The Recreational Vehicle and Motor Home Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana, is not generally known as a hotbed of political unrest. Set on a flat stretch of highway on the outskirts of town, it serves mostly tourists, teaching visitors about the pioneers of the RV industry. Late in the summer of 2009, however, roughly 150 people gathered at the Hall to express vehement opposition to the American Clean Energy and Security Act, pending legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Hosted by an upstart group known as Energy Citizens, the meeting featured speakers decrying the ostensible damage climate legislation might do to the town. A local RV salesperson spoke passionately against the bill; the vice president of Elkhart’s Chamber of Commerce delivered the keynote address. For one evening, a roadside attraction became the site for political organizing around federal environmental policy.

Energy Citizens hosted about twenty similar rallies across the United States in 2009, some in small cities like Elkhart, others in major urban centers like Houston or Atlanta. These gatherings, it turned out, were merely the opening salvos in a lasting campaign. Since that time Energy Citizens has signed up members in every congressional district in the nation; their staff have run booths at parades, state fairs, NASCAR races, and industry conferences; they have catered lunches and given away T-shirts; and they have mobilized their members to express pro-industry sentiment to politicians at all levels of government. They claim a membership of 1.6 million and have advocated on dozens of infrastructure projects and laws.

Outwardly, Energy Citizens blends easily with the thousands of advocacy organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that make up our near-cacophonous public sphere. What sets Energy Citizens apart from traditional forms of grassroots political expression is that the group operates entirely at the behest of fossil fuel companies. Energy Citizens is paid for and run by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest oil and gas trade organization in the United States. The API’s corporate members number in the hundreds, including recognizable firms such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell, with the Institute acting as the vanguard of companies’ collective political interests. Energy Citizens attracts support from people across the nation, but its work is dictated by decidedly corporate aims.

Energy Citizens is hardly peculiar in this regard. Companies across industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and soft drinks now commonly found citizen advocacy groups to fight political battles. Proclivities towards people-centered advocacy have, in fact, been etched into the structure of the public relations industry itself, as the once obscure subfield of grassroots mobilization has become a routinized and well-funded means by which communications professionals pursue their clients’ political agendas (Walker Reference Walker2014). Energy Citizens typifies an increasingly common form of political organization in which companies, working in conjunction with public relations firms, trade groups, and other associates, attempt to mobilize citizens as allies.

While this style of advocacy has become conventional for all sorts of businesses, few have adopted it with the zeal of U.S. and Canadian oil firms. Facing crises of legitimacy due to climate change, oil spills, controversial pipelines, and economy-rattling price shocks, fossil fuel companies have spent the past three decades seeking supporters who might put a human face on their industry. The results have changed the terrain of energy politics. Oil firms have funded dozens of advocacy organizations in the mold of Energy Citizens to vie for both particular infrastructure projects and the moral legitimacy of the industry writ large. With names like Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development, Fed Up at the Pump, or Canada’s Energy Citizens, their appellations hint at a civic ethos and grassroots participation; yet these organizations are founded, run, or funded by oil industry players.

This is a book about these groups and the day-to-day ways they do politics. Taking the U.S. and Canadian oil industries as a purview, I explain how these organizations form, why people join, and how these alliances intervene in public debates about the future of energy.

My central contention is that the political relationship between oil companies and supportive publics has fundamentally changed since the 1990s. Historically, the oil industry has tended to avoid citizen mobilization, preferring to rely on direct lobbying, advertising, and traditional public relations. For over a century after the first commercial oil wells were dug in Canada and the U.S. in the late 1850s, the sector was more apt to treat citizens as opponents to be pacified than as a political resource. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the face of climate change activism and local opposition to energy infrastructure, that the oil sector began to routinely create citizen advocacy groups to promote pro-industry positions. These organizations were often deceitful, however, hiding the involvement of corporate sponsors or falsifying grassroots support (Beder Reference Beder1997). Such groups were typically short lived, emerging to fight single legislative battles and disbanding immediately once the political dust had settled.

Since the late 2000s industry strategies have changed. Augmenting secretive, short-term campaigns, oil sector actors have begun to craft more steadfast organizations. Businesses now conduct grassroots outreach even in relatively placid political times, building what I call a “citizen reserve” – a constantly maintained roster of advocates willing to back industry positions when new political battles arise. The largest industry groups use vast data collections to predict likely supporters and target outreach efforts. In this way, the sector steels itself for the inevitable yet unpredictable opposition it will face. Oil firms’ outreach today is apt to take the form of visible, far reaching, and long-term campaigns that openly tout partnership between companies and citizens.

