Drilling to the Heart of America in 21st Century National Politics
By Seelah Kittelstrom
“Drill, baby, drill!” has become a ubiquitous rhetoric for America’s conservative bloc ever since Michael Steele's 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) speech campaigning for presidential candidate John McCain and his vice presidential candidate Sara Palin. At the time, this slogan signified a departure from reliance on foreign energy sources and a re-investment in domestic oil. However, even then, a reliance on traditional energy sources seemed discordant with the national political and environmental climate, with Al Gore having won the popular vote in the 2000 election on a climate-friendly platform and Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans in 2005. Today, “drill, baby, drill!” has been re-purposed by President Donald Trump, who famously pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords upon taking office in 2017, and again in 2025. With an even higher incidence of domestic national disasters today, an outside observer can’t help but wonder how so many Americans support the entrenchment of fracking and oil drilling in American territory, especially with its disastrous effects on biodiversity so well-documented, and so many of their fellow Americans opposing it. Though broad support for fossil fuels seems paradoxical, it begins to make more sense as part of an engineered cultural division when we examine the way that the industry markets traditional energy sources as part of the American “way of life,” using “drill, baby, drill!” as a command to maintain the status quo, deliberately misinforming Americans in order to keep profits up.
In order to begin to understand this, let us delve into the historical context of Steele’s 2008 RNC speech. For reference, Al Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 general presidential election by 53,7179 votes, campaigning on a platform of green renewal and ecological reform (The American Presidency Project). Though he did not ultimately ascend to the oval office, Gore’s national support reflects broad American concern for pressing climate issues. However, this concern belies a strong bloc of lobbyists with vested interest in maintaining a reliance on gas as a fuel source for cars and other industrial machines. In his RNC speech, Michael Steele asks the audience, “Do you want to put your country first?" In front of a crowd full of people with views aligned to his, the only possible answer was yes. The only way to fulfill this, said Steele, was to “reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil and promote oil and gas production at home.” This rhetoric draws a straight line between patriotism—a key American value, but specifically emphasized by the Republican party—and fossil fuel combustion. Steele framed the issue as an us-vs-them dynamic that “is about knowing who the enemy is and what to do about them.” This mentality entrenches polarization, leading to a sense of scarcity and provoking fight-or-flight so that the electorate opts for what they consider the safer route—how “it has always been done,” which in this case means traditional energy sources. By framing the energy debate not as a collective action problem that requires coordination, but as a zero-sum competition with winners and losers, Steele promoted investment in traditional domestic energy as a patriotic choice in a world of finite energy resources.
One way of framing how climate solutions become divided within a nation is with the concept of climate imaginaries, which are a way that scholars categorize contemporary responses to climate change into ideological groups. In “Contested imaginaries and the evolving cultural political economy of climate change,” David L. Levy and André Spicer frame the pro-fossil fuel rhetoric within this concept of climate imaginaries, which they define as “shared socio-semiotic systems that structure a field around a set of shared understandings of the climate” (Levy and Spicer 659). In practice, climate imaginaries inform “the ways in which institutions and economic activity are organized and structured, and the ways people think they ought to be organized and structured” (660). Levy and Spicer delineate four broad climate imaginaries: ‘fossil fuels forever,’ ‘climate apocalypse,’ ‘sustainable lifestyles,’ and ‘techno-market.’ They would identify “drill, baby, drill!” as a slogan of the ‘fossil fuels forever’ climate imaginary, which is the belief that fossil fuels are plentiful and bring prosperity, and that any restriction on their use would bring widespread economic hardship. As we will see, Micheal Steele’s RNC speech set the precedent for a weaponization of this fear of economic hardship to create a division within American culture that legitimizes fossil fuel use.
