This museum wants you to fight Big Oil
This museum wants you to fight Big Oil
A new exhibition at the Climate Museum in New York City shines a spotlight on the “biggest barrier we’re facing to combating climate change.”
Emily Sanders is senior reporter at ExxonKnews.
Tucked away between rows of luxury fashion and beauty stores in Manhattan’s SoHo shopping district, the Climate Museum has the quality of being hidden in plain sight. Stepping inside, I wondered if passersby might feel hesitant to check out an exhibition called “The End of Fossil Fuel” on their way to Ray Ban or Canada Goose. Is it ironic to critique the fossil fuel industry at the focal point of consumerism?
The curators of the exhibition don’t think so — they say the location helps drive conversations about individual action in a world shaped by corporate disinformation and greed. It’s a major theme of the exhibit: how Big Oil companies work to make individuals feel responsible for the climate crisis, while those same companies deceive the public about solutions and lobby to prevent a transition away from fossil fuels. At one panel in the exhibit, you can learn about how BP pioneered the “personal carbon footprint calculator” (that one’s always a shocker, I’m told).
That doesn’t mean we should sit on the sidelines — but visitors are asked to think bigger than driving less, recycling, or buying “sustainable” products at a store nearby. At the end of a maze of artwork and informational panels, stations are set up for actions like writing to your representatives in Congress to ask them to advocate against fossil fuel subsidies and stop accepting oil company donations. The idea isn’t just to educate about Big Oil’s legacy of deception and harm — it’s to bring visitors into the fight.
I spoke with Anais Reyes and Saskia Randle, members of the museum’s curatorial team, about their vision for the exhibition. Our interview, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Why did you decide this exhibition should focus on the fossil fuel industry?
Anais Reyes: We have to talk about the fossil fuel industry — it’s basically the biggest barrier we’re facing to combating climate change, and the industry relies on deception and racism to preserve its power. We talked about it on the curatorial team — how do we describe where we are and how we got here in order to understand and get to a just climate future? I think we often simplify climate change into a scientific issue when really it’s a social issue, an economic issue, a justice issue. And telling the story of the fossil fuel industry really became the centerpoint of that.
I came to climate work after [the story that] Exxon knew broke, so I kind of had that same first person experience a few years later of finding out and being like, ‘oh my god, that’s so unbelievable, what do we do now?’ I had that transformation. That mixture of emotions — anger, fury, sadness — when paired with the right information, really strong imagery and people in the exhibition who can talk to you and teach you more, can turn into motivation to act.
Saskia Randle: Even though much of the exhibition can feel very overwhelming, learning about how entrenched the fossil fuel industry is, and it can feel hard to take in, we want to remind people that the industry wouldn’t spend so much money lying to us if their standing wasn’t so tenuous.
The climate crisis is of course ongoing, and the tactics the industry uses to maintain power are always evolving. What is it like to put together a museum on something that is still happening today?
AR: It’s exciting and it’s a challenge. There were spaces in the exhibition where we were debating, like, do we leave a blank space here to talk about COP28 after it happens? Or do we put updates — there was a quote from the CEO of Occidental Petroleum about carbon capture, and then a few months later the company just dropped their whole carbon capture project.’ So there were questions of, how do we show this is an ongoing conversation? It kind of just ends up happening with conversations we have with people in the space.
SR: And because it’s an ongoing crisis, it also means that our visitors are able to take action and feel empowered. That’s the ultimate goal of all of our programming — visitors come in feeling like they might not know what to do, like they’re stuck in their individual and consumer-focused actions, which the fossil fuel industry has taught us to be so concerned about, and they can leave feeling like they can commit to opposing the fossil fuel industry. It’s a more interactive experience because it’s a present moment issue we can all get involved in.
AR: Sometimes when we do tours we bring people to the mural, and one question I like to ask groups is, ‘where do you think we are in this right now’? And people usually say we’re kind of in the middle, kind of still in a fossil fuel economy, not at the beautiful green future yet. We’re in the middle of the fight, the mobilization of the public. None of this was inevitable, so we still have a lot of control over what happens next.
You have all kinds of people coming in and out of this museum, and it’s located in the heart of an expensive shopping district in SoHo. What went into the choice in location?
AR: Part of it has to do with how the museum is trying to scale up and be in an easily accessible location, but it’s also interesting how this question opens up conversations about individual consumer action. We’re not here to talk about you feeling guilty for stopping to buy a smoothie on your way, we’re here to talk about the systemic issues that need to be addressed. We can address climate change from all these different angles, but a lot of people don’t think of it from the systemic perspective, and this helps open up that conversation. If we’re not talking about the fossil fuel industry being the barrier, or about justice, we’re missing the point.
There was another mural where the exhibit starts and ends that says “we cannot afford the luxury of either hope or despair.” Can you say more about that quote?
AR: A few years ago, the museum director was having a conversation with a trusted colleague and friend [Olatunde C. Johnson, professor at Columbia Law School], and they were talking about the challenges of the climate crisis. And the friend was like “oh, do you know the quote from that famous person, ‘we can’t afford the luxury of hope or despair’?”, and then they looked it up later and realized — ‘wait a minute, that quote doesn’t exist!’ But it was this really poignant idea worth preserving. We wanted to have this text art photogenic element in the space, and when we were originally considering a quote to put up here, we were like, do we talk about hope, or anger, or action? Hope can sometimes come off as being passive. It’s very complicated to be working in the climate space and fighting for climate justice and experiencing all these dangerous harmful things, and to be like ‘we’re still going to fight for something better, we can’t afford not to fight.’
But if you care, you’re already in this. If you’re concerned, you can channel this energy into action, and we can help you.
You can visit the exhibit until April 28 at 105 Wooster Street in Soho, Manhattan, Wednesday through Sunday from 1pm-6pm. Mandatory Masking Days are the first Wednesday of every month (all day) and second Saturday of every month, 12:00pm-1:00pm. Entry is free and more details are here.