“The people born there are not any less smart or any less capable or any less hardworking than the people born anywhere else who have a whole host of options of what they can do with their lives,” he says. “That’s something that is taught, and that is a form of disempowerment that has always gone hand-in-hand with the fossil fuel industry, because they need that easily exploited labor force.” In Narratively, Nathan C. Martin covers a story that, in many places, is core to the current American experience: Training the next generation of American oil workers…for jobs that don’t exist.