This chapter 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 finically transparent also employ misrepresentative coalitions, buried attribution, passive voice, and reputational laundering to make their funding sources harder to track in practice.

This chapter explains why oil companies recently started to embrace citizen mobilization after a long history of avoiding such outreach. It shows that while the coalescing climate movement and the availability of new online tools for organizing have played important roles in this shift, the proliferation of new government forums for citizen input in the regulation of fossil fuel projects has been the core driver of the industry’s new approach.

The book’s final chapter 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. The chapter demonstrates that oil companies today are apt to use financial transparency as a strategic asset, framing themselves as amplifiers of citizen speech. As oil companies embrace a more open model of citizen organizing, critiques or policy interventions that call for exposing the sponsors of pro-oil campaigns see their relevancy wane. The chapter closes by exploring how scholars and environmental activists might use the empirical insights of previous chapters, 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.

This chapter introduces the reader to how the oil industry mobilizes political support from publics. It argues that historically, the sector has shied away from grassroots politics, or employed short-lived, financially secretive front groups. However, today this is changing. Oil firms’ contemporary outreach is apt to take the form of visible, far-reaching, and long-term campaigns that openly tout partnership between companies and citizens. This style of organizing troubles the neat binary between grassroots politics and corporate public relations. To address this, the chapter suggests we think of all political mobilization as “manufactured publics,” emphasizing the strategizing, labor, and mixture of interests inherent in all contentious political efforts. This theoretical lens allows us to explore both the affective realities of people who join pro-oil groups and the corporate interests that shape these campaigns.