The Rhetoric of Oil in the Twenty-First Century

Government, Corporate, and Activist Discourses

Heather Graves, David Edward Beard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351052122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines mass communication and civic participation in the age of oil, analyzing the rhetorical and discursive ways that governments and corporations shape public opinion and public policy and activists attempt to reframe public debates to resist corporate framing.

In the twenty-first century, oil has become a subject of civic deliberation. Environmental concerns have intensified, questions of indigenous rights have arisen, and private and public investment in energy companies has become open to deliberation. International contributors use local events as a starting point to explore larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. This interdisciplinary collection synthesizes work in the energy humanities, rhetorical studies and environmental studies to analyze the global discourse of oil from the start of the twentieth century into the era of transnational corporations of the 21st century.

This book will be a vital text for scholars in communication studies, the energy humanities and in environmental studies. Case studies are framed accessibly, and the theoretical lenses are accessible across disciplines, making it ideal for a post-graduate and advanced undergraduate audience in these fields.

1 Introduction

Rhetoric in the Age of Oil: Energy Humanities and the Discourses of the Petrochemical Industry

Heather Graves and David Beard

A double-trailer oil tanker waits to turn across the Yellowhead Highway in front of me to go north to Josephburg, Alberta. Experienced westbound drivers know to slow down here because that tanker is going to pull out across their path even though the oncoming traffic is doing at least 110 km/hour and there is insufficient distance for the tanker to cross the westbound lane. Sure enough, the tanker starts its turn, but I and the other drivers have already braked to 90 km: we brake further to 60 km/hour. The tanker clears the crossing, and we continue safely over the rise. As I descend the hills leading into the city, the Edmonton and Sherwood Park skylines spread out in front of me. The tall high-rises of downtown are visible from 15 kilometers away, and off to the right the refineries are marked by mechano-like structures and plumes of smoke that fill the sky. Tongues of flame surge up from towering smoke stacks that burn off by-products from the refining processes. As my car skirts the refineries on my way to the University of Alberta campus, acrid smoke fills my nose. I wonder idly whether something I’m breathing right now triggered the allergic eczema that I have developed since moving east of Sherwood Park. Massive storage tanks flank the intersections where the Yellowhead crosses the Henday. Each tank is sunk into a deep, dry moat, guarding the surrounding city against potential leaks. Eventually the air clears as I cross into Edmonton and the industrial landscape gives way to residential neighborhoods and outdoor strip malls.

Unless they live in proximity to ‘oil country,’ most citizens living in the age of oil in the twenty-first century do not recognize how the fabric of their lives is constructed in, around, and through oil. They understand that oil heats or cools their houses and runs their cars, SUVs, and flights to academic conferences or exotic vacations, but they may not realize that it also makes possible a thousand other details of contemporary life—from plastic measuring cups in the kitchen to indestructible fabrics and floor coverings in the living room to shoes and household appliances. Even those elements of our lives that are not made from oil are produced using equipment fueled directly or indirectly by oil. Industrial farming depends on diesel-fed equipment and electricity or natural-gas powered feeding and milking “systems.” Our construction industry also uses oil-based components transported by oil-fueled vehicles. Our manufacturing industries depend on oil and gas to keep their plants open and their products moving to markets around the world. In some ways, life in the twenty-first century is, at least initially, unimaginable if we remove oil from it.

What if we do remove oil from our daily lives in the twenty-first century? What will our existence look like? We only need look back about a century to acquaint ourselves with life pre-oil. Returning to life pre-twentieth century will require a new mind-set for those of us living in modern first world nations. But burning peat or wood to heat houses for those of us living in northern climates is not the answer either. We do need alternative sources to meet our contemporary energy needs. But what replaces our ubiquitous plastic-based items? Oil is a low-cost alternative to natural fibers (polyester versus cotton or wool), in household items (plastic versus wood or metal), in tools and equipment (plastics versus wood or metal), and so on. We will have to ramp up development of alternatives, e.g., cellulose-based plastics, and/or return to expensive and labor intensive materials (e.g., silk, wool).

