Over at National Review, Andrew Stuttaford writes about the war against cars:
Some of those directing climate policy genuinely believe that climate change poses an existential threat to our species, but many others see it as a way to force the construction of the kind of society that certain strains of the Left have long wanted to see. Their policy prescriptions are about control, not the climate. And the car, with its promise of freedom and autonomy, is, both symbolically and in reality, the opposite of that.
Huh. I'm pained to report that, like the War on Christmas, the war on cars is going badly. As usual, in 2021 we suffered yet another setback:
You'd almost think there's no real war at all. Or, if there is, the folks running it are so incompetent there's nothing to worry about.
But what I really wonder is whether Stuttaford even believes what he says. There are certainly a handful of people who use environmental concerns as a cover for larger societal ambitions, but does Stuttaford seriously think that even these folks object to cars because they let people go wherever and whenever they want? Where does this strain of conservative paranoia come from? I've never come across even a hint of anything like this. Am I not reading the right eco-fascist publications?
So withe freedom of my car, I can go into the gated community this fellow probably lives in? FREEDOM!
Totally OT: several days ago someone asked me where to find a 5 year CD with a 5.7% return interest. I dropped the ball back then, here's is such a CD (I'm not shilling for Fidelity. They have my IRA accounts):
https://digital.fidelity.com/ftgw/digital/bondrsch/?securityId=DSNA60494&ordersystem=AORD
That was me! Thanks for the link. It goes to a login page, but this is showing 4.85% for five years: https://www.fidelity.com/fixed-income-bonds/cds
I'm at Vanguard, not Fidelity.
To Kevin's question: https://www.mattball.org/2023/08/i-hate-it-when-right-is-right.html
Try this:
https://fixedincome.fidelity.com/ftgw/fi/FILanding
You can't click through, but it shows a 5 year CD at 5.7%. It's from Studio Bank. Maybe you can find it on Vanguard.
(1) Paranoia is intrinsic, indeed necessary, to the modern right-wing mindset. They are always oppressed, always victims, of libruls who are at once feckless and all-powerful, utterly unrealistic and yet in control of everything. This in turn justifies their authoritarian and even violent tendencies: the libruls made them do it.
(2) Environmentalism is about as quintessentially librul a topic as exists. Plus it has the attraction of reprising the eternal knee-jerk reaction to the 1960s ("tree-hugging hippies"). It's a two-fer!
(3) Cars have been sold since forever as symbols of freedom, and recently they've been sold to right-wingers as both intimidating status symbols (eg hoods that are higher than the roofs of most sedans, which makes them both dangerous and putatively -- although not actually -- safer) and specifically as a way to disrespect environmentalism ("rollin' coal").
That all three have come together in this particular strain of addle-headed paranoia isn't really surprising. In retrospect it seems almost inevitable.
Nice break down of right wing thought - if you can call it that - re: environmentalism. They are caricatures of themselves these days. It would be pretty funny if they didn't have political power behind their ranting and raving.
And yet another example of conservative illogic. Conservation should be a natural fit for conservatism.
Wut? This "logic" is one o' them ee-leetist university things innit?
Paranoia is intrinsic, indeed necessary, to the modern right-wing mindset.
As is lying.
I would like to see a chart of Vehicles on the Road adjusted for vehicle size. In recent years, trucks and SUVs have jumped in all 3 dimensions. I'd estimate the perimeter has grown 20% since 2000.
Larger vehicles make parking more difficult since much striping is for mid-sized or compacts, and they obscure visibility while on the road (made worse with limo-tint on the windows).
Was there ever a war on “cars”? I’d believe it if he was talking about a “war” on gas powered cars and truck/SUVs. How much do we liberals object to electric powered vehicles? I suppose the must be some, but for the most part liberals seem to be fine with electric vehicles or even hybrids.
