Bob Somerby has been watching a lot of Fox News lately:
We've been surprised by one persistent talking-point as we've come to watch more and more of the nation's red tribe "cable news:"
We've been surprised by the persistence with which red tribe stars pound away at electric vehicles.
Funny thing: I've been meaning to mention that too. Over at National Review they gleefully highlight anything that can be plausibly considered a knock on electric cars. Every malfunction, every missed sales target, every consumer complaint, every goal to increase EV adoption. Hardly a day goes by without some kind of slam on electric cars.
Why? If you don't want an electric car, don't get one. I'm A-OK with that. But what's the point of bad mouthing those who do want one?
Now, I'm not an idiot. I know the answer perfectly well: EVs are favored by those who want to do something about climate change, and anything associated with climate change has to be relentlessly attacked. Solar power. Wind farms. LED light bulbs. Efficient houses. You name it.
It's all ridiculous. Even if you think climate change is a big hoax electrification is still good. "Clean" doesn't apply only to CO2, after all. Getting rid of smog and fine particulates is a big win all by itself.
But no matter. Anything that can be interpreted as caring about climate change has to be fought desperately. In no way can climate change ever be acknowledged as a problem, since that would imply the government doing something about it. And that can't be tolerated.
It's particularly odd given (1) Elon Musk is now almost as revered a right-wing icon as Trump, and (2) EVs provide the kind of stunning acceleration that tends to be loved by people who also love guns and red meat and country music. But nobody ever claimed right-wingers were rational or consistent.
But, but, but - all that acceleration without massive amounts of noise is so, so WOKE.
This is why some car makers are idiotically adding fake vrrooom sounds to their sports EVs.
Conservatives also hate consistency.
Yeah, there are a lot of Teslas on the roads around here and while I don't know for certain... their drivers all strike me as particular kinds of asshole. They're also (anecdotally) almost always male, white, and in the 30-40 age range. Which around here means they're probably somewhere on the Jan. 6 spectrum.
I am totally stealing the "on the Jan. 6 spectrum" line.
Whoa!!!
This calling my wife an asshole must not stand!!!!!
Unless your wife drives a Tesla in Northern Virginia, she'd be excluded from my language above 😛
I'm assuming you mean Tesla vehicles that have the asinine "Don't Tread on Me" specialty plates on their car?
My anecdotes don't align with your almost always male and white. Not sure about the age range. Don't agree about the "spectrum." Still, with regards to their being assholes, there is certainly a mix. A term I have been using, in the vein of Beemer Dick:
Tesla Twat
That said, had Musk/Tesla even come close to their initial (or even perhaps second round) of promises about the when and how much for the Model 3 I'd probably be driving one of those rather than a Bolt.
I'm in Northern Virginia, where there are a ton of military-fantasy types, for reasons. I see so many "no step on snek" license plates on Teslas.
In addition to that, they're most often terrible drivers around here. I avoid them like the plague on the road - the same way I try to avoid contractor vans, minivans, taxi cabs, Priuses, anything with a gold paint color, and anything with overly tinted windows or obvious aftermarket modifications. They're almost always dangerous to be near due to driver behavior, or don't know wtf they're doing or how to drive, or all of the above.
Which promises did Tesla miss on the Model 3?
They hit price, exceeded range and acceleration, are the top in safety...
Their boss might be an asshole, but they make a great car.
Schedule was the biggie.
Um, as a Tesla owner whose first campaign work was for Paul Wellstone I’m going to have to object.
Are you a Tesla owner in Northern Virginia who drives like an asshole?
So you’re just a garden variety clown instead. Congrats.
Effing Northern Virginia.
In the Bay Area my observation is that most Teslas are driven by people who appear to be of Asian or Indian descent. Like yours truly.
Over here BMW drivers remain at the top of the asshole pyramid. Followed by batos weaving in and out in their modified Hondas. And of course the yahoos with their jacked up trucks.
