Never Let a War Go to Waste

Guaranteed human.

It's time to move past doom and gloom because while the climate headlines make us feel

like we're losing, we met the people winning, and they just might change how you see your role in this fight. I'm Charles Lloyd, and this is a fighting chance available wherever you get your podcasts. Lots of people have been drawing comparisons between the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the attacks on Iran in 2026.

Alice pointed to similarities like claims about nuclear weapons. It's also covered testified at the barge that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.

“"What you said, I think they were very close to having one."”

I take the threat very seriously. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously. And the preemptive nature of these attacks. It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States.

But then the conversation turns quickly to the many differences. In fact, that unpopular as it was, the Iraq War did actually have congressional approval, for example, or that there were ground troops in Iraq that we haven't really seen any wrong. For me, the way these two moments in U.S. history connect has less to do with intelligence reports and battle plans and Republican presidents than it does with fossil fuels and propaganda.

It pulls together a lot of the stories we've been covering over the past several years into a single timeline, a unified arc towards fossil fascism. To understand what's happening now and where it might head, we need to take a step back and look at where it came from and how the whole thing hangs together.

“So that's what we'll be doing over the course of this three-part many series.”

I'm Amy Westerville and this is drilled.

The fossil fuel industry and American identity have always been deeply entwined, and, in

case, anyone ever forgets it, the American Petroleum Institute is there to beat us over the head with it over and over and over again. This year, we mark America's 250th birthday. Since the beginning of our great nation, we have never accepted limits on what can be achieved. That spirit has defined the energy story.

In 1859, the Drake Well, America's first commercial oil well struck oil in northwest Pennsylvania. This breakthrough helped launch a new era of prosperity. Here's Mike Summers, American Petroleum Institute president at the 26th State of American Energy event.

“Talking about America's first oil well, discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, and how it's”

sparked the modern global oil industry, which, of course, he connects directly back to American energy dominance today.

It was reminded then as it is now that the American energy leadership has never been accidental.

In this ten-minute or so speech, Summers gives us a neat and tidy illustration of fossil fascism. Not only do you have the nationalism and the idea of a return to previous greatness that is the hallmark of fascism of every time. So we embrace innovation, growth and prosperity, or slide backward, denying facts, delaying

progress, and ignoring the realities of rising demand. That's the choice, and the American people have made up their mind. We choose energy success, not surrender. But you also have that national identity and former glory linked inextricably to fossil fuels. American spent years being told that they should do less, build less, produce less, and

pay more. We're done with all of that. American energy is the future, and America is ready to lead. And, importantly, threatened by a small minority. A small fringes stuck in the past, they oppose growth, expansion, and new infrastructure.

There are against new jobs, higher living standards. They resist the energy required, the power, modern life. They offer no vision for the future. Listening to this talk earlier this year, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Brown

American Petroleum Institute has been connecting fossil fuels to American identity.

The lion's share of the effort that these guys are spending money on is not on science denial.

“Yes, they spend this much on science denial, and I'm not saying that that isn't important”

and doesn't count, but there's spending probably five or ten times more trying to influence the perceptions of these corporations and the perceptions of their product and tying their product to the American way of life and everything good about America, you know, apple pie, mom, you know, the flag fossil fuels. And so by implication, what they do is say, basically say any attack on fossil fuels isn't

a tack on our way of life.

That's an extremely powerful argument that fossil fuel companies have been making for decades

that they've been connecting fossil fuels with the American way of life and the good life. The API was formed as World War I, the first fossil fueled war, came to a close. Oil companies had been coordinating during the war to ensure a study supply of fuel to the front.

“The Standard Oil of New Jersey publicist Ivy Lee thought it would be a shame if that”

coordination ended when the war did. After the war ended, there was an interest in sort of coordinating an industry position for the petroleum industry to represent their interest to the public and out of that comes the American petroleum Institute and Ivy Lee for us on his experience in the war propaganda board effort to start developing larger institutional public relations efforts and he

works with the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which we now know as Exxon Mobile, to form the American petroleum Institute in 1919 and so the American petroleum Institute is now 100 years old and it's considered to be the really the first modern sophisticated public relations oriented, creative association in the world. But it's not just the American petroleum Institute that emerges out of World War I.