Has Andrew Stuttaford written about abortion? I wonder if he likewise thinks the war on abortion is about control and not “life” and that abortion with its promise of freedom and autonomy is both symbolically and in reality the opposite of that.
re electric cars. Toyota had to be dragged into the EV market kicking and screaming because they had long argued that fleet lifetime carbon emissions are lower if you manufacture many hybrids as compared to shoving the equivalent battery mass into a much smaller number of EVs. Yes, it it true that a single EV has lower carbon emission over its lifetime than a single gas burner over its lifetime, but the savings are not as great as you might think. The carbon cost for producing an EV is (apparently) 70% higher than the carbon cost for producing a gas burner, and this is because you need to mine a suite of relatively exotic elements all over the world to make the humongous battery required by a Tesla. Leaving the word "liberal" aside, I tend to agree with Toyota that the "smart" way to use battery power is in hybrids.
https://www.thedrive.com/features/toyota-is-right-we-need-more-hybrid-cars-and-fewer-evs-heres-why?fbclid=IwAR09NVINv8bATn3G4S3KSq91tjTf7Z5hljrXw5Z3ToA8KodBRuvT15887B4
The analysis is entirely predicated on batteries being a scarce resource which they are right at the moment, but there is no reason at all to assume that will always be the case. The elements used are not especially exotic, there just hasn't been the need to extract the quantities needed to build millions of EVs. Aside from that almost all of those "exotic" materials in the battery are recyclable. Gasoline is not. That said, I would vastly prefer that the government was spending at least as much on mass transit systems as they are promoting EVs as that would give me the FREEDOM to not drive at all if I so choose.
You do not need relatively exotic elements.
Rare earth elements are used in electric motors; those REE magnets are the main reason why modern electric motors are so astonishingly powerful for their size and weight. Batteries don't use anything more "exotic" than cobalt.
GM, Ford, Dodge, and Chrysler are definitely fighting a war on Cars. They’ve almost completely stopped making them. Now they make SUVs and Trucks, and a couple of sports cars. The American (Branded) Sedan is on the brink of extinction.
Good catch! The war on cars is being waged by pickups and SUVs.
And as mentioned above, this pickups are out-of-control large. My gawd, are men's dicks getting that much smaller?
Lol!
Most of the vehicles called SUVs are actually cars, specifically station wagons. To me, the difference between a SUV on one hand and a CUV or station wagon on the other is that real SUVs are designed for serious off-roading, they're 4 x 4s. If it has that general body shape and isn't designed for rock crawling, it's not a SUV, it's a station wagon, and decidedly NOT a truck, EPA classifications notwithstanding.
Well the sedan should have gone extinct as soon as the first hatchback was produced as hatchbacks have far more utility. Unfortunately Americans prefer their hatchbacks to weigh 3 tons.
In the right-wing lexicon, there's "socialism" (=they won't let me do what I want when I want) and "communism" (=they'll take my stuff). Keeping all their stuff and doing what they want with it, when they want, are paramount values.
Environmental protections as enacted will limit their behavior and force them to spend money in ways they don't want to right now. Forced spending patterns = government takings in the right-wing lexicon, which is the same thing as outright taking their stuff.
So by definition environmentalism is a form of socialism verging on communism. That's what Stuttaford is explaining, using "control" as shorthand.
I heard this mentioned on the radio this week. There is a movement gaining momentum for the development of "Fiftenn Minute Cities," residential enclaves where people can live, work, and shop without relying on cars to get everywhere they need to go.
This, apparently, has generated its very own conspiracy theory, promoted by the likes of Alex Jones and Joe Rogan that these are, in reality, open air prisons where residents will be required to stay unless the get permission to leave.
Then their listeners definitely should stay FAR away. Win-win!
Thanks for bringing this up.
Portland's got quite an expansive network of public transportation, dozens of mini downtowns, and tons of open spaces.
If people want to live in car-dominant cities, there are plenty of those. Their "freedom" comes by way of sitting in traffic, the high cost of maintenance and insurance. The folks at NR always have the freedom to move to Waco Texas or Mesa Arizona if they want, right?
They get deranged because they think it means people would only be allowed to move around within 15-20 minutes' walk/bike ride of their home, and not have a car.
It's just another delusion.
Alex Jones is in favor of shit like that, tho. He, and others, are adamantly in favor of intense restrictions on where people can move, both nationally and internationally.
I am truly tired of right-wingers telling me what it is that I *really* want and why *really* I want it.