Critiques of corporate power generally, and of the machinations of the oil industry specifically, have not kept pace with this shift. A chorus of voices, hailing from all corners of the political map, continue to consider corporately backed citizen politicking mainly as a form of fraud that relies on hidden sponsors. These critiques are so common they have their own short-hand vocabulary. The term “astroturf organization,” for instance, refers to the once common brand of synthetic turf for sports fields, and is used to condemn groups as bogus imitations of real grassroots organizing. The phrase “front group” is wielded with similar sting to insinuate that people participating in a pro-industry campaign are merely an edifice behind which the organization’s real interests lurk. These are old terms, but they have become notably more common in our news and media diets since the 2000s (Scott & Kang Reference Scott and Kang2024). Each metaphor implies that corporate-backed campaigns are inherently shams, just industry spin mimicking more genuine forms of civic political expression.

Critiques like these tap into vital political impulses. Fraudulent corporate campaigns do indeed dot our media environment, using online bots, fake social media profiles, or rosters of entirely imagined supporters to feign backing for their causes.Footnote ¹ Such tactics often spread untruths and propaganda. By calling out these groups we oppose their deceptions and, more significantly, articulate a collective right to public discourse free from corporate disinformation. That is a claim that ought to be staked with vigor. However, to the degree that critiques assume corporate campaigns take place only in the shadows, with made-up supporters or hidden cash flows, they are out of step with a rapidly changing reality. Today many industry actors are as likely to flaunt their support for citizen politicking as conceal it.

Energy Citizens, the campaign mentioned at the start of this chapter, is an instructive case. The organization has been called out as a front group or astroturf organization with regularity by journalists (Bulowski Reference Bulowski2022; Tabuchi Reference Tabuchi2021), activists (Carter & Costello Reference Carter and Costello2019; Climate Investigations Center 2017; Davies Reference Davies2011), politicians (Nilsen et al. Reference Nilsen, Sangal, Fritz, Wagner and Vogt2021), and academics (Beder Reference Beder, Huang and Huang2014; Dunlap & McCright Reference Dunlap, McCright, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011). In the earliest days of the Energy Citizens campaign, these were unquestionably fair accusations. Energy Citizens did not identify the API as its creator when it arrived on the scene in 2009. Instead, Energy Citizens listed the API as one of many sponsors, failing to disclose the Institute’s full control of the campaign. Energy Citizens changed its approach rapidly, however. By July of 2010, their website stated unambiguously that “Energy Citizens is supported by the American Petroleum Institute” on a banner splashed across their homepage. By 2018, their announcement had become more exact, noting that Energy Citizens is “Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.” Today those visiting the Energy Citizens site can click directly on the API’s logo to be taken to the sponsor’s homepage. Across time we have seen Energy Citizens move from a vague admission of its industry funding towards explicit recognition of their corporate backers.

Energy Citizens did not have an organization-wide ethical awakening that spurred these changes. Instead, the professional communicators running Energy Citizens, alongside those at the helms of many similar groups, began to find strategic merit in openness. It helped them avoid embarrassing exposés and connect more freely with potential supporters. Above all else, as the rest of this book will show, transparency helped the API by ideologically reframing their relationship with citizens. Rather than treating expenditures on political outreach as a tawdry secret, oil sector actors now often portray themselves as champions of citizen speech, paying out of pocket to amplify the voices of unionized pipefitters, local business leaders, and others who want to commend the oil industry’s positive impacts. Put simply, oil corporations’ evolution towards a more open form of citizen mobilization has not been a grudging capitulation to critics. It has instead been a means of underscoring the industry’s core political message: “We are partners with the public. Our interests are one and the same.” While opponents of corporate politicking clamor for greater financial transparency from companies, firms themselves have grown inclined to see transparency as a promotional tool.

Oil corporations are not only trying to score quick legislative wins when they mobilize citizen support. They are also trying to normalize political cooperation with publics, framing these efforts as a licit and even celebrated form of democratic participation. As one organizer of a pro-oil group in the U.S. told me, after naming the corporate sponsors of his campaign:

By announcing their funders pro-oil campaigns strive to include company-led mobilization in the vaunted tradition of grassroots political engagement.