Musk necessarily makes conservative right wingers uneasy, because while he is very right wing he's about as far as it's possible to be from conservative.
There's nothing conservative about the American right-wing. Just to pick a couple of examples:
• a real conservative supports reproductive choice and wants the nanny state out of a woman's personal health decisions;
• a real conservative wants the state out of the marriage business, and supports civil unions between males and females.
Precisely! I've long been trying to convince people to stop using "conservative" (unless it's applied to Democrats) and calling today's Republicans "reactionaries." Better yet, revanchist reactionaries.
Fully agreed on stopping to use "conservatives" when they are not really conservatives.
I would call today's Republicans "Republicans". What is wrong with that? I don't think anybody takes "Republicans" to mean something else.
Also people should use "trumpist" (or "MAGA" (or "GAGA")) for Trump fully-gone supporters. There is a strong overlap with Republicans, but not complete.
That would be a "small government conservative". There are other kinds. The dictionary I grew up with says a conservative is a person who supports the status quo and opposes change. It's true that MAGAts are reactionaries rather than conservatives; they oppose the status quo and seek to return to some usually imaginary version of "the good old days". "Again" makes "Make America Great Again" an explicitly reactionary slogan. Leave off "Again" and it could just as easily be a progressive slogan.
Musk does not support the status quo and certainly isn't trying to get back to the good old days. He is simply not conservative under any widely accepted definition of the term.
Musk is an enigma. He's both a genius and a lunatic at the same time. Thank God he was not born in this country or he'd be a shoo-in for president.
Genius and lunatic is by no means an uncommon combination.
I despise Elon Musk and now consider driving a Tesla the equivalent of wearing a MAGA hat. Nevertheless, the typical Tesla on the road has a 0-60 time of about 3.5 seconds. To compare:
Porsche Panamera (base model): 4.0 seconds
Ford Mustang GT: 4.2 seconds
BMW 540i: 4.5 seconds
Dodge Challenger SRT: 3.6 seconds
The reality is that from an acceleration perspective--the metric by which most of these neanderthals judge the "manliness" of their rides, electric vehicles are king. The Tesla Model S Plaid is, I believe, the fastest accelerating street-legal car tested by Car and Driver, with a 0-60 time of 2.1 seconds.
I used to think that might be the one small silver lining to Elon Musk's freakout - that having a prominent electric car guy boosting their "anti-woke" BS would make them want to start promoting his cars. Sure doesn't seem to be playing out that way, though.
Yeah, back in the day I really admired Elon. I've been secretly hoping that his complete slide into the right wing fever swamps is just him playing 12 dimensional chess in an effort to get right wingers on board with EVs and help us save the planet.
But no, he's probably just nuts.
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a whackjob is just a whackjob.
Back when I used to start ups I ran into several mini versions of Elon. Some smart moves coupled with some luck and after a while they are infallible and all the rest of us are dolts. At that point they find it all too easy to surround themselves with people who reinforce this thinking.
Exactly. Spot on.
And outside of their 'expertise', They don't treat others with respect.
Exactly.
Although I'm finding that those people who reinforce that thinking seek out marks vulnerable to coercion.
I get the sense that super-rich people, when they compare how much they pay in income taxes, start flipping out about it. Hard to image even caring when you have that kind of income.
Elon was always an idiot, and clearly so are you for not recognizing it. Good luck with life.
I want to believe it’s all 12 dimensional chess too! Because imagine the craziness of him paving the way for the “world champion of bullshit!” I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to process this cognitive dissonance eating me up inside! 😣 What a nightmare if progressive Elon Musk turns anti electric car MAGA right wing, while empowering religious fanatics to use his progressive power for bringing about the End Times they think Trump was sent to fulfill!
https://x.com/dream_reborn/status/1704289491718991872?s=61
And anything that can be interpreted as trying to prevent Covid is also not to be tolerated:
“Now, every booster you take, you’re more likely to get COVID as a result of it.”