When we exhort each other to “break our addiction to oil,” who is this “we”? Not all human beings use oil equally; many of us living in modern first world nations consume oil disproportionately. We buy the latest devices, own multiple vehicles, multiple houses, and travel the world for work and pleasure: we carve a large carbon footprint. Some of us are less affluent but live in geographical locations with extremes in climate (north towards the Arctic, in mountainous or desert areas, for example) or sparse populations: we see heating (or cooling) and gasoline as essential to our survival; we carve a smaller but still significant carbon footprint. Still others of us are inspired by media depictions of the affluent, and we direct our efforts towards obtaining some of these symbols of this life. Can we be happy to learn that while others have reveled in these luxuries their whole lives they are now off-limits to us? The exhortation to “break our addiction to oil” seems to call on all of us to reject not just the symbols but the realities of contemporary life. Can we do this? Are we ready and willing (those of us in North America, for example) to not take that vacation, to not own a car (let alone several), to move to a temperate global region that doesn’t require heating or cooling, to buy and eat only food grown locally, to own many fewer possessions, and all the other changes that removing oil from our daily lives would entail? And to do all this while others around the globe, for various reasons, do not?

When we, as a species, speak of breaking our “addiction to oil” we simplify the problem; in fact, as Gretchen Bakke concludes in this volume, we obscure elements of the problem that must be solved before we can envision human life post-oil in the twenty-first century. At the very least, we need a different metaphor that facilitates finding realistic solutions to the problems that we have, in part, created.

In calling for a new metaphor, we invoke rhetoric. Rhetoric has been and will continue to be central to discussions of oil because rhetoric is public debate—that is, debate about humanity’s appropriate course of action on a complex, contentious issue with an uncertain outcome. Rhetoric is our only means to discuss such topics to achieve even partial agreement on how to proceed. Whatever stance participants take, they engage in rhetoric to present their perspective. However, not all participants are aware that in making an argument they are using rhetoric. In fact, some of the existing research on the rhetoric of oil published by energy humanities scholars co-opts the term rhetoric without fully acknowledging what rhetoric is, as evidenced by authors who present their analysis as The Truth and label the opposing viewpoint as rhetoric. But if rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, 1984), then all participants must use rhetoric (effectively or poorly) if they advance an argument on the topic. This includes scientists who publish their findings from research. They interpret their results and present an argument that is judged valid or not. When their peers find those arguments compelling, the explanation can achieve the status of fact; however, further research may present new results that contradict that fact (Bazerman, 1994; Fahnestock, 2000; Gross, 1990, 2006; Myers, 1990; and many others). Scientists tend to be pragmatists who move forward based on their understanding of the facts but try to remain open to new research that might require rethinking their facts (Graves, 2005). On this basis, scientists are rhetoricians, yet the results of their research are often treated by nonscientists as unequivocal truth about the natural phenomenon. Admittedly, this impression is often fostered by scientific style, the point of which is to facilitate scientists in presenting their interpretations (subjective) as explanations (objective).

As noted, oil shapes popular and political discourses. It has also shaped academic discourse in the energy humanities, so much so that Jones (2016, p. 16) has branded the focus on oil “petromyopia” and called on scholars to focus on “non-oil topics” including coal, natural gas, and electricity. While the title of this book emphasizes its focus on oil, in fact, several of the authors in this volume have responded to Jones’ call to action, writing chapters that place oil within a narrative and a continuum with coal and natural gas. However, the discourse surrounding oil is by no means exhausted through the scholarship published to date. And exploration into the rhetoric of oil is relatively underdeveloped.