Such efforts are about more than abstract ideology. They have pragmatic political benefits. By partnering with citizens, oil firms gain access to new sites in which energy regulation takes place. Recent decades have seen public participation become an increasing routine feature of energy governance in Canada and the United States (Dorcey & McDaniels Reference Dorcey, McDaniels and Parson2001; Richardson & Razzaque Reference Richardson, Razzaque, Richardson and Wood2006). Townhall meetings, public comment periods, and participatory environmental impact assessments are now standard procedure when new energy infrastructure is proposed. These arenas are typically designed to allow everyday people a voice, so their concerns will not be drowned out by special interests. By mobilizing citizens, oil firms earn a means to influence these spaces. Companies can rally scores of supporters to flood government hearings; more to the point, they can ensure that the spokesperson of a “grassroots” pro-oil group is a trained lobbyist or public relations professional, allowing these hired guns to opine on behalf of citizens. The growth of pro-oil mobilization means that when governments try to listen to their constituents, the voice of the people is often articulated through paid industry representatives.Footnote ²

To be clear, the new has not supplanted the old in today’s corporate organizing. Furtive campaigns exist in tandem with those freely naming their sponsors. Some apparent groundswells of citizen support are nothing more than the fly-by-night ruses of public relations professionals, while other pro-oil groups attract dedicated, long-term membership. It is also common for transparency and opacity to mingle in a single campaign. As Chapter 3 will show, organizations that nominally reveal their sponsors often bury this information in tiny print or long lists, making it hard to find. Identifying the funders of pro-oil groups, even those who technically reveal their backers, can take some digging. There is a wide spectrum of transparency practices among pro-oil campaigns.

The problem is that our scholarly research and public conversations tend not to capture this breadth. This is evident in our language. Our critical lexicon has pithy terms like front group or astroturf organization for opaque corporate politicking but few settled words for emerging models of business-led advocacy that are more open. If such omissions were only semantic, they wouldn’t matter. However, I argue throughout this book that our inability to describe the varied styles of today’s corporate organizing is symptomatic of deeper misapprehensions. We have, by and large, failed to account for the ways in which corporate grassroots politicking has become more conspicuous; we have understudied the causes of this shift; and by presuming that the members of front groups are paid shills, fabricated supporters, or naïve dupes, we have yet to sufficiently explain how business-led advocacy organizations earn the backing of publics.

Understanding how companies mobilize citizen support is important for our understanding of politics per se. Grasping how oil companies do this work, however, entails stakes that are particularly high and clear. There is no contemporary issue more pressing than climate change and there are no actors more central to this issue than fossil fuel corporations. They have historically been key agents of climate denial, doubt, and delay. Their advocacy also orbits issues of Indigenous sovereignty, tax policy, habitat preservation, clean water protection, employment, and other topics that might matter a great deal to a great number of people. Getting a full picture of the political strategizing of oil companies is a prerequisite for thinking through these territories of political life.

This task demands a close look at the incentives, tactics, ideologies, and people that drive oil companies’ political mobilization. It is also important, however, to step back and evaluate the tools we have inherited for this work. Upon inspection, we will find that the vocabulary we often use to describe corporatized grassroots campaigns tends to smuggle assumptions into our thinking. Before diving into the world of pro-oil campaigns in the chapters to come, it is worth reflecting on the relationship between oil companies and everyday people, laying groundwork for exploring how corporations mobilize public support.

More than Front Groups

The pro-oil organizations that populate this book are remarkably diverse. As their names suggest, groups like Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy, BC Voices for LNG, the Consumer Energy Alliance, Hispanics in Energy, Oil Respect, and Californians Against Higher Oil Taxes operate in different places, tackle different issues, and target different sorts of members. Yet they share at least one thing in common: They have all, at one time or another, been called out by opponents as a “front group” or “astroturf organization.” These are fiery words that make a tacit claim the group under review is, in all ways that matter, an extension of a corporation. These terms perform boundary work, policing a line between authentic grassroots politics and the instrumentalized realm of corporate spin.

The urge to separate citizens from companies is a sensible one. Despite laws in both Canada and the United States imbuing corporations with many of the rights of personhood, businesses are self-evidently not people.Footnote ³ While there seem to be ways in which companies “speak” or have a “voice” in public politics (Marchand Reference Marchand1998; Miller Reference Miller1999) – and a potentially influential one at that – a long tradition of scholarship has emphasized the ways companies are decidedly un-personlike as communicators. The rationales researchers offer to back up this claim tend to focus on either the outsized power of corporations or their inability to act as good faith participants in collective decision making.

The former argument has been made most vigorously in academic studies of contentious politics, which have traditionally approached corporate communication as messaging from above and social movements as uprisings from below. Since at least as early as Gamson’s (Reference Gamson1975) influential book The Strategy of Social Protest, scholars have drawn a line between “members,” those participants in an episode of contention with “routine access to decisions that affect them,” and challengers, those lacking such access (p. 140). Early research in the fledgling sociological sub-field of social movement studies examined how dispossessed peoples might seize political opportunities (McAdam Reference McAdam1982), navigate institutional structures (Piven & Cloward Reference Piven and Cloward1977), or use framing processes (Snow et al. Reference Snow, Rochford, Worden and Benford1986; Snow & Benford Reference Snow and Benford1988) to ensure their grievances were addressed. While emphasizing different variables, these now canonical analyses share a basic framework in which oppressed peoples confront entrenched elites. Since large corporations in Canada and the United States have proven capable of leveraging their economic power for political influence, theorists have tended to think of comparisons between citizen and corporate speech as a study in contrasts.

