A Day In the Life In The War On Cars
Published on Patreon Nov 19, 2021
Sustainable mobility advocates are tearing their hair out after watching a video of Biden speeding down a closed-course runway in a huge electric Hummer. With the infrastructure bill at the center of Biden's policies, EV's have become a symbol of a neoliberal approach to reducing transportation emissions, at least that's the sentiment amongst sustainability and environmentalists who question the rationality of putting multi-ton, single-occupancy vehicles, and more highways at the forefront of the country's climate plan.
"An oxymoron on wheels," as Grist journalist Shannon Osaka puts it. Andrew Salzberg of CityLab pondered if the model could "convince dubious SUV lovers to give up internal combustion and thereby accelerate the decarbonization of transportation" or if it was just "the worst kind of greenwashing."
Proponents don't deny that automobiles powered by renewable energy are superior to ones powered by fossil fuels. And few people would argue that every automobile on the road should release as little carbon as achievable, and that the U.S. should play a role in making greener vehicles more accessible. However, we should be questioning just how much of the governments infrastructure plan — and presidential photo ops — should focus on replacing gas tanks with batteries while essentially ignoring all of autocentrism's problems, and its new ones.
If last Friday's post didn't startle you with with the side effects of the ev revolution, then the negative impacts may appear to be an unavoidable cost of reducing the collapse of the global ecosystem, cause it's the best that a car-centric country like America can realistically want to do. Even if mountains of scientific evidence shows there's no way to avoid the worst effects of climate change without driving less and using more active transportation, then focusing the publics imagination on ev's feels more attainable cause a green-ish solution is all automakers, energy companies, construction firms, and the many other automobility capitalists can get behind, because it will make them rich with you feeling like you're doing your part.
Sure there are plenty of people who can be persuaded to trade in their beloved badass megacars for a greener badass megacar with the right combination of tax credits, access to sub-prime loans, vast networks of government-funded charging stations, and toxic masculine ad campaigns featuring a LeBron James voice over. But for every one of them, there are more people who would can easily be persuaded to bike or walk a few blocks to the grocery shop or school if only there was a sidewalk, a bike lane, and local zoning rules that allowed them to be built.
It's all just optics and automobility colonialism with electrification at the drivers wheel. And Biden, who is also the most powerful traffic violence survivor on the planet, is the "car guy" promoting it.
Does anybody else get the green-washing-toxic-masculinity vibes too?