There's an opinion column in the guardian this morning, describing a mindset that they're calling "petro-masculinity". I don't disagree with the general characterization. One point put forward as an attempt to provide some context as to why people might end up in the mindset makes me wonder though:
Imagine that digging coal is something that you and your forefathers did for generations, and it paid the rent and felt manly and heroic (in spite of its harms and dangers). And then some environmental do-gooder in a Prius comes along, saying you shouldn’t do that any more. But they’re not offering you a viable alternative livelihood, certainly not one with dignity and that mysterious aura of “manliness” that digging coal had. Who wouldn’t be defensive?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/22/masculinity-gender-climate-crisis
We've all seen this argument before. "You and your forefathers". For the specific example given here, coal mining, I don't see how it can still hold. Coal mining used to huge. Tag on associated industries and it was even huger. It's not nothing, but I don't see that it's anywhere near as big as it used to be. Forefathers maybe, but as best I can see, the number of pro-oil/coal/etc vastly outnumbers the actual people still of working age who used to dig coal. Even in the communities devastated by the loss of jobs as coal/oil/etc becomes less of a thing, how many people want the coal to come back? Sure they'd like jobs to come back, but do they really want the coal jobs specifically to come back? I'm not convinced.
The other more general take is less about coal mining. It could be read as talking about those people who bonded with their forefathers over cars, motors and other fossil fuel reliant activities (don't ask, nothing springs to mind right now). Maybe I've got an outlier sample, but the really into cars people I know, still work on cars. Old cars now, sure, but they still do it. And it doesn't really feel that it's about manliness, it's more about the fact that they really like cars.
I'm one of those people who used to know a little bit about cars. I futzed around in the shed with Dad, pulled the engine out of my old Toyota Corolla, replaced a blown head gasket and got it back together (and running). New cars, that you need to plug a computer into, the hybrids and so forth, I find it sad that I can't fix basic things anymore, but if I had the time and inclination to work on cars, I'd probably have an old one in a shed that I'd work on once a month or so with the intent of having it running sometime in the next 6 years. It feels like there's far fewer people around who like working on cars though. Maybe there's a bunch of people who used to do it, and can't anymore due to any number of reasons, but is that number really that big when compared to the general mass of humanity?
I think in the end, that I'm not suggesting that the people that are described by that paragraph from the guardian column don't exist. I'm not convinced that they constitute any significant proportion of the petro-masculinity types they're attempting to describe, let alone the population as a whole.