Scholars have also noted that while companies can change their rhetorical tactics, they are stubbornly fixed in their ultimate goals. Businesses set out to earn a profit, which they privilege over other social or ethical ends. This notion is given an influential declaration in Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere. Habermas suggests that since corporations are motivated by profit rather than by a broader sense of social good – they are, by law and norms, incapable of reformulating the ends they pursue – they inherently instrumentalize public discussion. His historical retelling of the bourgeois public sphere is, in part, a narrative of corporate capture, with companies and other elites manipulating public discourse to pursue their own self-interested economic aims (Habermas Reference Habermas1991, Reference Habermas1996). While many have questioned both the historical precision and overall wisdom of Habermas’s ideas (Fraser Reference Fraser1990; Squires Reference Squires2002; Wahl-Jorgensen Reference Wahl-Jorgensen2019) most have done so while accepting his dichotomy between authentic citizen speech and the intractable, profit-driven persuasion of companies.

Those who use terms like front group or astroturf fall in lockstep with this normative tradition, enforcing a divide between company and citizen expression. In the name of protecting public discourse from corporate intrusion, critics ask us to think of grassroots politics as, at least ideally, a safe haven from and counter to the power of big business. Problems arise, however, when these ideas confront real-world politics. Historically speaking, many citizens’ movements have supported the interests of wealthy people or powerful corporations (Martin Reference Martin2013). Government or civic forums for citizen political participation routinely legitimate status quo distributions of power and entrench inequalities (Lee Reference Lee2015; Lee, McQuarrie, & Walker Reference Lee, McQuarrie and Walker2015). In practice, citizens often use their voices to support businesses and elites, not oppose them. Terms like front group and astroturf fail to make room for this complexity, instead labeling actors as either authentically grassroots or inauthentically corporatized. Actual political battles are rarely so neat.

These terms also have limited analytical heft because their meanings are not settled. There is little agreement on how one might conclusively tell a front group from an authentic grassroots organization. This is true even among scholars, whose definitions of the phrases differ and conflict (for a full discussion, see Appendix A). As Walker (Reference Walker2010, p. 47) notes, terms like front group are best thought of as a Rorschach test of sorts: People see their opponents as front groups and their political fellow travelers as paragons of grassroots authenticity. This does not mean we need to throw these terms away. They have a time and place. Throughout this book I will use the term front group occasionally, referring to organizations who hide their corporate sponsorship. However, the pages to come are littered with groups who partially or wholly announce their industry backers. This diversity hints that we might need other, more precise ways to talk about how corporations mobilize support. In general, terms like front group are sharp rhetorical weapons but rather dull analytical tools.

Another limitation of concepts like front groups and astroturf is that they give short shrift to human agency. The ideas treat campaign joiners as, at best, hapless pawns, at worst as nonexistent frauds. In either case, everyday people are presumed to be an inert shield behind which corporate interests lurk. This is sometimes surely the case. However, dismissing participants as fakes fails to capture how today’s industry-backed campaigns operate (Massie & Jackson Reference Massie and Jackson2020). In reality, there is a continuum of practice between astroturf and populist politics (Wear Reference Wear2014). Gunster et al. (Reference Gunster, Neubauer, Bermingham, Massie and Carroll2021, p. 198) put it well, reminding us that “simply dismissing all industry-driven populist initiatives as ‘astroturf’ underestimates the extent to which extractive populism genuinely resonates with (and amplifies) selective aspects of the world views and experiences of particular communities, especially those with significant ties to extractive industries.” We ignore the very real political attachments people have to oil companies at our own risk.

This lesson was underscored for me in the very early stages of my research for this book, when I began talking with people who had recently joined pro-oil advocacy groups. They often had considered and sincere reasons for supporting corporate campaigns. As an example, one of my first interviews was with a woman who ran a charity for children with cancer and concurrently acted as a spokesperson for a national pro-oil campaign. She was a respected leader in her city’s philanthropic circles, having garnered awards from the local and federal governments for her charitable work. We talked for about an hour and half, mostly about the ways she felt her support for pediatric cancer patients was made possible by the generosity of oil firms. She recalled that the first donations her charity received were from oil companies, as were the majority of gifts garnered since. She argued that both her own NGO and the charitable sector in the nation more broadly received their biggest boosts when the oil patch was flourishing. In here eyes, oil companies were not receiving due recognition for their contributions, so she felt “a genuine need and want to say ‘thank you,’ steward them, and defend them.” This was why she chose to join a pro-oil campaign.

