In 2023, the appointment of an ‘oilman’ to lead one of the most important climate change conferences of our time, COP28, raised some controversy. But it was not the first time that oilmen have taken the lead in international environmental governance. In this leture, Professor Glenda Sluga (European University Institute, Florence/ University of Sydney) returns to this lost history of the involvement of ‘oilmen’ in the earliest examples of international environmental governance in order to recover the extent and significance of early 1970s’ debates focused on the ‘planetary’.