Ron DeSantis
Or, more accurately, with every day that passes, you're more likely to get COVID, since risk is cumulative. Same with cancer.
Over a larger time span, the odds change but each day the odds are generally the same.
Everything is political to these people. Everything.
(You'd think given Musk's obvious political proclivities the Right would've relented by now on e-cars. I guess they think helping one right wing billionaire to become a trillionaire isn't worth the tradeoff of acknowledging the truth of the climate crisis).
They be pimpin' for the Awl Bidness, Bro.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the GOP (and the right in general) is funded by the oil business.
Dont forget about the Petro-States across the globe. Russia and the Saudis have a strong interest on this topic and they spend a lot of time and money on the GOP.
Yep. There’s no freedom like doing the bidding of the Saudis.
I'm old enough to remember how after 9/11 these right-wing war bloggers would go on and on about how we had to electrify our economy and get away from funneling money to the radical Muslim petrostates in the Middle East who supported terrorism. Hybrids were just coming on the market then and they were really excited about how those represented an opportunity to really own those Gulf states.
How times change...
I don't think it's about government regulation or oil company profits anymore. It's about never admitting error, never apologizing mixed with defending your tribe. You stake your side in an issue and then you defend it. The more untenable your decision, the greater your devotion. I think this is what keeps most of the right's pathologies alive: the Lost Cause, racism, homophobia. They were wrong once so now they can never be right.
Once bought they stay bought.,
Agreed RE tribe identity. Seems like it’s always tribe.
"I don't think it's about government regulation or oil company profits anymore. "
It is about profits for the Republican party and organizations like FoxNews and National Review, because that is what they are paid to do. But they need to rile the messes with something, and tribalism is part of what they use.
There's also a strong component of "pwning the Libz". Anything Democrats, progressives, or far lefty librulz want must be reflexively, even knee-jerkedly, opposed. Cut off our own noses to spite our faces? Yeah, man! MAGA!!
... which, horrifyingly, brings to mind that old Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder" in which everybody joyfully had themselves surgically defaced (heh!) to look just like Dear Leader. All others were exiled to remote islands.
I call it porcelain ideology. Cannot bend because it will shatter.
Good analysis. In the case of EVs, the answer is simple: donald trump said climate change is a Chinese hoax.
The end.
Their stated rationale for opposing electric car adoption is the government is "forcing" it on the public via subsidies mandates etc. Of course they ignore all the subsidies the oil and gas industry have gotten over the years. But yeah in the end it comes down to liberals who live in cities drive electric cars not "real Americans"
Hey! A couple of dirt farmers living out in the sticks NEED a big SUV/pickup! This means everybody should drive one.
The conservative in my family loves to harp on the failures of electric vehicles. I live in one of the US's coldest cities. Our electric buses run their route and they plan to buy more. Most urban routes went hybrid years ago. Those of us who go downtown love that it no longer smells like diesel. Conservatives probably hate that, too.
But he also hates heat pumps in home heating.
EVs are the new quiche
+1
Quiche is just omelet pie. Like, who doesn't like a pie? Or an omelet?
Years ago, in the Obama days I think, there was a poll of right wingers & the new light bulbs. When told they would save money, they wanted them. When told they were good for the environment, they didn't want them.
lol, I had forgotten about the great light bulb panic. Good times.....
They've moved on to gas stoves now, apparently.
I keep getting reminded because Amazon has decided to ban shipping bulbs and other products which California regulates to the state.
...California has not regulated full spectrum, heat bulbs, or heat resistant incandescent bulbs because they're useful. But Amazon banned them from the state.
Kind of like the way a lot of fat free and low fat foods have disappeared from the grocery shelves. A huge percentage of the population refuses to eat anything that can be construed as "good for you."
Hmm. I still see plenty of pro-health stuff at my grocery store, but it probably depends on where you live. The one product I used to buy that they discontinued, apparently because no-one was really interested in a "healthy" version of it, were Lean Pockets, a slightly less sodium and calorie-intensive version of Hot Pockets.