In line with Michael Steele’s RNC rhetoric, the fossil fuel industry casts restricting carbon emissions as a zero-sum game which would “cause severe economic dislocation,” (663). Levy and Spicer note that in order to impress this message on the public, big oil companies have weaponized “the ideological apparatus of the tabloid press, talk radio and Fox News [to weave] environmentalism and climate change into a populist cultural politics that fuses anti-government, anti-tax sentiment with distrust of scientific elites and a reassertion of traditional masculinity” (671). The American gas industry appeals to the pathos and cultural identity of voters, not to their reason. For example, Levy and Spicer emphasize how wealthy donors like the Koch brothers funded Superbowl ads for car brands, “gendering environmental concerns by mocking submissiveness to women and the intrusiveness of the ‘green police’ nanny-state” (671). America’s powerful conservatives targeted football fans with messaging that “codes” green energy with weakness and femininity, politicizing the energy debate to appeal to voters. By creating this connection, elites leave the actual science behind climatology out of the equation altogether, appealing to emotional, rather than rational, responses from their base. As well as demonizing sustainable energy, Levy and Spicer note that the industry also began to link carbon emissions with positive parts of conservative culture, like masculinity, freedom, and self-determination (671). This reveals that conservatives were not swayed by the opinions of their fellow Americans because they began to consider these beliefs to be those of the “enemy,” as Steele’s speech and in strategic advertising conditioned them to. This allowed the ‘fossil fuels forever’ imaginary to maintain legitimacy, because the debate strayed from scientific policy toward a culture war.
This idea of partisan rather than policy considerations on the part of voters ties back into the “drill, baby, drill!” rhetoric itself. First of all, the phrase itself is delivered as a precise, powerful command, which asserts a sentiment of dominance and masculinity popular with the American working class most vulnerable to fears of economic hardship. As a command marked by an exclamation point, the phrase mobilizes this very same working class, with the idea that working together, Americans will come to have dominion over the American landscape to extract its resources. Not only that, but the word “drill” itself takes on a dual meaning, not just referring to drilling for oil but evoking images of a military drill sergeant. This casts the conquest for oil as a sort of war, in which the opponent is the “green police nanny state” referred to by Levy and Spicer. In this way, the enemy becomes no longer simply external—foreign countries competing for oil contracts—but internal, with different ways of life competing for limited resources. In the words of Michael Steele in his 2008 speech, “Do you want to put your country first? Then let’s make decisions about our security based on what keeps us safe, not what is politically correct.” In his telling, “politically correct” people and decisions are ruining the country, which he equates with alternative energy solutions. He creates a scarcity mindset in his listeners and a sense of danger by emphasizing the importance of security. This applies to the ‘fossil fuels forever’ imaginary because it rests on a fundamental denial of the harm wrought by fossil fuel combustion. In order for the “drill, baby, drill!” slogan to have authority, it must unify the masses around an embrace of “traditional” American values: strength, domination on the world stage, and “America first” security measures, which includes drilling for fossil fuels.
However, with global warming data so available and increasingly legitimized, not everyone believes that it is a hoax, so how does the slogan “work” on those that acknowledge the negative effects of drilling? Danielle Celermajer suggests that accepting that fossil fuels destroy of the environment qualities can co-exist continuing to use them. In her piece, she outlines three other climate imaginaries, and dismisses them all as ineffective at producing the change necessary to save the climate. Instead, Celermajer proposes ‘grounded imaginaries’: bottom-up solutions to climate change that involve local communities. She adopts the term “climate imaginary” from Levy and Spicer, but she would identify “drill, baby, drill!” not as a manifestation of the ‘fossil fuels forever’ imaginary, instead using her own term, which she calls ‘apocalypse and doom.’ She outlines the ‘apocalypse and doom’ imaginary as holding that “even if there existed a time when humans could have made a difference, then that time has passed” (Celermajer 6), and now there is no chance of fixing the climate crisis. Crucially, Celermajer notes the prevalence of the idea that “the existing systems are on an unstoppable trajectory to disaster and promoted by those with an interest in ensuring that they are not stopped” (6). The 2008 “drill, baby drill!” speech does not explicitly state that there is no chance of fixing the climate crisis, but the elites in the room likely knew it was a real phenomenon, suggests Celermajer. Rather, they were intent on keeping the public uninformed so that they could continue to extract their labor for profit.