This woman was not paid to speak. Her commitment to industry positions was genuine. On top of that, she was a media-savvy professional who fully understood that her years running a cancer charity made her an unorthodox but compelling voice for the oil sector. I would argue that this woman was not an inert “front” for the oil sector to hide behind. Nor, however, was her speech some pure reservoir of citizen authenticity, untouched by corporate interest. The truth is somewhere in between.

When we use terms like front group or academic theories that assume a priori that citizen and corporate speech are wholly distinct, it is easy to overlook this interstice, where so much of today’s energy politics is taking place. What we need are theories that that help us understand the relationship and communicative coordination between corporations and citizens, rather than trying to hold these parties analytically apart. One potentially gainful approach is to think of how publics are manufactured. Rather than supposing that sterling and authentic grassroots publics exist and are then corrupted by corporate campaigns, it helps to start from the premise that all publics are necessarily made and remade through mediated communication. Approaching corporate/citizen advocacy in this way helps us better explain the hybridity we witness in real-world oil industry campaigns. The words manufactured and public are both rife with connotations, so for clarity’s sake let me explain my use of each, starting with the latter.

I use “public” to mean more than a rollcall of supporters. A public, in the sense I intend, is a process by which people, often strangers, forge a common sense of identity through texts. Members of a public come to see themselves as part of a shared project not necessarily because they agree on all the issues, but because they view themselves as involved in an ongoing discourse on the same topics. As Warner (Reference Warner2002, p. 88) puts it, publics “commence with the moment of attention, must continually predicate renewed action, and cease to exist when attention is no longer predicated.” A public needs ongoing participation to endure. Otherwise, it withers.

Forging a sense of connection among a public is a tough task, because members often have not met and will never meet. A public is always, to a degree, an abstraction. The bonds that unite a public are not physical space, but a shared identity that is forged through the circulation of common texts, a corpus whose vocabulary, style, genres, and media forms help members imagine a shared community (Warner Reference Warner2002, p. 72). Members of a public gain a sense of fellowship, accurate or not, from evidentiary shreds they find in their media diets. When oil companies strive to manufacture publics, then, they are above all else trying to create such evidence, using social media posts, rallies, ads, letter-writing campaigns, and the voices of citizens themselves to suggest that a coherent public backs the sector.

The term public intones democratic legitimacy. A public is a group socially entitled to speak on behalf of “the people” or some subsection thereof. Groups, mobs, and masses that do not carry this mantle. A collection of people is only imbued with the political force of a public when members begin to recognize their shared identity; they are typically only able to achieve political gains when those in power afford them this same recognition. There are no set rules for how large, righteous, or univocal a group must be to act as a public. Instead, groups fight to be seen as publics. Publics are the outcomes of, not simply actors in, struggles for political legitimacy.

Publics have always been somewhat diffuse. This feels particularly true in our moment, however, when the conversations that help us figure out our common purpose with others are often conducted online. We may know participants in our publics solely as avatars or social media handles. This, of course, does not stop us from forging meaningful bonds. Digital platforms allow for connective feelings between relative strangers (Papacharissi Reference Papacharissi2015) and provide potentially important tools for political organizing (Tufekci Reference Tufekci2017). Yet the affiliations between publics forged online, particularly around political issues, are often fragile, involving temporarily networked alignments of interests rather than deeply shared worldviews (Bennett & Segerberg Reference Bennett and Segerberg2013). Some of this fragility is due to the political economy of online platforms themselves, with social media often designed to amplify inflammatory opinions rather than deliver an accurate sense of a given public’s sentiment. In online discussions of climate change, for instance, the profit motives of social media platforms drive conversation towards “noise, incivility, and ambivalence” (Russell Reference Russell2023, p. 86). The task of intuiting the feelings and beliefs of a public can become very difficult in such fractured online spaces.

This is true for us as individuals, but also for multinational companies or governments. They too want a sense of what publics think, and they too may be stymied by the complexity and dynamism of how publics operate. The difference is that large institutions often cobble together their own ways to understand publics. These might include surveys, online behavior tracking, or other forms of data gathering and analysis. Institutions may also try to understand publics through synecdoche, taking a person or group as a representative of broader public sentiment. For instance, Lang (Reference Lang2012) argues persuasively that political leaders often use NGOs as “proxy publics,” taking their rhetoric as a barometer for opinion among those the NGOs claim to represent. This act of alchemy, turning a bounded organization into a symbol of an unbounded public, is a core aim of industry-funded mobilization efforts. To garner such recognition, however, these would-be publics must first be manufactured.

