Been working on a series about this: to understand why climate science denial was effective, you have to understand how much effort & $ the industry put into instilling the idea that it's fundamental to American identity, which is inextricable from capitalism.

One of my favorite examples, this Jetsons-style 1956 film, commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, and created by legit Hollywood film folks. https://archive.org/details/Destinat1956

Oil and competition make America great! This, that @cmuffett1 shared with me, from the book Hucksters in the Classroom, is along similar lines... but with some real racism mixed in: The Mochans, about a "primitive" people who put natural resources over profits.

This comic was done by Standard Oil in the mid-70s a boom time for fossil fuel-funded curricula about economics that, of course, placed oil and capitalism at the center and aimed to ingrain in American youth the idea that profits always come before planet.

Other companies putting out econ & social studies materials at the time: Phillips Petroleum, Amoco, Florida Power & Light, Sohio, Champlin, the list goes on. A fair bit has been written about industry attempts to shape science ed. This stuff strikes me as far more dangerous

Because fast forward 40 years and what is the number-one response to every single proposal to tackle climate change: how much is it going to cost? what about the economy? That's no accident.

This Phillips Petroleum series we dug up was viewed by half of all U.S. high school students in the late 1970s. Was it the entirety of their economics education? No. Did it have an impact? Probably!

Anyhow, look for that series soon @WeAreDrilled. And BY THE WAY it's Giving Tuesday, so if you want to support more of our reporting, please do! http://Patreon.com/drilled 

And this of course follows on from S3 of the podcast, which traced the whole 100-year history of oil propaganda, the origins of the API, and the shaping of American identity and patriotism around oil. Go listen to it if you're interested in this stuff: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s3-the-mad-men-of-climate-denial/id1439735906?i=1000458727231