On a balmy day in December, in Oblong, Illinois, I sat on a folding chair in a small, windowless room and watched a ’90s VHS tape about a high school student who couldn’t live without her petroleum products.

The tape, kept at the Illinois Oil Field Museum, is called Fuel-Less: You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel. It’s a loose spoof on the movie Clueless: a ditsy high schooler magically loses access to her most prized possessions (her clothing and makeup, of course), and has to wear a potato sack until she understands and appreciates the importance of petroleum in her daily life. Or, as she puts it in the video, “Oil is, like, neat!”

The 1996 video, produced by oil and gas lobbyists, might seem like a throwback to a bygone era. But in fact, an Illinois nonprofit run by fossil fuel interests is still facilitating public education campaigns — involving in-school presentations, classroom materials, teacher workshops, and even the museum theater where I watched this video — to ensure the next generation learns that oil is, like, neat.