When I say a public is “manufactured,” I do not mean it is fake. There are no natural or unmanufactured publics. The word manufactured is meant to underscore that the act of creating and maintaining a public takes work. If people stop involving themselves in a public – if they stop writing, thinking, and talking about the public’s texts – the public itself dissolves. The labor of stoking this participation can be distributed in many ways. It may be incited by powerful actors like big oil companies; it might be sparked by a few citizens who slowly forge a sense of common purpose. A public can never be controlled purely by a single actor, however, because the very existence of a public depends on ongoing participation from many, typically at a scale that would be difficult for any one person to wrap their head around, let alone control.

There are many ways companies might try to build publics. The greatest analytical advantage of the concept of manufactured publics is that it can handle this variety. It does not reduce political contestation to a binary between “fake” front groups and “real” organizing. Instead, it prompts us to ask: How are companies stoking discursive participation from citizens? Thinking about manufactured publics demands that we start from an empirical judgment about actions rather than a normative judgment about authenticity. This nudges our thinking towards descriptions of what actors are up to which is, I would argue, where we ought to start. Too often we attempt to adapt the world’s complexity to our concepts rather than the other way around. This mistake has been especially common in studies of political communication, which tend to reify categories of analysis by approaching political life as a field populated by stable actors (Karpf et al. Reference Karpf, Kreiss, Nielsen and Powers2015). We would do well to avoid this pitfall when investigating corporate political mobilization. By emphasizing empirical description in our analysis of corporate-led campaigns, which the concept of manufactured publics helps us do, we will end up better positioned to answer normative questions in an informed way.Footnote ⁴

The concept of manufactured publics also steers us away from universalizing discourses that often dominate issues of climate and the environment. Oil companies, for instance, frequently make reference to the shared benefits “we” experience from the industry’s economic prosperity or talk about how “citizens” support the sector, deflecting from opposition by Indigenous communities or local activist (Barney Reference Barney, Wilson, Carlson and Szeman2017). In parallel, environmentalists are apt to invoke the language of the anthropocene to imply that humanity in general is responsible for climate change and environmental degradation, averting attention from the ways liability and suffering are unevenly distributed across class, geography, and race (Malm Reference Malm2015; Yuffoff Reference Yusoff2018). By attending to the labor of making publics, we force our attention towards how notions of “we” are constructed, avoiding such simplistic narratives.

Companies’ efforts to build publics hinge less on dazzlingly persuasive rhetoric than on creating ways to make participation easier for would-be backers. Getting someone to change their mind on a political issue is hard; getting someone who supports you in the abstract to do so more actively is a relatively easier task. Thus, as Walker (Reference Walker2014) argues, publics today are often created through “participation subsidies” – material means of lessening the burden of advocacy in ways big and small. Company-backed campaigns might craft a form letter to a politician, saving supporters from typing their own (Reader Reference Reader2008); they might pay for buses to haul advocates to a public rally (Beder Reference Beder, Huang and Huang2014); or they might feature quotes from supporters in paid advertising, giving these backers a platform they would otherwise not be able to afford. Ultimately, companies hope that such subsidies aggregate individual sentiment, presenting supporters as a unified public rather than atomized opinions.

Subsidized publics are most powerful when they are coordinated and time sensitive. If 5,000 people call an elected official to champion a new oil project over the course of a year, it might leave an impression; if the same 5,000 people call in a single week, those voices, rightly or wrongly, begin to sound like the groundswell of a movement. When companies invest in citizen mobilization, they are aiming to create precisely this synchronization. Furthermore, such outpourings are typically coordinated with oil companies’ inside lobbying and advertising, as well as with the efforts of sympathetic think tanks, trade associations, and advocacy organizations, creating a far-reaching political push. Thinking of publics as manufactured, subsidized, and time-bound helps us consider the full network of influences that participate in pro-oil politics. The apogee of corporations’ pursuit of political legitimation is not simply to craft a public, but to offer incentives capable of mobilizing it in a timely and strategic manner.

A core argument of this book is that the oil industry has begun manufacturing publics in new ways. Whereas the 1990s saw the sector cobbling together short-term campaigns to react to immediate policy threats, today the oil industry is investing heavily in subsidizing more stable, long-term publics that can be mobilized across many issues. When we confine ourselves to the use of vague terms like front group it becomes difficult to describe this shift. Oil firms have a new idealized vision of how politics happens, which demands a reserve of supporters cultivated and readied at all times. By examining the strategies companies use to mobilize support, as well as the experiences of members who participate in pro-oil groups, this book aims to offer a sense of how the oil sector manufactures its publics today.

Plan of the Book

The chapters to come frame pro-oil campaigns as a mode of political mobilization worthy of the same rigorous attention scholars have long devoted to social movements. In so doing, they depend on the methods, such and interviews and fieldwork, that researchers often ply to analyze activism. My intervention is a rather modest one: I treat the organizers and members of so-called front groups as having agency beyond the strictures of the raw economic capital that fuels their work. I investigate their tactics and the ways they make sense of their actions.