Both Levy and Spicer and Celermajer note that there are greater powers intent on enforcing the status quo, but they identify different ways of getting there. Specifically, Celermajer observes that the ‘apocalypse or doom’ imaginary has led to a proliferation of popular media depicting an inevitable “end of the world,” in which just one or two characters survive “in the remnants of a familiar US metropolis.” In this way, notes Celermajer, “they signal that even as many or most worlds come to an end, a seed of the world that matters – the hyper-modern consumerist West – is salvaged” (7). This “hyper-modern consumerist West” is the very same one engineered by the Koch brothers and similar ultra-wealthy archetypes evoked by Levy and Spicer. So while Levy and Spicer outline the ways in which the conservative bloc popularizes fossil fuel use through appeals to the mass public’s personal identities, Celermajer observes how the ruling class can engender apathy in the public by instilling a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of the crisis. However, both tactics achieve the same end of keeping the working class in disempowered positions of performing labor for the benefit of the ruling class, and the effect is so powerful that we continue to see the popularity of “drill, baby, drill!” today.
In 2025, Donald Trump revived the phrase to promote “a gigantic natural gas pipeline in Alaska, among the largest in the world,” in a March 2025 address to Congress (PBS Newshour 2025). He boasted that “Japan, South Korea, and other nations want to be our partner with investments of trillions of dollars each,” which presents a striking contrast to Steele’s RNC speech. In 2008, the Republican party promoted domestic oil drilling as a way of getting ahead of competing countries, but in 2025, Trump framed it as an opportunity to work together with them. However, the throughline still stands that those in power believe that “we have more liquid gold under our feet than any nation on earth” (PBS Newshour 2025), which is the true motivator for these drilling projects. The disparity in justification for domestic drilling projects, 17 years apart, reveals that though the rhetoric may change, the goal of preserving an oil-drilling status quo remains the same. In Celermajer’s solution to this stagnation in climate policy, she suggests “grounded imaginaries[…to…]connect with people’s everyday lives and provide living rebuttals to the accusations of elitism that have been deployed to undermine alternatives to fossil fuelled systems” (8). She notes that working-class communities, weaponized as tools for the top 1%, are actually the “principal site for, and driver of, change[, which] facilitates horizontal (or rhizomic) dissemination and authentically democratic processes of transformation” (8). This speaks to the stakes of the mass public’s imagination: when we fall victim to strategic marketing, we are helpless, but when we recognize their collective power, Celermajer suggests that we will be the ones to find a solution, not the ruling class.
This project sought to define and categorize the acceptance and embrace of fossil fuels by the American public, and to make sense of how this continues to be a feasible position so many decades after the science has been publicly available. With Donald Trump still in office and currently implementing his “drill, baby, drill!” plan, it has pressing and acute implications for the contemporary moment. As long as he continues to benefit from broad support, he will be able to forge ahead with his revival of traditional power plants and drilling. On a historical level, the investigation of rhetoric allows us to draw connections and map out authoritarian leadership. Looking back on the late 2010s though the 2020s, we may consider this moment a remarkable feat of propaganda on multiple channels. Americans are left with two options: either believe that climate change is a hoax, or believe that it’s too late to save ourselves. Regardless of which they choose, failing to envision a third future injects a deadly dose of inertia in the only people equipped to stop climate change: the mass public.
Seelah Kittelstrom is a student at Columbia University studying Political Science and History.
Works Cited
Celermaijer, Danielle. “Grounded Imaginaries.” Griffith Review Edition 73, July 2021, https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/grounded-imaginaries/#_edn33
Levy, David L., and Andre Spicer. “Contested Imaginaries and the Cultural Political Economy of Climate Change.” Organization 205(5), 2013, pp. 659-678.
“Michael Steele 2008 Convention Speech” C-SPAN, 3 September 2008,
The American Presidency Project. 2000. University of California, Santa Barbara, 7 November, 2000, Santa Barbara, California.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2000.
"WATCH: Trump revives ‘Drill, baby, drill.’" PBS Newshour, PBS, 4 March 2025,
