Why Is There Such A Male Fascination With Fossil Fuels? It’s Called Petromasculinity

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Energy, retail, transportation, food, and other corporate sectors are backing away from their original sustainability goals. For example, US automakers have announced tens of billions of dollars in losses attributable to their EV investments, but many of them had lobbied vigorously for rolling back vehicle emissions regulations. The refusal to acknowledge the human, climate, and environmental limits of production and consumption have at their core tremendous conflations of power and identity. With all these upheavals, discussions of “petromasculinity” have reemerged on the global stage.

What is Petromasculinity?

Political scientist Cara Daggett coined the term “petromasculinity” to describe links among über male identity, authoritarian yearnings, and fossil fuel power. “The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit,” she describes. “As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism, and misogyny.” Petromasculinity feeds into a swirl of nostalgia, rage, and entitlement. After these high emotions are triggered, there is a resulting call to order: restore fossil rule, patriarchal dominance, and hierarchical racial divisions.

Ultimately, fossil fuels offer a flood of wealth for the few.

Decades ago, recognizing an impending crisis in power and control with the growing acceptance of renewables, the Koch brothers orchestrated a carefully designed campaign of clean energy mythology, which morphed into Project 2025. The Right’s push for hegemony is possible if-and-only-if a fossil fuel culture flourishes. The ideology forced a testosterone-injected political identity for men that pushed for continued fossil fuel supremacy.

Petromasculinity is a way for power brokers to savor white male rule by illustrating the role of fossil fuel systems in domestic security and stability. Propping up the fossil fuel industry allows wealthy white males to hold tight to their grasp of power. They don’t care about the costs of burning fossil fuels to the greater society as long as their Big Oil elite club maintains refined lifestyles.

US culture and politics are now invested in petromasculine identities and ideals. Oil and gas wealth thrives in overwhelmingly male-dominated industries, corporations, and states where males are the perceived victims who need to be understood as they promote values of demographic violence. Powerful men at these intersections don’t want to relinquish their place at the top of the refuse hill.

Ah, So That’s What “Energy Dominance” is All About

The analysis of petromasculinity makes sense at this fragile moment in time for US democracy.

As he campaigned in 2024, Trump promised to prop up the fossil fuel industry. “We’re going to drill, baby, drill right away. Drill, baby, drill.” Trump extolled this idea to take advantage of the inexpensive gas and oil that the US sells to the world. Then, on his first day in office, Trump 2.0 barred any new construction of offshore wind projects, proposed eliminating EV incentives, and reversed former President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement. Soon the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was doomed.

The Administration’s vision of US “energy dominance” is a euphemism for solidifying fossil fuels at the top of the US energy hierarchy. In one of a series of the Trump administration’s all-or-none policies, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025 reset the energy policy playing field from clean energy innovation to a good ole boys network of petro-identities and culture.

Sustaining global petromasculine hegemony means supporting pro-fossil fuel finance, critiquing the politically correct, and propping up oil- and gas-heavy military campaigns. All one needs to do is look at the trajectory of the US/ Israel war to see that Iran’s 20% of the world’s oil was not reconcilable with geopolitical masculine personas. Fallen clean energy hero Elon Musk rationalized a subset of this worldview in his unusual interpretation of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth — to support anti-immigration policies. “The hobbits were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.”

The Right appeals far more to men than to women, argues intersectional feminist journalist Soraya Chemaly, as it validates climate denial, affirms a fossil-fuel-based identity, rejects risk and regulatory structures, and dismantles mechanisms of accountability like DEI. No longer do compromise and diplomacy win out over bombs and drone attacks. Petromasculinity rejects messy democratic negotiations — they’re associated with being feminine and frail.

Why EVs Challenge Masculine Identity

In the US, a masculine theme of identity and what a car means symbolically to the individual has been a fast equation for male identity reference. Across generations, a car has represented masculinity, intelligence, and handicraft, with a bit of knowledge and engineering thrown in as part of the package. The car as an extension of the self became integral to a mass consumerist society, so that guys who associated with car culture became concerned with speed and aesthetics, all the while reflecting an important cocktail of status and wealth.

While car culture has been traditionally perceived as masculine, EVs from their earliest emergence have been associated with femininity due to their ease of use, limited range, silence, and cleanliness. In contrast, internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs)  have been seen as an extension of male-dominated sports car racing that is competitive, dangerous, and adventurous.

Men see their self-worth tied up with traditional masculine gender performance. So it isn’t much of a leap to see that fossil fuel messaging has instilled negative male attitudes toward electric vehicles. Media — both legacy and new — emphasize male identity in place of policy pragmatism. Challenges with the transition to renewable energy, for example, are reconceptualized as into symbolic personal injuries.

As a result, and since women comprise half of all US drivers, doesn’t it make sense to design more EVs to appeal to women? Nope. It’s clear — macho EV design fails the Bechtel test.

They’re Drinking the Kool-Aid: Males have High Carbon Footprints

A May 2025 study from the London School of Economics and Political Science reveals that women in France emit 26% less carbon than men with their diet and transport usage. What difference does it make?

Significantly, if all adult men adopted the same carbon intensity of food consumption as adult women, without affecting women’s consumption, food carbon footprints would decrease by 1.9 MtCO2e and transport carbon footprints by 11.5 MtCO2e in France.

It’s clear that mitigating climate change requires us to shift our consumption patterns, and it’s time to do some self-reflection about our carbon footprints in high-emission sectors like diet and methods of getting to and from our workplaces and leisure activities. Emissions from other goods and services would need to be at least 80% lower for men to fully cancel out the gender gap in food and transport emissions.

Let’s look at men as meat eaters. Researchers warn that eating meat isn’t just a dietary preference; it is wrapped up with gender. Manifestations of masculinity continue to dominate the male body and are often symbolized by the consumption of meat as a symbol of virility. Many influencers amplify the message that being low in testosterone is synonymous with low status, weakness, and sexual inadequacy.

In the pursuit of more healthy masculinity goals, an increasing number of people in universities, think tanks, NGOs, and citizen initiatives have started to transform physical activity and sport practices into eco-friendly and zero-carbon human activities. The goal is to use the platforms they have to defend against climate change through sport, which has traditionally been a male-oriented activity.

Resources

“Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire.” Cara Daggett. Millennium: Journal of International Studies. June 20, 2018.

“Petromasculinity: One more reason the right hates progressive women, especially Gen Z.” Soraya Chemaly. Substack. March 2, 2026.

“The testosterone moment is here. And men may never look the same.” Azeen Ghorayshi. The New York Times. May 12, 2026.

“Women’s food and transport carbon footprint 26% lower than men’s in France, study finds.” Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. May 14, 2025.