To accomplish this, I rely on fifty-two in-depth interviews conducted between 2015 and 2023, most with the joiners or professional staff of pro-oil advocacy groups. For context, I also interviewed government regulators, politicians, and environmental activists. The majority of these interviews were undertaken in person at sites where pro-oil groups were active, with supplementary interviews taking place over phone or online video chat platforms. Interviews generally lasted from one to two hours, and sometimes included visits to sites my interviewees found meaningful in relation to their advocacy work. Important themes emerged inductively from open coding of field notes and transcripts.

My on-the-ground research emphasized three primary locations: Calgary, Alberta, the economic hub of the Canadian oil sector; Washington, DC, where the largest U.S.-based oil trade groups and companies center their lobbying; and various sites across the state of Nebraska, where debates over the proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline spurred political conflict and activism. In these places I attended rallies, met informally with organizers, sat in on regulatory hearings, and tried to observe pro-oil advocates in action. Throughout the book I also draw from official reports, public comments to government, regulatory proceedings, advocacy group websites, social media content, publicity materials, leaked oil company documents, journalistic coverage, and internal materials given to me by pro-oil group organizers. Finally, my work relies on a compendium I created of ninety-five pro-oil organizations active from the year 2000 to the present (see Chapter 3 and Appendix C for details). This corpus contains the largest pro-oil groups in the U.S. and Canada, but also captures dozens of smaller regional players.

While this book examines the U.S. and Canada, my method is not strictly speaking comparativist. Instead, I emphasize the relationship between the two nations and cross-border political coordination by the oil sector. I take this approach because the enmeshed histories of fossil fuel in the two countries preclude treating them as isolated cases. During much of the 1900s, the nations had an almost “joint energy policy” with Canada oriented towards southern export and the U.S. pursuing energy security through a close relationship with its northern neighbor (Gray Reference Gray1970, p. 10). More recently, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (2012) has called the two nations “the largest integrated energy market in the world,” underscoring their interdependence. Beyond rhetoric, this is written into each nation’s soil, with seventy oil and gas pipelines running across the U.S.–Canada border (Natural Resources Canada 2020). While newfound deposits in the United States and an emerging trade war between the countries have radically altered their economic relationship, each nation still crafts its energy policy with an eye towards the other (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane2023).

Another reason to view Canada and the U.S. through the lens of relationship rather than contrast is that the actors leading each respective national oil industry are similar. The API and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) are the largest oil and gas trade groups in their respective nations. While autonomous, close inspection shows they represent many of the same core interests, both counting either subsidiaries or parent companies of BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, Murphy Oil, Shell, Ovintiv, and Phillips 66 as members. It is unsurprising, then, that these trade organizations share political strategies across borders, resulting in similar efforts at political mobilization. The API founded its Energy Citizens campaign in 2009; CAPP created an organization known as Canada’s Energy Citizens in 2014. The Canadian campaign was independent but invited organizers from the U.S. to Canada to speak about strategies for grassroots mobilization.Footnote ⁵ While attentive to national difference, this book keeps such moments of cross-national coordination squarely in view.Footnote ⁶

The book is shaped in other ways by the realities of fossil fuel production in Canada and the United States. The reader will notice that while I often refer to the oil and gas industries as linked sectors, my research focuses mainly on the former. This is because in the national contexts I survey, the two fuels are unevenly important yet politically inseparable. Despite major booms in natural gas production on both sides of the border, oil remains the economically more central resource. In Canada oil production still outstrips natural gas by a wide margin (Natural Resources Canada 2023), and as the U.S. Energy Information Administration (2024) bluntly reminds the world, the “United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever.”Footnote ⁷ Yet politically the fossil fuels mingle. The largest trade groups in Canada and the US represent oil and gas companies concurrently, structurally ensuring their interests are treated as shared rather than competing. Furthermore, many companies, particularly those in pipelines, fracking, and distribution, work in both sectors, making it impossible to draw neat lines between the political interests attached to the fuels.Footnote ⁸ For this reason, the book gives more focus to issues surrounding oil, but tends to treat oil and gas companies as politically aligned.

The chapters that follow move from a wide look at the field of pro-oil groups towards on-the-ground accounts of their work. Chapter 2 begins this arc by explaining how and why oil companies started to embrace citizen mobilization after a long history of shying away from such outreach. I argue that while the coalescing climate movement and the availability of new tools for online organizing have played important roles in this shift, the proliferation of new government forums for citizen input in the regulation of fossil fuels has been the core driver of the industry’s new approach.