They're the same people who think they're the arbiter of who's an 'authentic' black person.
it's wild that anyone can take seriously a publication that prints stuff this inane. i doubt the author actually believes it, but presumably most of NR's readers do, along with all the other nonsense it publishes. and NR readers are supposed to be the smart conservatives.
Pretty sure there are no smart conservatives. Not these days.
Well, yeah, there is a sect of hippies who want to go back to nature. They have zero impact on policy.
The economic forces won this battle a long time ago. Cars, houses, you name it. Electric cars are a novelty for our age, eventually the hybrid will win out as the more economically sensible purchase that allows all the freedom of full combustion while making the short trips cheaper.
Trying to restrict people from what they want is a fool's errand. People want freedom and autonomy and they'll shovel dollars into the wallet of those who give it to them. This is also why abortion will go state-by-state back to being legal except in the least populated states. People want freedom and autonomy.
I have to make this argument all the time with my colleagues about banning gas stoves and water heaters. They can try, but will inevitably fail and run into legal challenges to their bans.
This will be absolutely horrible if it happens.
The state literally exists to do this, and it is very, very successful at it in many if not most cases.
You know what sort of freedom and autonomy I want? To not pass a despoiled, ravaged planet onto my descendants.
So your argument is "lets pollute and poison, we shouldn't even try to stop that form happening."
Murc, I think your life would be much happier if you read Hannah Ritchie regularly. I'm 100% sincere.
We HAVE to stop burning fossil fuels. Hybrids don't get us there.
If you make it all-or-nothing, then you lose. Telling everyone they have to go electric is only going to create a massive backlash and defeat the purpose.
Hybrids are far more sensible as noted above. Require every rental vehicle to be a hybrid. Offer incentives and push manufacturers to increase stock.
If we are going to be extremists in the name of saving the planet, you know what happens? Lots of Republicans get elected is what happens. Go ahead and ban gas stoves in California and watch the next election.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Just make the alternative better and cheaper. Right now the alternatives are more expensive and frequently not better than their gas powered alternatives. And then there are electricity rates, which are out of control.
Climate fascism is NOT a winning strategy for change.
It is NOT sensible to continue burning petroleum. If we are going to save the world, this is "all or nothing".
This is dumb, but particularly noteworthy given the given mandates on fuel mileage, parking minimums, car safety etc.. being framed as the ultimate in autonomy and freedom that Americans will choose over government involvement in transportation decisions.
Suckers every minute.
You are ignoring the fact that EVs are better at everything except recharge time which 95% of the time is irrelevant. I suspect that over the course of a year, we actually save several hours by charging at home overnight and never stopping at a gas station. 20 minutes a month, 12 months a year, adds up to about 6 hours of wasted time.
20k miles in a 31mpg car with an average tank of 12 gallons with the 'fast' of standing there for five minutes a fill-up (unlikely) is over four hours.
Plugging in once a day, and taking a crazy amount of 15seconds a grab, and letting it charge twelve hours a day...
...will get you the same 20k miles for two hours of 'work'.
They seem to think we can't wander off while our EVs are charging. To eat, use the facilities, take a hike.
Hybrids are nonsensical.
They have as much maintenance as other internal combustion vehicles, they carry less than either pure ICE vehicles or BEV vehicles, they require 'fuel' which is drawn from a few sources in the world.
Whereas BEVs can charge off any power source, with modern batteries go just as far, and charge at home.
Many cars never road trip. In fact, the majority don't.
Never have to visit a gas station again is real.
Come now, are homeowners and landords being required to rip out their old stoves and replace them with an elctric? Or is it simply the case that the building codes require all-ellectric for new construction? This is as silly as that "Their coming to take our incandescent bulbs away" business a few years back and also true? I might add that the construction sector has been pushing all-electric, for a while now and for the obvious reason: it's cheaper to put in wiring rather than wire and gas lines.
The freedoms that Republicans have represented for the last fifty years are the freedom to be racist, and the freedom for Christianity to be the official or only religion (that's what "religious freedom" means to the right). These are not things that national politicians, media figures and writers will admit to openly, so other issues, some mostly manufactured, are used as representatives or just dog-whistles.
The right is not seeing an increase in crime, since there is none, but this is an issue that calls up hostility to inner-city blacks. The right is not particularly "pro-life", but abortion is an issue which involves enforcement of arbitrary "Christian" morality (as well as an issue which allows partisan opponents to be characterized as murderers).