There's also a newly delineated region with a whole bunch of new states and borders carved

“up by the fossil fuel industry and its government backers in France, Britain, the Netherlands”

and the US. After the break, how the thirst for Middle East oil both contributed to World War I and reconfigured global politics when the war ended.

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the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. From the very early days of the oil industry, it's been tied to national identity. It is inextricably linked to both nationalism and imperialism. That hundred-year history is covered in great detail in a whole bunch of really good books

that I'm going to link to in the show notes, but not attempt to summarize in about five minutes. Here we go, history time. Okay, so just as the Americans are getting going in Pennsylvania, Russia's Tsar opens up the Baku region of Azerbaijan to private oil prospectors. By 1890, Russian oil is giving American oil a run for its money.

At the same time, the Dutch have moved to modernize the oil industry in Indonesia and start the world-dutch oil company. Then they merge with Shell Transport to create Royal Dutch Shell and ship oil all over the world. So within really just a few decades, the oil industry is taking root everywhere, but that's

not happening in the Middle East, although lots of people are speculating that there are large oil reserves there. Why? Well, because it's mostly controlled by the Ottoman Empire, the so-called Sikman of Europe,

Various countries start jogging to grab the Arabian Peninsula and the oil that lays below it.

“Germany, Britain, and France are all there.”

Germany starts building the Baghdad Railway from Baghdad to Berlin, which would give them access both to the oil fields of Bostra and the ports of the Persian Gulf. An Australian gold miner, William Darcy, begins exploring for oil nearby in Persia today Iran, and putting bits in oil fields in modern day Iraq. In 1908, just as he's getting ready to shut down the Persian exploration, he hits

black gold, he creates a new company, the Anglo-Persian oil company, that's the company known today as BP, and guarantees Britain a study supply of Arabian oil. They want more, particularly those Mesopotamian oil fields in what is today Iraq. For years, Anglo-Persian tries to convince the Ottoman Empire to give them a concession there.

At least they have contracts drawn up and ready to sign and something happens.

The first time writing breaks out an Istanbul and the Sultan is deposed before he can sign.

The second, Archduke Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is assassinated, kicking off World War I. During the war, Britain takes possession of Baghdad and Bostra.

“As the war comes to an end, several secret treaties come to light.”

Among them, a collection of letters between diplomats, Mark Sykes of Britain, George Pico of France, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazanov, no collectively at the Sykes Pico Agreement. Negotiated in early 1916, its splits up the Arabian Peninsula between the three countries. Without, of course, consulting any of the people who actually live there.

Britain gets Baghdad and Bostra, France gets Mosul and Syria, Persia split between Russia and Britain. Mongol version is not happy about this, they do not like the idea of giving Mosul to the French, and immediately begin working behind the scenes to undermine this arrangement. Another secret deal signed in late 1918.

The French agreed to give up Mosul, so long as they can retain a share of the oil there in control of Syria. Diving up shares of the Arabian Peninsula's oil, even enters into the Versailles-Peace treaty talks in 1919, where Royal Dutch Shell also enters the chat. There's a whole bunch of geopolitical jockeying and a lot of drawing of lines and creation

of new countries that absolutely sets up the next hundred years of conflict in the region. For our purposes, I'm going to jump to the formation of Iraq in 1922 via a treaty that Britain drafts with its personally selected monarch, King Faisal.

“It's important not just because it creates modernity Iraq, but also because it's where”

an oil giant that had been missing from the conversation suddenly appears. It's right, it's the US. And particularly standard oil of New Jersey, the company known today as Exxon Mobile. The US had provided most of Britain's oil during World War I, and oil for a lot of the other allies, too, and now they want in on divying up the Ottoman oil spoils.

But in typical American fashion, the US had also refused to join the League of Nations

and had never declared war against the Ottoman Empire, only Germany, which had targeted

US vessels. At one of the very first meetings of the American Petroleum Institute, US oil executives began agitating for a way into Iraq's oil fields. They start releasing all these white papers and pamphlets and memos and talking to the press about how the British and French oil monopolies are anti-democratic and anti-American.

