissions, frameworks such as Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and Jason Hickel’s recommendations for degrowth provide methods for living within planetary boundaries while providing an equitable social foundation for everyone. Through such a collective approach, we can ensure that everyone has the essentials they need for life without further eroding the planet’s life-supporting systems. “Thinking the world” (Mbembe, 2019) as a radical act is necessary in a time that demands urgent collective action and re-animating protection of the commons that sustain all life on the planet. A radical form of democracy needs to be learned into being.
The Authors:
Drs. Karsgaard and Shultz are working together with other researchers, teachers, and high school students around the planet to get at the roots of fossil fuel dependency and advance energy and climate literacy. Funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the project, Learning Collective Worldmaking, will help youth formulate interventions as youth policy makers, climate activists, and engaged citizens as they mobilize their right to a healthy environment. Interested high school teachers can email Carrie_Karsgaard@cbu.ca to learn how to get involved.
Carrie Karsgaard is Assistant Professor in the Education Department, Cape Breton University, Carrie_Karsgaard@cbu.ca
Lynette Shultz is Professor in the Education Policy Studies Department, University of Alberta, lshultz@ualberta.ca