All-Electric F150 Pickup Truck Will Affect Mental Health

The electric car revolution has been creeping along for some time, with Tesla’s fortunes skyrocketing and more and more products appearing on the market. This gradual trend towards the ‘decarbonization’ of the economy got a major boost when Ford announced the pre-order for its new F150 pickup truck to be delivered in 2022. The significance of that announcement is that it positions the electric vehicle squarely in the sights of the very oil and gas workers who depend on trucks to do their work. It also means we have arrived at a point where electric car technology is cheap enough and reliable enough, with sufficient range, to make our dependence on oil and gas something more visible in our rearview mirrors than on the horizon in front of us.

This change, however, will mean that millions of families in towns that depend on oil and gas industries are about to have their lives disrupted. My research group at the Resilience Research Centre has been studying these processes of change for the past five years. What we’re finding runs far deeper than simply diversifying the economy. Oil and gas towns have identities as rough-and-tumble places that have learned to embrace the boom-bust economics of world oil prices. They have also prided themselves on a no-nonsense approach to life where fierce independence balanced by incredible philanthropy is the rule. All of this is changing.

When my team interviews people in oil and gas dependent towns, we are hearing two different stories regarding how people see themselves, now, in the past and into the future. The first is the rugged individualism of the petrochemical worker who lives for the moment when pay envelopes are thick and they have the means to fill their home with all the toys they want, from a new all-terrain vehicle to the latest television. During the economic busts that inevitably follow, those same families understand their lifestyle comes at a cost. They are prepared to relocate if necessary, or to have their principal wage earner (in most cases, men) leave the family to find jobs elsewhere. As a fallback, families send into the paid workforce stay-at-home parents (usually women) and are willing to be flexible with regard to who looks after the kids. This is never meant to be a permanent situation, though. Those secondary incomes are always seen as second best.

Decarbonizing the economy means that even with a higher price for oil, disruption is coming. Small towns are going to depopulate. In some cases, my research team has heard that towns will revert back to what they once were: small agricultural hubs where people raised barns together and families shared a common belief in hard work for little return other than the satisfaction of a stable life. This mythic representation of heritage culture of the prairie farmer is eulogized by folks who see change coming and are desperate to preserve the past. It is also an anachronism that ignores the truth of agribusiness and the industrialization of smallholdings. There can be no going back because that historical way of life is no longer possible.

Solution: Diversify the Economy and Update Identities

All of this means that resilient oil and gas communities that will soon be full of F150s lining up at charging stations will have to not only change their economies, but they will also have to rethink their identities too. The good news is that this is already happening and where it is occurring, the results have been relatively positive. In our research, we are meeting members of town councils that are working towards diversifying their economies. Towns are reimagining themselves as retirement communities for seniors or branching into new agribusiness initiatives like raising marijuana and hemp. There are efforts being made to turn oil and gas workers into energy workers, with emerging technologies in geothermal (drilling wells and drilling geothermal vents are quite similar, it seems). Then there is solar and wind energy, with predictions that many of the hot, dry, flat places where oil and gas is extracted could become epicenters for green energy production. The part of this I particularly like, and which our data suggest will make these transitions successful, is that they do not radically alter the identity of these communities. An energy worker is still an energy worker, even if the source of that energy shifts from carbon-based to an alternative. Agricultural expertise is just as useful in raising canola as it is processing pot.

If we ignore these transitions, we run the risk of people experiencing these displacements as both unjust and traumatizing. If that happens, we could see a dramatic destabilization of our political systems as families are pushed into poverty. There is a better way forward, but it will require economists and politicians to listen to mental health professionals.