British lords fireback that America has established monopolies for itself in the Philippines and Haiti only to turn around and criticize Britain for supposedly doing the same in Iraq. The massive amount of imperialist swordfighting and zoos, all while pretending to be very very concerned for the rights of the Ottoman Empire's former citizens, of course. When the alliance between Britain and King Faisal is finalized at the end of 1922, it includes

an open door for American oil companies in the region. Success! Except that the Turkish Petroleum Company still legally holds the oil concession in Iraq, it's negotiator, Halust Sarkas Gulbenkian, a Turkish-born Armenian educated in Britain, is outsmarting all of them.

Discussions drag on for years mostly because of Gulbenkian, and finally in 1928, Gulbenkian

is ready to sign a deal. Turkish Petroleum will be divided four ways equally between Anglo-Persian, it's B.P.

of US companies called the Near East Development Corporation, led by Standard Oil of New

“Jersey, Leir Exxon, and Sockany vacuum later mobile.”

Each group has also given 1.25% of their share to the only private stakeholder in the agreement, Gulbenkian himself. A company agreement is a map of the Arabian Peninsula with a red line drawn around it, which gives the document its name the red line agreement. Standard oil's publicist Earl Newsom was educating executives and Washington politicians

about it back in the 1920s and 1930s. When I came across those documents in his archive, suddenly the strong sense of entitlement that US oil companies had seemed to feel around a rock and its oil made sense. It wasn't justified, not at all, but at least I knew where this entitlement had come from. It also helped make the American Petroleum Institutes power make more sense.

It wasn't just operating as a trade group, lobbying for this or that policy. It was actually negotiating foreign policy on behalf of the US. No wonder it in the industry it represented, saw itself as just an extension of America and American identity, and no wonder it was so important to protect that connection.

Not only smooth and efficient, but powerful as well.

I watched them for hours. Great, genemy, they were superb. I just couldn't help comparing them with hours. If you call that a comparison. Surely these vehicles must be the property of the highest officials.

I was wrong. It seems that almost everybody in this country has one of those, they call them automobile. This is a clip from an American Petroleum Institute propaganda film that came out in the 50s.

“Dr. Brul told me about it a few years ago and I think about it all the time.”

It's done in the style of the jet-sens and depicts Martians leaning on Earth. The Martians are communists for some reason, and they visit Earth and they see cars and oil and decide capitalism is the way to go. And only one in almost a thousand makes a major discovery. Pretty big odds.

Yet America's proved reserves, the oil supplies still underground, have kept increasing steadily. I couldn't imagine how this ever-increasing supply of oil was achieved. Until I found out that there's not just one, but thousands of oil companies, all competing with each other to discover and develop new sources of oil.

For believe it or not, in the USA, anyone who is willing to risk it can drill for oil. The American Petroleum Institute has only increased its power since then.

It commissioned one of the industry's first reports on global warming in the late 1960s

and was integral in shaping the economic argument against acting on climate change. I was interested in the American Petroleum Institute and I downloaded all the news articles that talked about the American Petroleum Institute and climate change. And there, as you can imagine, there are thousands of them and they go all the way back to the 1980s so I downloaded them and I sorted them chronologically and I just started reading

all of them. Just to get an idea of what the American Petroleum Institute was saying about climate change. I noticed that in the early 90s, the American Petroleum Institute is quoting these economists saying climate change is not a problem, it's not going to hurt society that much and it's going to be too expensive to get off the fossil fuels.

So we shouldn't do anything about this problem. That's Ben Fronta, who heads up the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University and uncovered a lot of early API documents on climate change. And then I saw the American Petroleum Institute quoting and referring to the same economists again and again and again for decades on the late 90s and the early 2000s, like wow,

these are the go-to guys for the American Petroleum Institute. And then I discovered that a lot of those studies that the American Petroleum Institute was citing by those economists were actually funded and commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.

“So that was incredible, but what really got my attention was back in 2017, I think, and Donald”

Trump had announced that he was going to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement and in a speech he gave to justify doing that, he cited some economists instead that

state in it.

