The History of Petroproduction and Consumption in the US

The centrality of petroproduction and consumption in the US has shaped the way that environmentalism developed. There's a kind of generic understanding that environmentalism as a social movement, as a kind of ethic, starts in the global north. I'm sort of situating and saying some of the ways that environmentalism starts in the US is because this is the place that the destruction of the fossil fuel industry was most visible first. We're more besieged by the destructive capacities of fossil fuels at an earlier stage because we're so dependent on them early on.