You can impress a certain kind of person at a party by reciting the fact that there are more yoga instructors in the US than there are coalminers. In fact, the disparity is greater than this catchy phrasing suggests: there are actually more yoga instructors in the US than there are people employed in the entirely of the coalmining industry, miners and otherwise. It’s not even especially close: about 38,000 people in the US work in coal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to about 100,000 yoga instructors who are registered with the Yoga Alliance, an industry group.
If you looked only at the numbers, you might think a politician would be incentivized to talk about the interests of the yoga industry, about the dignity that yoga jobs give to American families, or about the need to foster growth in the yoga industry, more than they talk about these things for coal; after all, yoga, not coal, is putting food on the table in more American households. But no politician would ever talk about the interests of yoga teachers, or wax poetic about their role in the American dream, the way they do with coal miners; if they did, they’d be laughed out of the room. And we all know why: yoga is thought of as decadent, cosmopolitan and feminine, while coal mining is imagined as hardscrabble, honorable and masculine.
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This was at the forefront of my mind this past weekend when the EPA announced that it would lift limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-burning power plants, a reversal of Biden and Obama era climate policies. It’s just the latest in a long line of energy industry deregulation efforts by the Trump administration, which has also loosened or removed limits on carbon emissions from vehicles and household appliances; in 2022, the Republican-dominated supreme court ruled, in a six to three decision along party lines, that the EPA lacks the independent authority to regulate carbon at all.
Some of the motivations for the Trump administration’s pro-carbon, anti-green policy postures have to do with cold, hard cash. Fossil fuel companies have given a staggering amount to Trump over the past several years, with energy companies donating at least $75m to his campaign, in addition to large personal donations from executives. They’ve kept the money flowing since. Oil and gas companies donated nearly $12m to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and have continued making large contributions to Trump affiliated Pacs. At least $25m has come just from one oil firm, Energy Transfer Partners, and its CEO. The industry and its major power brokers may see these contributions as a way to purchase a favorable regulatory environment; when he solicited contributions from the energy industry during his 2024 campaign, Trump characterized their donations as part of a “deal”.
But part of the Trump’s love of fossil fuels – and his accompanying hostility to climate change mitigation, green initiatives, and nature conservation – might be less transactional than libidinal. Because to him, part of the appeal of climate-destroying, future-inhibiting, polluting energy industries is not merely that their executives are writing him checks. It’s that he sees these industries, and these forms of energy consumption, as more manly.
This is the theory put forth by the Virginia Tech professor Cara Daggett, whose 2018 paper “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire” has become something of a cipher for political observers, eager to understand the Trump administration’s commitment to dirty energy even at the cost of the country’s competitive advantage (China, for instance, has surpassed the US in solar panel production at an alarming rate). For Daggett, much of the American right’s energy policy posture is not explainable by recourse to strictly material measures: it requires a psychological explanation. To them, she argues, oil, gas and the lifestyle markers and forms of consumption that they enable – think cowboy hats, broad asphalt highways, and big trucks parked before a field of swinging pumpjacks – represent an ideal of American manliness and dominance whose symbolic power has become a meaningful obstacle to a US energy transition. In other words, the Trump administration isn’t just committed to doubling down on America’s reliance on oil and gas because those are the industries that enrich their donors and friends. They’re also committed to fossil fuels because they see them as manly, and understand green energy, by contrast, as effeminate.
If this sounds too stupid to be plausible, remember that this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. His policy decisions are not the result of a complex weighing of benefits and liabilities, or a sober assessment of competing interests: they are decisions based on gut feelings and often motivated by obscure resentments. Trying to articulate ideological coherence in the man is a bit of a fool’s errand: he has no discrete ideological worldview and seems to operate largely on impulse and id. But if Trump has no ideology, he most certainly has a psyche. If there is a single throughline in Trump’s actions and priorities, it is his reverence for the most brutish and regressive form of masculinity: his admiration for those who dominate and humiliate their rivals, his desire to punish those he sees as weak, his contempt for responsibility, his ostentatious recklessness towards the wellbeing of others or the prospects for the future. It might sound childish, but that’s by design; Trump, after all, is the man who sat in the cab of a semitruck on the White House lawn, blowing the horn like a sugared-up kindergartener. Responsibility is for grown-ups, which, in his mind, means it is for wimps.