“And I thought that was really surprising and so I went to go find that study and it”

was authored by some of the same people that had been quoted by the American Petroleum

Institute for decades and it was the exact same situation. It was a study funded by industry published by a think tank or consulting firm, and then it's quoted as being liable and being rigorous research. In late 2021, before Putin invaded Ukraine, the American Petroleum Institute took to cable news shows in the internet to warn the American public that the Democrats and their climate

policies had made us vulnerable in this situation, that if they just been allowed to drill as much as they wanted, America would be able to rub Russia's nose in it and sweep in to save Europe with plentiful gas. There is a lot of concern about what has been put forth by this administration, and there's

“a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty is leading to a lack of investment in the United”

States, and when the administration is continually putting forward new proposals, the limit production in the United States, American oil and gas companies are cutting back on production. That was our friend API president Mike Summers again, and it wasn't just Summers, lots of other industry spokespeople were out saying similar things very early on. In fact, it was so early, and the messages were so similar that I figured there must be

some kind of coordination. So I called up PR expert Christina Arena to ask what she thought. For a media campaign where you're engaging different stakeholders and you're writing the talking points, if you want your proxies, other political officials, other organizations to repeat the same talking points that takes at least three or four weeks if you're producing

“a creative ad that is on television, that could take two months plus in a tight timeline.”

This was just too coordinated, given the timeframe from the triggering event when Putin invaded to the release of this creative. The intervals were too tight, the messages were too word-for-word. This is an organized disinformation effort geared towards affecting policy in the short-term. I do personally believe that the communications pieces were put into place and ready to

go prior to February 24th, and that the fossil fuel industry knew it stood to benefit from Russia's war, not just in terms of near-term gas prices, but a shorter-term policy grab. It didn't matter that the Democrats hadn't actually managed to pass any climate policy, or that permits for oil and gas drilling had actually increased under Biden.

It didn't matter that oil and gas production in the US had just hit a record high, or that it was Obama and Biden, who had led the charge to lift the export ban in 2015, opening the door to the US becoming the world's top gas supplier in just a decade.

What mattered was the story, and being able to tell it first and loudest.

The notion that it's activists and woke people, they should be the ones to fight climate change, you know, it's not relevant for real Americans, it's this notion that President Biden cares more about climate activists than he does about real Americans. So there's a concerted pusher on these narratives. Again, it's the industry pulling on the thread of American identity, an oil being a fundamental

part of it, and it worked. Within a month, the Biden administration had lifted any delays or restrictions on liquified natural gas terminals and into deal with Europe that locked them into purchasing large volumes of American gas for years to come.

We're going to work to ensure an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquified natural

gas LNG for Europe this year, but we'll also work to ensure additional EU market demand for 50 billion cubic meters of LNG from the United States annually by 2030. But we heard from industry at the time was the same thing we'd heard from President Trump during his first term, and are hearing from him and his administration today. The idea of a lost and former greatness of an identity and a global dominance that's

being threatened, not by climate change or by a war, but by a pesky internal minority. Leftists, environmentalists, climate activists, in his 26th speech, APA president Mike Summers, describe them as people who oppose progress in American greatness and will therefore be left behind. The future belongs to those who are willing to meet demand and to lead with realism.

He hammered on energy dominance, too, a theme repeated often by Trump and his administration.

We're looking to be very energy dominant, and we will be in a very short order. Unleashed energy dominance. This is unleashed the national energy dominance council. We are unleashing energy dominance.

“That taps into another key marker of fascism, the Strongman Leader, guy who's going to”

lead us back to that former glory. In the case of fossil fascism, we call it Petro-Masculinity, and the current US president is a walking example.

When I wrote about this, it was during the first Trump administration, and what I wanted

“to do was understand this connection and far-right movements between misogyny anti-feminist”

politics, anti-queer politics, and this support for fossil fuel and climate denial. I still tend to be talked about separately, as if they are coincidentally inhabiting the same movements. That's our story next time.

“Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoltz-Austwick.”

He also composed original music for this episode. Matt Fleming created the series artwork.

Our first amendment attorney is James Weaton.

The show was reported and written by me Amy Oesterwald. It's time to move past doom and gloom, because while the climate headlines make us feel like we're losing, we met the people winning, and they just might change how you see your role in this fight. I'm Charles Lloyd, and this is a fighting chance, available wherever you get your podcasts.

This isn't I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.