Many of the authors in this volume connect their scholarship on the rhetoric of oil to climate change and related environmental issues, obvious connections for this discussion. They also highlight how rhetoric contributes to such discussions by providing means to move forward in the face of uncertainty about the facts as well as the outcome of myriad possible actions (i.e., Aristotle’s deliberative rhetoric). In complex and confusing situations—for example, the contradictory positions and factual evidence advanced in mass communication about climate change—rhetoric provides ways to analyze, understand, and navigate the perhaps incommensurate discursive positions proposed. Analysis allows us to identify the writer’s underlying assumptions about the audience, the subject, and the goal. Similarly, we can detect the perspective’s primary values. In understanding the specific basis for the writer’s position, we can perceive the broader context of values into which it fits. Major disagreements—how (or if) humanity should address the problem of climate change—cannot be resolved unless discussants find common ground in shared values, assumptions about, and understandings of the problem. Once we identify others’ values, it becomes possible to create common ground. Granted, once we do understand each other’s positions, we may still disagree on a common course of action—but without understanding action becomes impossible. The authors here offer fascinating analyses of energy and climate change discourse that illustrate that this discourse is not, in fact, neutral, factual, or straightforward.

Another theme in this collection is the multimodal nature of discourse about oil. Numerous authors use visual rhetorical theory to analyze and interpret video, film, and images with text. This multimodal focus reflects trends in humanities research to move beyond text to emphasize how visual/aural components contribute in contemporary mass communication. Contemporary discourse about oil is highly visual, from the images of bitumen mining in the Canadian oil sands in advertisements by environmental activist NGOs to the petro-state sponsored ad campaign in Venezuela depicting giant oil workers manipulating works of public art; historical discourse about oil is also visual, as Ian Wereley demonstrates in his analysis of political cartoons in early twentieth-century England.

This book takes a global perspective on what it means to live in the age of oil in the twenty-first century, with contributions from scholars contributing vantage points from North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. Our contributing authors use local events as starting points for exploring larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. They highlight the assumptions underlying the positions they study to show how the arguments are constructed and how they position audience members politically, economically, or ideologically. These perspectives also help us to understand ways in which people around the globe, in fact, may share experiences despite their divergent circumstances.

This collection is organized into three large geographical sections: U.S. and European case studies, case studies in South America, and then in Canada. Section I presents a historical chapter on the transition from coal to oil in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. The second chapter documents how efforts of citizens in the United States to free themselves from “fossil fuel addiction” are hampered because such metaphors rely on the logic of oil in their imaginings about fuel alternatives in the future. The remaining chapters in this section focus on the United States.

Euro-American Case Studies

In Chapter 2, “King Coal versus Prince Petroleo: Imagining Oil, Energy, and Transition in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” Ian Wereley notes that energy humanities scholarship lacks historical analyses of oil. Drawing on the concept of “oil spectacle” (using invented stories, images, and symbols to render oil comprehensible), Wereley analyzes two political cartoons from Punch to illustrate how the characters of King Coal and Prince Petroleo serve as rhetorical tools to understand the transition from coal to oil in Britain in the early 1900s. He argues that these cartoons act as cultural mirrors that both reflect and influence the society in which they were produced, affording valuable entry points into the discourse on oil and energy transition at that time that may shed light on contemporary society’s effort to transition away from oil. He notes that oil, the proposed alternative energy source, is characterized as supporting traditional applications while also enabling entirely new technologies (aircraft and automobiles). Wereley concludes that oil discourse in Britain in that period reveals that the petrocultures of the past are alive “constantly shaping how oil is thought and talked about today.”

In Chapter 3, “Crude Thinking,” Gretchen Bakke analyzes an advertisement featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson exhorting viewers to “break our addiction” to oil in favor of solar energy. She analyzes the metaphor of “addiction” that deGrasse Tyson uses, noting that it characterizes the problem as cultural not technological: viewers lack the will to change. She argues that oil has twisted beyond all recognition the relationship between the necessary labor-time for its production and the energetic potential of the oil itself. To aid readers in reframing the future, Bakke quantifies how oil energy revolutionized the quality of human life and propelled us to, as deGrasse Tyson characterizes it, the brink of climate change disaster. She argues that he characterizes solar power as infinite, tacitly giving us license to increase our already excessive power consumption, and she emphasizes that this characterization perpetuates our imaginaries of oil: “a post fossil-fueled world . . . continues to be premised even in the imagination upon . . . thinking with the logics of oil.”

