Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Fossil-Fueled Discourse, Henry Walter

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

As industrial civilization confronts the realities of devastating global climate change and the local environmental catastrophes precipitated by coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, this paper moves away from mainstream analyses of demand-side choices and instead considers how miners and rig workers make decisions surrounding the ethicality of their work. This article considers corporate publications including investor and sustainability reports and company-sponsored employee magazines, industry magazines, and news sources in top-producing fossil fuel producing localities in the United States. A discursive analysis of this set of publications uncovers a dense rhetorical lattice of misinformation and disinformation surrounding fossil fuel workers. …