Chapter 3 offers an overview of contemporary pro-oil mobilization in Canada and the United States. Through analysis of ninety-five organizations the chapter looks at patterns in the scale, issues, and levels of transparency common among pro-oil advocacy groups. These data show that contestation today often happens at the state or provincial level and typically emphasizes multi-issue, long-term campaigns. Furthermore, many of these organizations demonstrate at least nominal financial transparency, with more than half naming sponsors on their websites. This level of revelation is largely absent on social media, however, with very few campaigns mentioning their sponsors on X or Facebook. Groups that are nominally financially transparent also employ misrepresentative coalitions, buried attribution, passive voice, and reputational laundering to make their funding sources harder to track in practice. These findings, I suggest, can inform responses to oil companies’ political mobilization.

Chapter 4 turns the book’s focus from organizations to joiners, investigating why people enlist in pro-oil campaigns. Attending to the case study of Canada’s Energy Citizens, the chapter argues that the campaign’s early stages relied on personal connections between members as much as fealty to a political cause. The fledgling campaign mobilized staff’s friends and coworkers, who joined as a show of collegial support. These bonds were solidified by shared feelings of precarity, with members believing that their own livelihoods and communities were dependent on the largesse of oil companies. It was the threat of losing their way of life – or more exactly, the perception that their way of life was under attack from environmentalists and legislators – that kept pro-oil campaigners mobilized. Joiners’ enthusiasm for supporting industry was often tempered by feelings of risk, however, as they worried about how becoming the face of Big Oil might affect their employability or personal relationships.

Using the case study of the API’s citizen mobilization efforts, Chapter 5 explores how the largest U.S.-based oil trade group came to embrace, for the first time, a constant and preemptive mode of mobilization. Their efforts, I show, have aimed to create a predictable support base for the industry, identifying backers ready to fight on the sector’s behalf as new issues or projects become politically controversial. This “citizen reserve” has become an influential model of mobilization, allowing oil companies to vie for both short-term legislative wins and the industry’s long-term repute.

Chapter 6 shows how citizen mobilization ends up providing registered lobbyists new avenues to speak to politicians and regulators. Using the case of the KXL pipeline in Nebraska, the chapter explores how state government developed an array of forums for measuring citizen sentiment about the proposed project. I show that although pro-pipeline groups attracted a robust base of support, they leveraged their memberships to allow oil lobbyists to speak on behalf of citizens in these new government forums. By claiming to represent a public, pro-pipeline groups’ paid lobbyists were afforded a right to speak in meetings, hearings, and online spaces intended for everyday people. This, I argue, is a main strategic driver behind the formation of many contemporary pro-oil groups.

Chapter 7 returns to issues of transparency, arguing that so-called front groups tend to be open secrets of sorts, with their funders or founders rarely fully hidden from view. It shows that oil companies today are apt to use financial transparency as a strategic asset, framing themselves as amplifiers of citizen speech. Furthermore, it explores how scholars and environmental activists might use an empirically grounded account of how pro-oil groups operate – particularly the top-down control, internal political fissures, and affective experience of risk by joiners in pro-oil campaigns – to create more just and effective grassroots interventions in climate politics.

Amid this talk of transparency, let me offer some frankness on my own position: I consider myself an environmentalist. I believe we need an immediate and radical fissure in our relationship with fossil fuels. Yet I grew up in Calgary, the petro-capital of Canada. I have political attachments to keeping fossil fuels in the ground but also deep personal attachments to people who have devoted their professional lives to pulling them out. My grandfather designed gas plants and some of my close friends make a living at oil companies.

My own politics tend to pit me against oil projects, yet the caricatures of industry supporters I often hear from people who share my views have never struck me as accurate. This is especially noticeable when terms like front group get tossed around too loosely, brushing off pro-oil sentiment as inherently the realm of paid shills or fake citizens. This dismissiveness is often rife with arrogance, but more pressingly, it is empirically out of touch. By offering space in this book for the voices of industry supporters I hope to provide a clearer sense of what they think and why they act as they do.

Listening to these folks does not demand conciliatory politics. I won’t ask anyone to climb an empathy wall (Hochschild Reference Hochschild2016) or lessen their political ardor. One might see the opportunity for mutual understanding in what follows; just as easily, the coming pages may be read as a tactical analysis of the oil industry for the purposes of dismantling the Canadian and U.S. petro-states. I leave it to the reader to decide. I am invested in both. I don’t think either is possible without understanding how companies and citizens are cooperatively advocating for the future of the industry. Whether reformist or radical, cautious or caustic, those who want to reimagine our collective relationship with energy must contend with the ways oil companies construct and defend their own legitimacy and the role that very real citizens play in this process. The oil sector has evolved its political strategies, and this book is offered as a humble contribution towards keeping up.