Aside from being substitutes for the main real cultural issues of race and religion, all these phony issues distract from the real Republican economic policies and actions which are to the detriment of low-income Republican voters.
Not obvious if it is "Aside". The main line of the Republican is "keep rich people rich", and this appies to National Review. This is not so good for convincing voters to vote for them, so they use other issues for that.
I don't think either race or religion drive the Republican party. It is the triad of money, money and money.
Agreed. People on the left sometimes lose sight of this because voters are attracted to the Republican Party for other reasons, but tax cuts for the rich are the Republican Party's core policy. In 2012, when the Republican Party was being the party of “no,” Obama found the one thing that could get Republicans to “yes”: a reduction in taxes for people making more than $200,000 per year ($250,000 if married filing jointly). Trump rejected a lot of traditional Republican talking points, but his major legislative accomplishment was a tax cut bill.
Don't blame Christianity for people that claim to be Christians and act like they don't know the first thing about Christianity, which is doing unto others as you would have others do unto you.
It's the same as not blaming science for people with science degrees that act like they don't know the first thing about science, which is being open to the possibility that you might be wrong. Come to think of it, isn't that doing unto others as you would have others do unto you? But I digress ...
There absolutely should be a war on cars. There isn't currently, but there should be.
What an odd statement. Even if there a war on cars, "we're losing" isn't the same as "we're incompetent."
He absolutely does not believe this, it's just a rhetorical cudgel for fools who listen to fools.
Oh boy, it was way back in 2011 that George Will said "the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."
And yeah, you can tell in Manhattan it's the people in their cars stuck in traffic who are really free, and the people on bicycles getting where they are going quickly who are the ones who are slaves of a leftist vision. Uh huh.
Say what you will about Lance Armstrong (liar, cheat and bully is a good place to start), he had this insight: when you get a bike when you're a kid, that's the first time you taste real freedom.
Substitute “marriage” for “trains”.
❓
These are the same people who are convinced that unless Trump is elected the Democrats are going to start rounding up conservatives and force them into camps.
Hillary's remark about de-programming mental cases didn't help with their paranoia.
Be that as it may, it's obviously being promoted by the petroleum industry and their corrupt tools, and Democrats and liberals never talk enough about that.
It's really the key point in every conversation about climate.
"There are certainly a handful of people who use environmental concerns as a cover for larger societal ambitions"
Anyone have specific examples?
I don't think anyone with sense actually does this. The environment is only a strong motivator for a tiny percentage of the population. Most people care far more about economic concerns, so when people say they're doing something for the environment, you can be fairly sure they actually are. Sometimes environmentalists miscalculate and push for something that doesn't actually benefit the environment, but when they do, it's because they're honestly mistaken, not because of ulterior motives.
There are some issues that can be used as cover for other agendas, but the environment isn't one of them.
"There are some issues that can be used as cover for other agendas, but the environment isn't one of them."
The oil companies are certainly doing their best to prove you wrong, with all their "look at how green we are" advertising.
They're doing that in an attempt to counter direct environmentalist criticism of their business. That's not the same as using the environment as cover for something completely unrelated.
On rare occasions I've heard environmentalists talk about how we need to stop growing our economies to prevent climate catastrophes. Sometimes they throw in words like sustainability, but in the sense that we need to shrink our economies so that we don't keep destroying more pristine areas or even return areas to a natural state.
I've never heard any Democrat in any leadership position at any level talk this way. No bills that anyone was taking seriously had such goals. But you can sometimes find people interviewed on podcasts and news shows say such things. They do exist even if no one listens to them.
Note that Exxon Mobil (and its predecessors) has been prosecuting a war on the environment for more than a century and lied about it for the better part of half a century, while spending the last quarter century selling Americans on PR bullshit about how the company is going green.
Cars representing freedom and autonomy is pretty comical. Have to feel sorry for the poor suckers who believe it.
I'd like to tell them to spend three hours stuck in Manhattan traffic, followed by another hour trying to find a parking spot, and see how free that makes them feel.