In Chapter 4, “Rhetorics of Toxicity, Racism, and Religion on the Gulf Coast: Oil and Environmental Justice in the BP Spill Documentary Films,” Juliette Lapeyrouse-Cherry analyzes three documentaries about the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, USA: The Big Fix, Vanishing Pearls, and The Great Invisible. She links energy humanities with new materialist ecocriticism, drawing on transcorporeal understandings of the body to explore how the films implicitly and explicitly foreground the impact of the spill specifically and petroleum culture in general, on human and animal bodies along the Gulf Coast. Lapeyrouse-Cherry examines how the films link animal suffering and human physical experiences of the oil spill to illuminate the concept of transcorporeality. She contends that the films’ success in conveying this concept hinges upon filmmakers’ use of imagery to depict toxic action. She then applies an environmental justice lens to the films to assess their treatments of race and religion. She argues that when all public and academic discussions of the spill ignore issues of race and religion, we can never fully understand its impact on Louisiana’s oil culture.

In Chapter 5, “When Water Meets Oil: Rupturing Rhetoric and Reality in Energy Policy and Climate Change,” Josh Wodak analyzes the presence of oil extraction in the Gulf of México to explore the potential for the act of rupturing—both physical (pipelines/drilling rigs) and symbolic (climate change science’s effect on our sense of the ‘real’)—to interrupt the climate science/energy policy impasse that he identifies between facts/values and is/ought during Barack Obama’s tenure as president. In his discussion, Wodak links the discovery and extraction of oil in the Gulf, the American Space Program, and the decommissioning of military/industrial equipment into Artificial Reefs in the Gulf to illustrate the stark contrast in Obama’s climate science and energy policy in his first and second presidential terms. Wodak examines how various ruptures challenge Obama’s contradictory energy policy that, he argues, simultaneously facilitates and decimates the marine ecosystems in the Gulf. He argues that Obama’s promotion of oil as innocuous and necessary was undermined by oil-related ‘natural’ and human-caused disasters during his presidency. Wodak then argues that repurposing booster rockets from the space program into artificial reefs in the Gulf has created the unlikely scenario of marine ecosystems relying on oil infrastructure and thus creates a responsibility to scale up rigs to reef conversion in general.

In Chapter 6, “The Flaming Faucet as Fracking’s Ideographic Synecdoche: Tracking its Emergence in the Rhetorics of Gasland and the U.S. Natural Gas Industry,” Ross Singer examines how the film, Gasland, which investigated the link between hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and contaminated groundwater in the United States, galvanized environmental activists to oppose natural gas production in the United States starting in 2010. He shows how rhetorical devices and practices explain the film’s impact, how they shaped the natural gas industry’s response, and how these practices were appropriated and used against anti-frackers. He catalogs the ways that fracking uses and potentially contaminates water to explore its discursive meaning as proposed by both activists and industry. He proposes that the initial exchange between Gasland’s director, Josh Fox, and the U.S. natural gas industry took shape through contrasting articulations of synecdochic meanings ascribed to the flaming water faucet, creating a “representational ideograph.” Singer argues that the flaming faucet became a shorthand political symbol that condensed and refuted broader ideological discourse: Gasland characterized the flaming faucet as a threat to “life,” while the industry characterized it as a threat to “science.” Singer shows how the flaming faucet became a focal point that shaped the entire conflict. He concludes that ideographic analysis can contribute productively to inquiry in environmental disputes, prompting attention to how ill-defined but widely validated terms and slogans that connect symbols to complex arguments are selected, arranged, and enacted.

Case Studies in the Global South

The second major section of this volume presents three discussions of oil culture in South America: two from Venezuela and one from Argentina. Given the political and social unrest in Venezuela, the scholars who contributed these chapters are potentially exposing themselves to considerable personal risk by commenting on and, in some cases, critiquing current and historical events in their homeland. We appreciate their courage in making these important contributions.

In Chapter 7, “The Birth of a Myth: The Latin American Modern Oil Nation,” Manuel Silva-Ferrer explores the politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Rhetoric in the Age of Oil: Energy Humanities and the Discourses of the Petrochemical Industry)
• Section 1 Euro-American Case Studies
• Section II Case Studies in the Global South
• Section III A Closer Look at the Oil Sands in Alberta
• Index