Climate progress, every week

👋 Hi, everybody! This week’s news (as I’m sure you know) was dominated by a historic midterm election. Some are calling Tuesday’s results a “blue tsunami,” with Democrats taking control of Congress as well as several consequential governorships. In Georgia, Democrats gained a majority on the Public Service Commission, the body that governs utility services, for the first time in 30 years. Meanwhile, Ohio communities voted to impose restrictions on data centers. And Seattle, my current home, looks likely to double its public transportation levy.   

We’ve got plenty more news for you on that front (as well as stories about glaciers and electric aviation). But for today’s main story, I’d like to talk about something other than American politics. We’re going to discuss culture instead. Specifically, the American Dream — what it means, where it comes from, and how we might be able to reimagine it. 

This post originally appeared in Grist’s weekly solutions newsletter, Looking Forward. Not on our list yet? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Time for a new American Dream

Grist / Getty Images

The American Dream has long conjured up a specific image: a comfortable single-family home with a front lawn and a white picket fence. Zoom in closer and you’ll see one or two cars in the driveway, a big gas range in the kitchen. Closets filled with nice, new clothes. Whether or not you yourself find these trappings truly desirable, that is the vision that has long been sold to us — what it looks like to have made it.

And it is a vision that runs on fossil fuels. 

Not only that, it has specifically been sold to us by fossil fuel interests, as my colleague Kate Yoder explores in her investigation: The Dream That Oil Built. 

Kate has long been interested in how climate got caught up in the culture wars, and how the “American way of life” is often held up in opposition to climate policy. “That leads really naturally into identity politics, because it’s this whole idea of how fossil fuels actually interact with our lives, whether we see them or not,” Kate said. “They’re sort of sold as the key to comfort and prosperity — and climate legislation comes along and the companies are like, ‘Oh no, you’re not gonna have heating in your home. They’re gonna take away your car. You’re not gonna eat hamburgers anymore.’”

Kate had a hunch that this didn’t happen accidentally. And two years’ worth of reporting validated that hunch, uncovering a century of efforts from oil and gas companies to marry their products to American values and aspirations. 

In some cases, that tie was made pretty blatant. In the 1940s, the Union Oil Company of California began a campaign to “sell [the] public on [the] American way of life,” as documented in the industry trade journal National Petroleum News.

That way of life centered on freedom, convenience, and abundance — values easily linked to highways, cars, modern gas appliances, and cheap goods made possible by the proliferation of plastics.

Kate’s story includes many clippings of vintage advertisements — like a sponsored film from 1956 called Destination Earth, in which a martian visits Earth and is amazed by the convenience of petroleum-powered cars. Or a 1957 campaign dubbed “From A to Z: An Alphabet of Good Things about Petroleum,” which includes this line under “M,” for Mother: “Housewife, cook, chauffeur, hostess, teacher, glamor girl — she does dozens of jobs well … who’s responsible for so many of these new time-saving products? Mother’s little helper — Oil.” 

A 1957 advertisement from Shell promises that oil will make life easier for women. Lifeblood

But ads aren’t the only tool fossil fuel companies have used to shape the culture in their favor. “I was really surprised to find that it was much more than an advertising campaign,” Kate told me. “This was sort of a grand effort to sway communities through events, luncheons, churches, schools, films.” 

Kate plans to continue digging into efforts by the gas industry to showcase their products in Hollywood films, and also how fossil fuels infiltrated our education system with industry-friendly messaging. (She also plans to compile her reporting into a book one day. “If we mention it, then it becomes more real,” she joked to me.) 

So, if the fossil fuel industry planted a dream, Inception-style, in the minds of the American public, a natural question follows: Can we un-incept ourselves? Can we replace that polluting dream with another, built on values of sustainability and collectivity instead? 

In some ways, Kate said, the American Dream is already starting to shatter. “Fossil fuels propelled the American Dream. Now they’re sort of destroying it,” she said. In a recent poll  exclusively for Grist, likely voters reported that they think climate change is making the American Dream less attainable, particularly because of the cost of living.

“This promise that each generation is going to be able to live a better life than the last — I don’t think many people are believing that right now. For various reasons, but definitely climate change is a huge one of them,” Kate said. 

Some direct replacements for fossil fuel-powered products are taking a page out of the Big Oil playbook, with consumer education campaigns or product placement in TV and movies. But what Kate says she’s not seeing is that coordinated effort to shift our cultural ideas of what it means to live well. “If you look back at these old magazines, this vision of ‘fossil fuels are part of a modern American life’ is everywhere,” Kate said. And it persists to this day. But as climate change continues to worsen, we’re in dire need of a new dream. 

“There’s appetite for climate action. People know that this is a problem,” Kate said. “It’s just about finding the ways to do it that can promise people a life that they want — because right now it’s being sold as a life that you don’t want.”

Dive deeper:

• The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream
• Fossil fuels are hiding all over your house. We built a model home to show how.
• The American Dream wasn’t built for climate change
• Exclusive: Most voters believe climate change threatens the American Dream

More from Grist

🌊 What the blue wave means for green

Tuesday’s election results could be consequential for climate policy at the national, state, and local levels. Controlling both the House and Senate will give Democrats more power to resist the Trump administration’s rollbacks, for one. We’re tracking the highlights — from Congress to state legislatures to the Texas Railroad Commission. Read more

✈️ Taking flight

An electrified future for passenger air travel is still a long way off. But electric aircraft may arrive sooner in other fields, like research and emergency services. Some counties are already conducting test runs and pilot projects using electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for paramedics. These aircraft may prove especially useful at reducing response times in rural areas. Read more

🧊 A tale of three glaciers

Glaciers are often described in the sweep of a single, global story — one that focuses on how quickly we are losing them. But in fact, each glacier’s story is different, heavily shaped by and shaping the topography, weather conditions, and culture around it. Glaciologist M Jackson shares three vignettes of glaciers she has studied, whose stories are in many ways surprising. Read more

In other news

• Some notable ballot measures this election showed voters prioritizing environmental protections (Inside Climate News) 
• Data centers undoubtedly played a big role in the midterms. 5 women share how their experiences influenced their votes. (The 19th) 
• New analysis finds that the bipartisan permitting reform bill would likely be a boon for both emissions and energy bills (Heatmap News) 
• Hawai‘i is experimenting with artificial reef structures to protect its coastline and restore corals (Mongabay) 
• In Massachusetts, cranberry bogs are becoming a new site for agrivoltaics — marrying solar and agriculture (Canary Media)

And finally, looking forward to …

… a new American Dream.   

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You’re feeling happy and a little drunk, looking at the proud faces of your family and friends crowded around your little apartment kitchen. It’s launch day for your first book: a history of “the loneliness era.” Such a strange time in your country’s history. An epidemic. 

The last third or so chronicles how society restructured itself: denser housing, walkable neighborhoods, highways turned into railways, parks, urban farms. 

Maybe you’re getting poetic, but this cozy celebration feels almost like an epilogue to you. All your loved ones here, local wine on the table, the music of your city out the window … 

— a drabble by Claire Elise Thompson

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A drabble is a 100-word piece of fiction — in this case, offering a tiny glimpse of what a clean, green, just future might look like. Want to try writing your own (and see it featured in a future newsletter)? We would love to hear from you! Please send us your visions for our climate future, in drabble form, at [email protected] 

👋 See you next week!