Or spend a lifetime as someone who can't drive due to disability in a car-dependent town, and see how free that makes them feel.
Your second paragraph proves your point. Especially in car-dependent towns, cars represent freedom and autonomy; if you can't drive, your freedom and autonomy is dramatically circumscribed. Fortunately, the fix for that is coming, in the form of self-driving cars.
War? No. Skirmishes, sure. Eliminating vehicle lanes for bike lanes. Closing streets to cars entirely. Reducing speed limits.
The oft-repeated claim that "the left hates cars because cars represent freedom and they hate freedom" is a bald-faced LIE. The vast majority of left-leaning people love freedom and always have. The real problem with cars is that they are the most geometrically inefficient way to transport people, taking up far more square feet on the road per person moved than trains, buses, and bikes; and they also have to be parked, taking up even more space.
In the suburban and rural areas where conservatives tend to live, this is a non-issue because population density is low enough to allow for enough road and parking space to go around. But in cities, especially dense cities, it is a huge problem that makes urban amenities harder to create and sustain. Every square foot devoted to road space and parking for cars is a square foot not given to housing and businesses, which benefit from being densely set.
I don't begrudge suburban and rural people their cars. In low-density places, cars and their attendant infrastructure are practical and make sense. But cities have different needs and cars don't serve those needs, they get in the way of them. Booting cars out of the city makes the city better!
Well, it explains why pedestrian deaths to cars are at a forty-year high, anyhow.
The push for electric cars is the opposite of a war on cars, it’s literally preserving cars as the dominate form of transportation. A war on cars would be to make driving gas powered cars much more expensive and investing in mass transit.
Tangentially related to the topic: I bought gas Friday at my usual station for $2.999/gal cash or credit. It isn't always, but happens to be one of the cheapest places right now; the most expensive price I've seen locally is 3.299/gal.
There's a station a few miles away that died when it was isolated by highway widening seven or eight years ago. (I bought there a few times when out that way as it was the last place around you could pump before paying.) It was on the low end of pricing and the sign is still posted: $3.199/gal. South Carolina has phased in a 12 cent/gal increase in the gas tax since then.
The way you hear reports of people complaining about the price of gas, you'd think they want permanent recessions or pandemics.
Why is Kevin confused by this? He's a big advocate of "driverless cars," which is woke code for mobile prison-pod death machines.
Same thing with masks. They say we want to force them to wear masks. Because somehow we get our jollies out of forcing green to wear masks? At least with cars they can cobble together something about freedom of movement. Masks?
It’s projection. For them everything is a matter of faith. We must want to impose our faith in them, because they sure do want to impose their faith on us.
It’s not quite the form at NR to go on about woke libtards so they try to dignify their resentment with intellectual window dressing. Just like Fox or the Daily Caller or Breitbart though, they start with a conclusion and reverse engineer from there. I have no idea who this prettified vegetarian version of Republican red meat appeals to apart from friends in high places who are just like them. Maybe it’s why David French is at the NYT now.
There is a war on cars, and it is led by all the people in urban planning that promote bikes over cars, zoning reform, and are against parking minimums on new developments. They are the people who claim that any new roads will only cause more car trips and believe that building high-density housing near public transit means you don't need cars. The thing is, all the high-density building is for luxury apartments, the working class gets pushed out to the far burbs where there is no public transit, and the businesses complain that there are not enough workers.
But it's not because they don't want people to go where they want it's because of the negative outcomes from heavy auto-use. If people could teleport anywhere using solar powered transporters they'd be fine with that.
They wouldn't be exclusively building luxury apartments if the luxury market was already saturated. If Toyota was only allowed to sell 1000 cars in the US every year, you can bet they'd all be Lexuses and not Corollas. Likewise, if the excessive strictness of the zoning code only allows developers to build a number of apartments that is far less than the total demand, those apartments will be luxury units. If they could build as many as they wanted, many would be for the middle class market.
There’s plenty of evidence to back that claim: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q21f88p
+1
You need to be careful to restrict that claim to places with high population density. Where I live, the highways and most of the streets in towns in the region have two lanes, one in each direction, and they are uncrowded even at the busiest times. Upgrading the highways to four lanes would have no effect whatsoever on the number of car trips people around here take.
