Education as a Petro-Pipeline: Beyond the Limits of Education Research in the Face of Climate Change

Funding text 1: Our systematic literature review (Monroe et al., 2019; Page et al., 2021; Trott et al., 2023) classifies and describes the intersections of education, fossil fuels, and climate change in published scholarship and grey literature, identifying trends and petrocultural gaps where fossil fuels remain hidden or unquestioned in educational futures. After discovering a paucity of research through our review, however, we became curious about whether emergent research was beginning to confront fossil fuels more directly. So, the second part of our study systematically reviewed the titles of projects funded by Canada\u2019s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Below, we describe the \u201Cexplicit, systematic methods to collate and synthesise findings of [relevant] studies\u201D (Page et al., 2021, p. 3), before moving into a petrocritical (Bartosch, 2019) discussion of the extent to which education scholarship is complicit in the petrocultural violences described above, along with the ways it resists and contests petrocultures in response to mounting climate crisis.; Funding text 2: Climate science is clear that without decreased fossil fuel emissions, a future of catastrophic weather events that change the possibilities of human and non-human life is unavoidable. It is urgent that the full impact of the fossil fuel industry is made visible and that alternatives become commonplace, embedded in a post-oil culture. Such efforts are even more imperative now, as the current US administration under Donald Trump intensifies a war on climate science and education to boost extraction, or to \u201Cdrill, baby, drill.\u201D At the time of writing, the United States is scrubbing climate research from government websites and flagging projects funded by federal bodies like the National Science Foundation for violating executive orders issued by President Trump (Johnson et al., 2025). Petroculture is thus being enforced within research at the very moment it is most critical to resist it.