Fat-free stuff was mostly not healthier, they replaced the fat with sugars and gelatin.
I was walking by Fox News headquarters (you know, the populist know-nothing "news" source watched by retirees in the hinterlands and located in the center of MIDTOWN MANHATTAN) one night. The building has an old Times Square type news crawl on it. It read something like "Stock up on real light bulbs now before Jan 1 when the new Obama law allows only slow starting dim CFL bulbs to be sold."
CFLs were several times more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and now LED bulbs are several times more efficient than CFLs. Somehow we missed right wing LED hysteria, I think, mostly. Gas stoves are the new incandescents.
And LED lights are actually faster and brighter than incandescent.
If Orwell was still alive and in his prime he would have a field day with Fox News
Denying climate change is at the core of the right wing distain for EV's, and additionally, the mandates in 13 states (all blue) that will require the sale of only EV's and hybrids by a certain date. I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that the infrastructure and EV technology may not be available to support an all EV fleet by such date.
That said, my next car will likely be an EV or plug in hybrid, but I would still also own an ICE vehicle.
Based on what I see in California, the vast majority of new cars and probably cars in general, will be EVs long before the requirement date, which I believe is 2035.
I think what has been underestimated is how much people hate going to the gas station and the repair shop. It's dirty, messy, a waste of time, and especially at the repair shop, you are at their mercy in a way you are in no other realm of life, even with construction contractors.
Don't dread getting my car serviced (except for the bill) since I have had reliable/honest car repair folk the last 45 years. EV's are not completely maintenance free and hybrids have both EV and ICE systems to deal with.
For people without home charging capability, an EV may be harder to justify, and having an EV parked overnight in freezing temperatures and without being hooked up to a charger, causes issues with range and charging performance. Not against EV's but would need more confidence in range and charging availability/time to go without having an ICE alternative available. Cost to acquire needs to come down.
EV’s are dam close to service free. How else could Tesla with their lousy customer service get by?
No transmission, no regular tune ups, brakes that don’t wear, no exhaust system, maintenance on an EV really is minimal compared to an ICV.
People in really cold climates will figure out they have to do the same thing with their EV that they do with their diesel pickup- plug it in over night if they want it too start in the morning.
I leave my EV in freezing temperatures.
But most older buildings were wired for lighting that's easily enough to trickle charge an EV.
If liberals favor it, whatever it is, it must be opposed. Here in MA, Governer Healey is working toward universal pre-K for 4-year-olds. Does any conservative discuss if this is good for young parents and children? Will it be good for the economy of Massachusetts, which has always benefitted from investments in education? Nope.
Why do you need child care or pre-K? Your barefoot and perpetually pregnant moms in the kitchen should be providing that service.
Meanwhile, it isn’t just Fox and its fellow travelers. The recent arctic weather has spawned stories like: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna134355 in the “not Fox” news space.
And also this, from The Guardian, which certainly isn’t Fox … https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/19/tesla-battery-dying-cold-weather-charging-winter
The role that Elon Musk plays in the EV universe is a little subtle.
What EM did which was genuinely insightful from a marketing perspective was recognize that EVs could be sold as fast cars, not as a natural extension of the Vermont co-op/composting lifestyle. His timing was good as men in general were also looking for ways to express their manliness by controlling machines in a maybe-competent way, thus the success of all those "Fast and Furious" movies.
As a result lots of rich people drive Teslas, but not as expression of their environmentalism, rather it's kinda like the way some conservatives love to tell you they love Tim Scott or Thomas Sowell or Ben Carson. "We're the REAL non-racists" is the idea. Much of what drives Tesla sales these days is something similar. "We're the REAL environmentalists. Not you wimps".
Anyway, thus, outlets like Fox don't really see Musk and his products as being immune from criticism. You may buy a Tesla because it's fast, but the idea EVs will take over just shows you how much the world needs gas cars for things like cold weather, is the idea. I admit this is a bit subtle.