Facts aren't a war, tho. Roads and streets need to be shared, not just given over to all lanes of cars travel. There should be room for kids to ride bikes to the school or arcade or wherever, for pedestrians to walk and cafes to have seating outside. And places for stranded motorists to walk or stand instead of being run over by the next car.
I don't agree about cafe having outside seating on public right of way. Streets, including sidewalks, exist to permit people to move around. Owners of adjacent private property should not be permitted to obstruct them. If cafes want to have outdoor seating, let them put that seating on their own property; the building doesn't have to run right to the lot line.
Speaking as a small town boy who spends no more time in big cities than I have to, I agree that mass transit makes sense in big cities; I cannot see promoting transit where the population density calls for it as being "a war on cars", nor can I see failing to make car use convenient in places where transit is the more sensible alternative is a "war on cars" either.
Even Naomi Klein who quite clearly does want to use various crises to stamp out capitalism doesn't want to limit cars because of "freedom."
Cars are crazy expensive. The NYTimes just had an article on the cost of car ownership. If you watch YouTube financial advice shows, you will notice that car costs are a major factor causing people to stay broke. The average car payment now is over $700. That sounds more like indentured servitude to the car than freedom.
The "cars are freedom" argument for middle and lower income people is kind of like when old people claim that living alone in their home is "independence." They can't leave their home by themselves, they are entirely dependent on others for groceries or trips to the doctor, and they can't even take the stairs to other floors of their own home. They sit watching TV all day, hoping they can guilt a younger family member into visiting for an hour. But somehow they think they are more independent than the old lady in an assisted living apartment building with an elevator, a bus to the store, an on-site salon, and a busy activities room full of friends.
It can be complicated and things are relative. When people talk about freedom like that I think they mostly mean not being bound to somebody else's schedules. That can be worth a lot for quite a few people, in money and in personal inconvenience.
And here in the good ol' USA we've spent at least the entire post-WWII period, about 80 years now, making sure that in most of the country you just have to have a way to get around that doesn't rely on anyone else's transport because there basically isn't any. There are only a few areas, mostly some major urban ones, where you can get around reliably enough for work, shopping, leisure that you can get by without a car. It's what keeps the low-end used-car lots going, the ones that make a killing on the bad-credit financing. That cars are so expensive now can be a real hardship because in most areas they're a practical necessity. That's a different idea of freedom, more like survivability.
Basing urban life on walking neighborhoods is great but . . . outside of major metro areas Walmart and Dollar General rule. The small neighborhood shop can't compete on price and people won't appreciate that, so the walkable neighborhood is going to be pretty upscale. I don't know where this vicious cycle breaks down.
My two bits:
a) In a truthful telling they don't recognize themselves as heroes but as villains. So they fiddle with things until they are the heroes and the ones who oppose them are the villains.
b) Projection. They dissimulate and feign motivations they lack (see point a), so they assume everyone does. Ergo, environmentalists really *are* villains who just want to control people. It's all just virtue signaling.
c) Religion is a gateway drug to believing any story that comforts you regardless of evidence to the contrary.
d) Keeping faith in the face of evidence to the contrary is proof of virtue!
e) They themselves seek to control others because it's comforting to be in the dominant position. Their testicles grow larger when they're keeping someone down.
f) A poor and faith-based model of mind, lack of curiosity, and weak imagination. They perceive their own motivations and cannot believe other people are different. Gay people are faking it. Trans people are faking it. And most of all, egalitarians are faking it. Everyone is like them and wants to dominate others. Their enemies are either just virtue signaling (see b) or are inscrutable, soulless orcs who cannot be reasoned with and who must be destroyed.
g) Strawman. It's hard to argue against reality, but it's easy to argue against this imagined reality.
h) Tribal signaling. Publicly making a bad-faith argument like this commits you to the cause and binds others to you as they rally to it and support it. It's like making bones in the Mafia. You have violated the rules, so your only refuge is the society of other rule breakers.
So that might be more than two bits. I could go on.
I just want an electric car that isn't controlled by technocrats, so that it drives like a car and works the same way tomorrow as it did yesterday. Don't want to auto-pilot, in fact I'd take one with manual transmission and and buttons and dials and gauges.