On a balmy day in December, in Oblong, Illinois, I sat on a folding chair in a small, windowless room and watched a ’90s VHS tape about a high school student who couldn’t live without her petroleum products.
The tape, kept at the Illinois Oil Field Museum, is called Fuel-Less: You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel. It’s a loose spoof on the movie Clueless: A ditsy high schooler magically loses access to her most prized possessions (her clothing and makeup, of course), and has to wear a potato sack until she understands and appreciates the importance of petroleum in her daily life. Or, as she puts it in the video, “Oil is, like, neat!”
The 1996 video, produced by oil and gas lobbyists, might seem like a throwback to a bygone era. But in fact, an Illinois nonprofit run by fossil fuel interests is still facilitating public education campaigns — involving in-school presentations, classroom materials, teacher workshops, and even the museum theater where I watched this video — to ensure the next generation learns that oil is, like, neat.
The Illinois effort fits into a well-documented national landscape of fossil fuel industry-funded marketing that, disguised as education, has long wormed its way into the nation’s schools. But in Illinois, a state that’s already engaged in an aggressive push away from fossil fuels, experts say the future jobs promised by this program aren’t likely to exist.
“It just seems like [the effort is] getting in there and indoctrinating students to support the industry,” said Sally Burgess, lead organizing representative for the environmental organization Sierra Club in southern Illinois.
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The nonprofit is called the Illinois Petroleum Resource Board (IPRB); it’s an organization comprised of 12 representatives from the oil and gas industry. A self-proclaimed “industry-funded education and outreach program,” the IPRB was founded in 1998 through the bipartisan Illinois Petroleum Education and Marketing Act in order to “demonstrate to the general public the importance of the Illinois oil and gas exploration and production industry.”
The organization, which has largely flown under the radar for the past 25 years, has some environmentally related responsibilities — it orchestrates the restoration and remediation of some oil fields and old battery sites in the state. But it mostly focuses on messaging promoting a future of fossil fuel jobs.
The IRPB provides science curriculum and professional development workshops to teachers in Illinois, and conducts “Petro Pros” presentations in elementary, middle, and high schools to discuss the benefits of pursuing careers in oil and gas. It presents in math and science classes, at assemblies, and even at career days, mostly “downstate” in southern Illinois, where the oil and gas industry is most active.
As of last November, the IPRB reported that it had presented to 17 different public school districts in 2023 alone, and from 2010 to 2023, it says 781 teachers attended its summer professional development conference for math and science educators.
Given the need to transition away from fossil fuels, experts in Illinois and beyond have raised concerns about the IPRB’s role in schools, and its potential for misleading students.
“Children don’t have a good understanding of the economic incentives that the presenters have,” said Oakley Shelton-Thomas, senior researcher at the environmental group Food and Water Watch, about the IPRB. “They see them as authority figures, and they don’t necessarily have the full context… that these are actually profit-motivated entities.”
Part of the IPRB’s purpose, as outlined in the 1998 statute that founded it, is “to coordinate a program designed to demonstrate to the general public the importance of the Illinois oil and gas exploration and production industry.” After multiple extensions, most recently in 2017, the act is now scheduled for repeal in 2028.
Though the IPRB was founded by state statute, it is not a public body — it operates as an independent nonprofit without taxpayer funding. The IPRB’s activities are…
Read More: A Fossil Fuel Miseducation