Good insights! And we can see the "men looking to express their manliness" thing in all the Tesla crashes where the manly man behind the wheel mansplains to his terrified passengers how the "autopilot" feature makes crashes impossible, while accelerating up to maximum towards a parked car, or tree, or wall.
It only does that if the driver tells it to. It'll yell at him the whole way there.
The problem with Active Driver Assistance Systems is that right now they're not good enough to drive the car, so they must allow the driver to override them when the automated system is wrong.
But drivers are wrong sometimes.
We own a Tesla. Thus, I voted with my feet, as the saying goes.
With that said, I have LOTS of criticisms of my car (marginal quality, non intuitive user controls, on occasion over use of technology).
Further, I have some deep concerns around the US EV strategy:
1. Old gas powered cars and trucks don't just go away. Rather, they get sold and often end up in the third world, using gas that is dirtier than American fuel.
2. EV's, at least today, are often too expensive to purchase and or tricky to use/hard to charge for lots of working class Americans
3. EV's, at least today, are not practical for industrial uses (long distance trucking, tree trimming vehicles, tractors etc)
I HOPE we solve all the aforementioned challenges....
You're not wrong about the tasks they aren't suited for. However, they are supreely well-suited for other tasks, such as
* A family's second car that someone only drives to work and back on weekdays.
* A work/utility vehicle that stays within the confines of a city or neighborhood (my father had a pickup like this.)
* Vehicles for municipalities that are intended to stay within city limits. Mail vehicles. We may get there with local delivery trucks.
The thing is, EVs are cheaper to operate and don't break as much, due to being much simpler machines. The main downside is range.
I expect there to be a slow adoption path, and the plugin hybrid (runs electrically but with a gasoline range extension) to be a good way for people to experiment and get used to how they work.
I'm not sure how big a point your point about "sold to third world" is. They vehicles have a definite lifespan, which will be spent somewhere. Then it will be junked. There's no other adoption path - no other way to transition to using more EVs.
Doctor Jay - I agree with your insight around the many places that EV make sense.
To clarify my third world point, my old car (car I had before my Tesla) uses gas. As the world becomes more prosperous the demand for cars increases. So if my old car ends up in a third world country, driven by someone who previously did not have a car, have I really lowered global emissions?
In addition, the American transition to EV requires building the car, the chargers etc. It is my understanding that the manufacture of an EV, because of the large battery, is a very resource intensive process: one must drive a lot of miles, I read an estimate of 50,000 miles but who knows, before an EV is more environmentally friendly than a gas car. My old car drove just fine: have I really helped the world by buying a new Tesla?
EVs are much longer range than 'inside the city' now.
They are still less good for trucks doing long haul, but they're better for the suburban or exurban commute. The more miles you put on a vehicle per day, the better electric is over ICE until you hit that charge limitation.
I'm not sure why an electric tree trimming vehicle wouldn't work out (and what percentage of the work truck fleet is that?), but it's pretty obvious that for local deliveries (which are now a far bigger thing by multiples than ten years ago) electric trucks would be vastly better than IC trucks.
The Biden/Democrat infrastructure act includes a lot of money for the grid and chargers, addressing #2.
emjayay
yes my one example (tree trimming) is clearly not broad. Let me restate the challenge. The US has almost a million forklifts, 4 million tractors, lots of large and very expensive farm combines etc. To replace all of this infrastructure, built up over many years, will be complex and very expensive.
I WISH we had the charging issue on a path to being solved: at best, the verdict is still out on this issue. All the public charging companies lose money, even with Federal tax money added in. I was just reading about one charging company that loses $40,000 per charger, per year.....
Most tree trimming trucks don't go all that far. They drive a commute, sit at a location, drive a little bit, sit at a location. They hardly do a hundred miles in a day.
Did you mean logging?
From the header when I opened this page:
"Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ." —Iago, "Othello"
From George Orwell's 1984:
"In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it."
