"It turns out President Biden may be the most left-wing president we've ever seen," Kudlow said. "His actions on spending and taxing and regulating, on immigration and fossil fuels and other cultural issues... he may be the most left-wing." [...]

What, then, explains the political power of fossil fuels? Hefty political donations and the long-term need for some supply of the fuels, albeit paired with some kind of technology to capture emissions, only tell part of the story. The industry, especially in the U.S., also serves as an avatar for a certain kind of cultural worldview, one that resonates with tough-guy masculinity and patriarchal families.

In 2011, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that white males were overrepresented among people who denied the reality of climate change. Researchers attributed the phenomenon to a desire to "protect their cultural identity."

"Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it," the study's authors wrote. "Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control."

In 2014, researchers in Sweden found that climate denial was "intertwined with a masculinity of industrial modernity that is on decline." Those who defended the industries destabilizing the planet were trying "to save an industrial society" that men like them had built and dominated, argued the researchers, whose work appeared in Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies.

In 2018, Virginia Tech political scientist Cara Daggett gave the concept a name: petro-masculinity.

"The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit," Daggett wrote in the international studies journal Millennium. "Fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics."