Right wing propaganda is currently going after two targets: trans people and our society’s shift to less environmentally destructive infrastructure (e.g., renewable energy and EV’s). Certainly, the attacks on trans people are the more alarming of the two things, but they tend to be more confined to far right spaces. In contrast, lies about renewable energy and battery electric vehicles seem a lot more likely to seep into the mainstream — and pop up in my news feed.
The difference is probably down to who is promoting each narrative. Anti-trans narratives are the obsession of the fully unhinged Christian fascists and white nationalists that make up 30% of US adults. In contrast, anti-environment narratives come out of the fossil fuel industry; they are well-funded, well-organized, and highly educated. However, they still follow simple narrative formats that we are all familiar with:
- “I know you are but what am I?” Also known as the Peewee Herman Defense or the “Obama did it, too!” strategy, this right wing narrative fixates on negative aspects of the liberal position and implies that it is worse than the status quo. It never is, but they always focus on the flaws on the other side to cover up that fact.
- “Chaos and destruction” Claiming that the liberal position is equivalent to burning all of western civilization to the ground for absolutely no reason. Basically, any sort of societal change looks like everything burning down in the conservative imagination, and this narrative leans in on that idea.
An example of the Peewee Herman Defense would be the guy Joe Rogan recently had on his show talking about how lithium is often mined under truly horrific conditions, and of course the point was to say, “Obviously, it is wrong for electric vehicles to exist because they include the product of exploited labor,” which is interesting because the people who are opposed to electric cars are not at all opposed to exploiting working people. Naturally, this kind of argument never comes anywhere close to the leftist position, which is that capitalism always exploits working people and damages the planet, and therefore, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism and capitalism should be abolished. Rather, the narrative is meant to reinforce the status quo and keep the fossil fuel industry going — that’s because these narratives are being directly financed by the fossil fuel industry.
The implication that the fossil fuel industry is somehow ethical is laughable. At least with lithium production, whole nations aren’t being bombed to oblivion (yet). At least with battery electric vehicles, humanity might still have a future. Do people really think that no one is being exploited by fossil fuel extraction industries? Fossil fuels represent the ultimate exploitation of humanity because using them for our comfort and convenience today sentences future generations to horrific suffering and death, not to mention the wars that have been going on for well over a hundred years to secure access to cheap fossil fuels.
This particular argument — that we shouldn’t use EV’s because the batteries are unethically sourced — is a funny one because Joe Biden’s neoliberal administration has already improved the situation significantly by attaching a requirement to the federal tax credit for EV’s that requires them to have battery components sourced in the US and nations with trade agreements with the US. While it certainly won’t fix the problem (only abolishing capitalism could do that), it will improve the working conditions associated with EV batteries and give the US government leverage to further improve those conditions in the future. Moreover, they’re not going to suggest we go back to lead acid batteries in the many, many other products that use lithium ion batteries, are they? Sure, only lithium ion is really practical in small devices, but you do still have a choice to not use them — surely, the sad photos of lithium mines would justify simply not using anything with a lithium-based battery in it. There’s no federal policy encouraging ethical sourcing of the lithium in your smart phone.
An example of the Chaos and Destruction narrative would be an article by an economics professor that I read this morning that claimed that “environmentalists” want to burn western civilization to the ground in order to “create jobs”. Most of the article is a weird tangent focused on the idea that “jobs are not wealth” and the case of fires in London long ago that created a lot of jobs for working class people, and a man who joked that we should burn down Paris to create jobs in France to make a point about economics that seems to have been lost on the economist. His narrative is based around the false premise that neoliberals like the Biden administration want to literally destroy American energy infrastructure so it can be replaced with renewables. That’s not how things work at all; rather, all infrastructure has a lifespan, and the idea (briefly) is to build new energy infrastructure instead of replacing end-of-life fossil fuel infrastructure with more fossil fuel infrastructure. It’s easier than you’d think because the capitalist obsession with “efficiency” (i.e., money efficiency) means that most of that infrastructure is already at the edge of falling apart anyway.
I guess people are saying that renewables create jobs because America likes the idea of creating jobs. In the short term, a new industry is going to create jobs, but in the long term, it seems likely that the net number of jobs would be the same as before the transition. The more important issue (economically speaking) is that transitioning to a combination of renewable energy and nuclear (which is currently not renewable) would keep energy costs down and maintain the standard of living currently enjoyed by Americans. Failure to transition would result in the US falling further behind Europe.
The left’s position on all this would agree with the idea that jobs are not wealth, and we would put the lives and quality of life of human beings above both of those things. Capitalists “create jobs” to distract from the fact that they themselves aren’t working — rather, they get paid for just owning stuff. If they can get paid for just owning stuff, why can’t we get paid for just not taking that stuff away from them? Or — better yet — maybe we could build a society where everyone who can work does, no one gets rich by owning stuff, and the current generation isn’t sacrificing the future for today’s luxuries or trivial crap.
There is a punchline to the transition to renewables (which EV’s are part of) that will come to light soon enough. The people funding anti-transition propaganda know what’s up, and they’ve already been adjusting their lives and their investments to reflect the inevitability. It’s the common conservative individual living within relatively modest means that is going to suffer as a result of this propaganda.
Conservatives don’t believe in climate change or peak oil, but fossil fuel companies do, and that means that investment in fossil fuels is going to continue to drop relative to investment in renewables and nuclear, and at some point, returns on investment in fossil fuels will become unpredictable. When they become unpredictable, investment at extraction points will drop like a rock, followed by investment in fossil fuels at the market level. Most of the losses will be suffered by naïve investors who don’t get the joke. Because extraction of fossil fuels requires constant investment, this will mean a sudden drop in the availability of fossil fuels. The price will skyrocket, but companies will not increase their investment to match the price. The price of homes that rely less on fossil fuels will similarly skyrocket as will the price of EV’s.
These right wing narratives won’t stop the inevitable, but they will make it a lot more painful, particularly for people of limited means living in conservative communities that have faithfully eschewed investment in transition. If those people live in rural areas, and are thus more dependent on transportation to get resources, it will be even worse. In our modern world, cities don’t produce resources, but everything flows into a city to be processed before it flows back out into the world. Rural communities might be where all the resources that matter start, but those communities rely on access to cities to get the finished products and refined resources they need to survive. This inevitable transition is likely to be the final blow that destroys rural America… because conservatives believed fossil fuel industry propaganda.
How will America eat without farmers, you ask? Our current mode of farming is factory farming, and as is the case with any other factory, the work can be done by robots.
From the viewpoint of fully unhinged Christian fascists and white supremacists, the destruction of rural communities and exurbia will be a direct attack on the white Christian way of life. They’ll respond by trying to force capitalist industry to go back to a fossil fuel world, but it won’t work because it really can’t, and they’ll pivot to taking out their rage on all their perceived enemies.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only punchline to the joke.
The neoliberal plan for the future is that 100% of homes and vehicles will run on a combination of renewables and nuclear fission reactors. This plan assumes that both autonomous vehicles and nuclear fusion are inevitabilities (they are not). They assume that most people will not own a car, but will instead call one up when needed, and the vehicle will arrive at their house on its own volition. They assume that fusion will be readily available just in time to save us from shortages of nuclear fuel. Economic growth will continue and everything will be fine.
The second punchline is that this plan is not feasible. Even from the perspective of most people who vote Democrat, this plan is not feasible. “It will work because it must,” is not a plan. There have been countless times in human history when the only choice was success, but failure is what actually happened.
While the grid will be fine as we transition to electric vehicles, there just isn’t enough money to replace every internal combustion engine on earth with an electric motor in a timely fashion — there isn’t even strong agreement that this should happen. Moreover, autonomy is turning out to be much more difficult than Elon Musk and his fans imagined. Similarly, nuclear fusion is still (as always) 20 years away, and 20 years away is too long.
Technically, yesterday was too long. Climate change already has us and the rational goal now is to keep the entire human species from dying out; the more optimistic (and irrational) goal is to keep the loss of life at 1 or 2 billion. The human carrying capacity of the Earth was 3.5 billion in 1970 — that was the last year we were not exceeding the carrying capacity. Exceeding the carrying capacity of a planet means that you are depleting and damaging the resource capital of that planet (e.g., the biosphere) — in other words, you are reducing the carrying capacity of that planet. So, the carrying capacity of Earth is no longer 3.5 billion — it is substantially less than that. Moreover, there is a 30-year lag between when greenhouse gasses are released into the environment and when we see the resulting change in climate, so things would get much, much worse even if we stopped our excessive CO2 production today.
Related: Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists (60 Minutes, January 2, 2023)
Related: Global CO2 Levels (chart at co2levels.org)
My guess is that we are looking at the inevitable death of at least 6 billion people and that the resulting social and economic upheaval, as well as rightwing backlash, will likely increase that death toll to all human beings (complete human extinction), along with 85% of other species. If you don’t like this prediction, then prove me wrong. Find a path toward degrowth — reducing consumption in western nations while also reducing the human population to 2 billion — and prove me wrong.
If alien archeologists examine the United States of America after we are all gone, they’ll find a curious world where people living in material abundance (as illustrated by their homes that are filled to the brim with “products”) managed to die off from a combination of poisoning, starvation, murder, and just plain bad weather. In amongst the piles of stuff will probably be quite a few electric vehicles. That would be the third punchline.
Related: Elon Musk and the Default Plan
I’m not trying for nihilism here. My point is that we should do something because we still have the opportunity to prevent humanity from dying off completely, and we should finally get both serious and practical about making that happen instead of continuing with these bad jokes and their awful punchlines.