If an individual's definition of a word means one thing in one context, and the opposite in another context depending on what serves the individual's personal self-interest in the moment, then the only meaning of the word is "we" are the good guys, and "they" are the bad guys.
The word "conservative" has a meaning beyond virtue signaling. If you care about that meaning, then you're on the "we're all in this together" side. A real conservative is like a real progressive in that they are both open minded and skeptical, except that the conservative is more skeptical than open minded, and the progressive is more open minded than skeptical.
We come out of the womb open minded and immature, and we come into adulthood retaining only one of those traits having left the other one behind.
In other words, someone that is closeminded is immature, whereas real conservatives and real progressives are mature.
To anyone that wants to keep flipping the "divide and conquer" coin, keep in mind you only lose once.
Uhh-huh.
Centrism as a mental disorder.
I agree one of us is suffering from a mental disorder, but who?
When I think about what I know versus what I don't know, I think needle versus haystack, and Crissa thinks haystack versus very hard to find needle.
Maybe that means I'm suffering from a mental disorder, but it depends on how you define the term.
"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him and say, 'You are mad, you are not like us'.” - Abba Anthony (251-356)
It's because electric cars suggest they've been doing something wrong with their internal combustion cars that they might be responsible for, so EV's offend their infantility.
Also suggests petroleum companies might be responsible for all the mess and death they've created, which is even worse.
It's just Cleek's Law, "Today's conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily." And Murdock, pere et fils, make a lot of money stoking resentment. And the oil companies probably push this under the table. Biden should come out foursquare against jumping off bridges.
Why should electric cars be any different from LED light bulbs, mRNA vaccines, low flow toilets, windmills, voting by mail or any number of other.good ideas?
“When true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him” - Jonathan Swift
The latest scary campfire story I hear is about thieves stealing EV charging cables for the copper, or for resale. Wow, you'd think it was like catalytic converters or something.
EV charging cables, when plugged in, are super dangerous to steal.
An acquaintance constantly sneers "Yeah, and all those 'electric' cars are powered by ... COAL!!"
However, they have not kept up (what reactionary does?) Coal fired electricity production has been reduced to near zero in New Mexico and is going the way of the buggy whip in the rest of the country, too.
Even when powered by coal, an EV is cleaner, and lower carbon output. A giant, immobile power plant can and will have more emissions management than a tiny vehicle.
In every single problem we have the problem is conservatives, every single time.
Isn't it time someone noticed, isn't it time some political party pointed it out?
It is not conservatives, it is Republicans (and by now also trumpists).
Well, to be fair, sometime they only make an existing problem worse.
No, it's always conservatives. They will always generate something like the Republican party, sometimes worse, sometimes just worthless, but it will always be there to gratify the 1% by any means necessary, and for no other reason.
And this is why billionaires should be illegal.
It's not just EV's. In the deep south there is (or at least was) a practice of modifying diesel pickups to, at the flip of a switch, spew massive amounts of smoke. They called it "Rolling Coal" and it was significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page. There were videos of such trucks immersing hybrids in black smoke as some kind of protest.
I never understood the resentment, TBH. Even if you love your gas/diesel vehicle and would never drive a fuel-efficient vehicle, the people who DO drive them are doing you a favor. The laws of supply and demand dictate that lower demand lowers prices, hybrid drivers are keeping fuel prices lower for the Bufords.
Is like how they oppose rail and bus - every person who can use rail or bus is another car off the road. Yet they block them anyhow.
I've seen such a truck in Vermont as well. The house where it parked has since burned down. I expected they've moved their love of combustion elsewhere.
I expect people are especially hostile to electric cars in parts of the country whose economy is particularly dependent on extraction and sale of fossil fuels, and who feel threatened by a possible loss of their livelihood. This is a lot more concrete than hostility to ackinowledging reality of climate change.
Which is silly, we still need plastics and lubricants etc.